Accounting for Time: Comparing Temporal and Atemporal Analyses of the Business Case for Diversity Management

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12278
• Date: 01 November 2014
• Published date: 01 November 2014

Zachary W. Oberf‌i eld is assistant

professor of political science at Haverford

College. His research focuses on organiza-

tional change, organizational socialization,

and street-level bureaucracy. His book

Becoming Bureaucrats: Socialization

at the Front Lines of Government

Service (University of Pennsylvania Press,

2014) explores how police off‌i cer and

welfare caseworker entrants developed

their bureaucratic identities, motivations,

and attitudes during their f‌i rst two years

of work.

E-mail: zoberf‌i e@haverford.edu

Accounting for Time: Comparing Temporal and Atemporal Analyses of the Business Case for Diversity Management 777

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 6, pp. 777–789. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12278.

Zachary W. Oberf‌i eld

Haverford College

Public management strategies have an inherent temporal

component: managers take action at one time, and

employees or organizations respond at a later time.

However, it is common to study such strategies using

atemporal research. Concerns about the inadequacy of

this approach have led scholars to advocate for public

management research that incorporates time. Because

following this advice is dif‌f‌i cult, it is important to evalu-

ate how the omission of time af‌f ects the understanding

of public management strategies.  is article compares

temporal and atemporal analyses of the business case for

diversity management—the expectation that organiza-

tions that manage diversity well will also improve their

performance. Using survey and personnel data drawn

from U.S. federal government subagencies, the article

shows that both analyses support this general expecta-

tion. However, the cross-sectional analysis, by failing to

account for organizational inertia, portrays diversity

management as more potent than the analyses taking

time into account.

Time is inherent in public management theory

and practice (Pollitt 2008).  e strategies

thought to change public organizations—from

transformational leadership (Trottier, Van Wart, and

Wang 2008) to performance management (Moynihan

2008) to employee empowerment (Fernandez and

Moldogaziev 2013)—are theorized to unfold tempo-

rally: managers take action at one time, and employees

or organizations respond (or do not) at a later time.

Additionally, inertia, the force that keeps organiza-

tions stable over time, is one of the main rationales

for bureaucracy and, according to some accounts, its

def‌i ning characteristic (Goodsell 2004; Kaufman 1975;

Kelman 2005; O’Toole and Meier 1999, 2003; Wilson

1989). Despite time’s centrality, it is common in the

scholarly literature to study public management using

cross-sectional research designs.  is approach is poten-

tially problematic because it ignores the role of sequence

(Pierson 2004; Pollitt 2008) and raises the specter of

measurement error and omitted variable bias (Meier and

O’Toole 2013a; Menard 2002). Because of these con-

cerns, scholars have advocated for public management

research that incorporates time (O’Toole and Meier

1999; Oberf‌i eld 2014).  is approach is expected to

provide a more valid portrayal of how public manage-

ment strategies actually af‌f ect public organizations.

In an ideal world, it would be easy to incorporate

time into the study of public management. However,

sometimes public management phenomena are short-

lived (Light 1998), and there is only one opportunity

to gather data. Also, cross-sectional data are typically

easier and cheaper to gather (Menard 2002). As such,

in all likelihood, cross-sectional research designs will

continue to be used to study public management

processes.  erefore, it is important to compare tem-

poral and atemporal analyses of particular strategies

so that we can develop a clearer understanding of how

our view of management is af‌f ected by the methods

we use to study it. Because the public management

literature inf‌l uences the expectations of policy mak-

ers and public managers, this issue has real-world

implications: by comparing temporal and atemporal

management analyses, we can provide more realistic

projections about how long it actually takes to bring

about change in the public sector (Pollitt 2008).

 is article contributes to the literature by examin-

ing diversity management, a personnel strategy that

emphasizes the recruitment of historically underrepre-

sented workers, training programs to promote a more

inclusive organizational culture, and the implementa-

tion of f‌l exible personnel policies to create a more

diverse workforce (Pitts 2006). Specif‌i cally, it studies

the business case for diversity management—the

argument that when public managers improve how

they handle diversity issues, they will also improve

how their organizations perform.  e article evaluates

this argument using atemporal and temporal analyses

of a diverse set of agencies across an entire level of

government. In doing so, it provides evidence about

the extent to which a methodological choice—the

inclusion or exclusion of time from our research

and analysis—af‌f ects our understanding of public

management (Raadschelders 2011).

Accounting for Time: Comparing Temporal and Atemporal

Analyses of the Business Case for Diversity Management