Elinor Ostrom: The Power and Peril of Multidisciplinary Research

• Author: Hindy Lauer Schachter
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12862
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Date: 01 November 2017

Book Reviews 955

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 6, pp. 955–957. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12862.

Elinor Ostrom:

The Power and Peril of Multidisciplinary Research

Hindy Lauer Schachter is professor in

the School of Management at New Jersey

Institute of Technology. She is author of

Reinventing Government or Reinventing

Ourselves: The Role of Citizen Owners in

Making a Better Government

(SUNY Press,

1997),

Frederick Taylor and the Public

Administration Community: A Reevaluation

(SUNY Press, l989), and

Public Agency

Communication: Theory and Practice

(Nelson Hall, l983). Her articles have

appeared in

Public Administration Review

,

Administration and Society

,

International

Journal of Public Administration,

and other

journals. She was book review editor of

PAR

from 2009 to 2011.

E-mail: hindy.l.schachter@njit.edu

Vlad Ta r k o , Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography

( London : Roman & Littlef‌i eld , 2017 ). 202 pp.

$ 32.95 (paper), ISBN: 9781783485895 .

E linor Ostrom, the first and only woman to win

the Nobel Prize in Economics, is an exemplar

of the benefits of interdisciplinary research.

She built her institutional analysis on insights from

a myriad of fields including political science, public

administration (PA), sociology, economics, and

the natural sciences. She designed her empirically

grounded theories to cross boundaries between

economics and other social sciences. Moreover, she

published her findings in the top journals of the

fields whose insights she used, such as American

Political Science Review , Public Administration Review ,

American Economic Review , and Science . This varied

approach certainly boosted her productivity. Problems

do not respect disciplinary boundaries. Yet, despite

Toonen ’ s ( 2010 ) Public Administration Review precis

on her career and that of her husband, Vincent, it

may have made at least some PA scholars ignore

her insights when she may have had much to say

in addressing wicked problems surrounding citizen

participation. The neglect is unfortunate because her

approach to issues such as citizen involvement has

important implications for unsettled PA disputes.

For PA scholars and practitioners who have limited

knowledge of Elinor Ostrom ’ s work, this intellectual

biography can be a useful introduction. After reading

it, people can delve deeper into the thoughts and

methodologies in her books and articles.

Tarko ’ s volume offers a clear, but relatively brief,

analysis of Elinor Ostrom ’ s intellectual approach to

how communities all over the world have handled

difficult, collective problems. In the first chapter,

Tarko explains that the key dictum in Ostrom ’ s

institutional economics is that understanding a society

involves understanding its rules including the default,

informal norms. This requires a need to discover rules-

in-use—rules that do not exist on paper. Outsiders

wanting to learn about these rules need to practice

research flexibility, along with a pragmatic use of

methodologies, moving from game theory models to

case narratives. One appropriate way to discover those

rules is rigorous field work, or getting to see facts on

the ground.

A basic finding of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom ’ s

workshop in political theory and policy analysis

(Indiana University, Bloomington) is that self-

governance and bottom-up emergence are likely to

encourage efficient rules in terms of transaction cost

economy. Her empirical study of local governments

found that polycentricity (the existence of multiple

service providers of different sizes and origins) enabled

greater efficiency than provision through one large,

consolidated entity. Skepticism toward top-down

designs and solutions is a hallmark of her approach.

Her case studies from several countries show that

multiple parallel jurisdictions with many decision

centers increases resiliency. One reason seems to be

that multiple jurisdictions allow people in one polity

to learn from their neighbor ’ s failures and successes.

Ostrom ’ s interest in bottom-up policy making led her

to postulate advice on citizen behavior that relates to

disputes in PA literature on citizen involvement. Her

work holds a specific interest in two unsettled areas.

First, some PA writers argue that citizen views on service

efficiency are as objective as agency views (Schachter

2010 ); other writers discount citizen views because

they see them as subjective (see the discussion in Van

Ryzin, Immerwahr, and Altman 2008 ). Second, some

PA studies assert that citizens have unique knowledge

that can help to improve decision making, even in

technical areas like transit (Schachter and Liu 2005 ).

Other writers posit that experts should control technical

decision making, or decisions where “quality” rather

than acceptability matters (Thomas 1990 ).

Ostrom ’ s conclusions buttress the PA writers who

want to expand the citizen ’ s role. However, it is rare

to see her cited by those authors. Her work supports

the proposition that allowing citizens to participate in

Danny L. Balfour , Editor

Hindy Lauer Schachter

New Jersey Institute of Technology