Questioning Kaufman: How Cross‐Level Political Coalitions Interact with Organizational Structure

• Author: Forrest Fleischman
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12753
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

Questioning Kaufman: How Cross-Level Political Coalitions Interact with Organizational Structure 743

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 743–751. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12753.

Forrest Fleischman is assistant

professor in the Department of Forest

Resources at the University of Minnesota

Twin Cities. His research focuses on

understanding how political and

administrative factors influence the

management of forests in India and the

United States.

E-mail: ffleisch@umn.edu

Abstract : Herbert Kaufman ’ s The Forest Ranger is considered a landmark study of how organizations can be

structured to elicit compliance from field officials, yet there have been few attempts to validate Kaufman ’ s claims.

The author argues that the outcomes observed by Kaufman resulted from interplay between organizational structure

and political context—a variable that Kaufman ignored. This argument is supported by case studies of two agencies

with structures similar to Kaufman ’ s U.S. Forest Service but poorer outcomes: the same agency today and India ’ s forest

departments. Both differences in organizational structure and poorer outcomes are found to be the result of political

context. Specifically, coalitions assembled around agencies use the implementation process to shape outcomes in ways

that could not be accomplished solely through changing laws or formal administrative structure. This points to the

importance of building supportive field-level coalitions to complement administrative reforms.

Practitioner Points

• Political context, including the degree of public consensus over goals and levels of corruption, plays an

important role in shaping organizational outcomes.

• Interplay between political context and organizational structure is more important than the internal structure

of an organization alone.

• Successful administrative reforms require building supportive political coalitions.

Forrest Fleischman

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Questioning Kaufman:

How Cross-Level Political Coalitions Interact

with Organizational Structure

H ow can organizational leaders ensure

that actions taken by subordinates meet

organizational goals? In a classic study,

Herbert Kaufman ( 1960 ) proposed an explanation

for how the U.S. Department of Agriculture ’ s Forest

Service (USFS) ensured compliance from field staff.

According to Kaufman, the USFS was an effective

organization because it had an institutional structure

and organizational culture that elicited high levels

of compliance and effective policy implementation.

Kaufman ’ s The Forest Ranger continues to be widely

read among both foresters and students of public

management; two book reviews of his work have

appeared in Public Administration Review in the last

decade (Burton 2012 ; Luton 2007 ), and the book is

frequently included in lists of classics in the field (Lynn

2015 ). Although a number of studies have examined

how the USFS changed after Kaufman ’ s 1950s

fieldwork (Carroll, Freemuth, and Alm 1996 ; Clarke

and McCool 1996 ; Koontz 2007 ; Tipple and Wellman

1991 ; Twight and Lyden 1988 ), none of these studies

has examined whether Kaufman adequately explained

the phenomena he observed or whether his explanation

could be applied to other contexts. Given the broad

influence of this work, it is surprising that critical and

comparative evaluations have not been conducted.

In this article, I argue that Kaufman ’ s explanation was

incomplete because he ignored political context, in

particular, the goals of the USFS ’ s supporting political

coalition. By political context, I refer to the broad

set of interactions between an agency and its external

political environment, including its relationship with

its formal political superiors (i.e., courts, legislators,

and the chief executive) but also with interest

groups and local stakeholders. By political coalition,

I refer to a loosely coordinated group of political

actors who shared goals with respect to the agency

mission (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2014 ). Kaufman stated

repeatedly in the preface and introduction to The

Forest Ranger that political context was not relevant for

his argument, writing that “insofar as Service relations

with the environment impinge on the internal

functioning of the organization, they are examined

here, but they are extraneous for the most part and

therefore not treated at length” (1960, 6).

This argument has clear relevance for the design of

administrative reforms. If Kaufman was correct that

structure and culture are crucial for understanding

administrative outcomes, but political context is

not, then apolitical structural reforms have great

potential to improve the performance of public