Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People to Help Governments Do Better. By DanHonig, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 264 pp. $14.99 (ebook). ISBN: 978‐0197641200
本书挑战对政府低效的普遍看法，提出以赋能替代合规管理，通过信任和自主权激发公务员的使命动机，从而提升公共部门绩效，适合公共管理研究者和改革者阅读。
Stories of dysfunctionality, stalled change, and failure to deliver are all too common for those who work in study, or try to reform the public sector. These stories underscore the urgent need for change and reinforce a view of the public sector as irremediably slow and ineffective. This book encourages us to look at governments through a different lens, challenging the mistrust in the state's and its agents' ability to improve our lives. In Mission Driven Bureaucrats, Dan Honig forcefully intervenes in academic and policy debates about how to make public sector organizations more effective. Honig's analysis and recommendations counter those of “new public management,” which, building on principal-agent views of government, tend to suggest a mix of monitoring, targets, and incentives. He suggests that these compliance-oriented formulas can often crowd out the public-oriented motivation that draws many to the public sector, especially in tasks and sectors where performance is not easily observable or measurable. Management for compliance, Honig argues, fails to recognize that often public sector employees want to make a difference in the world and that for them to be able to do that requires a certain level of trust. In so doing, management for compliance often fails to attract and retain talent and ultimately fails to deliver on its promise of better government agencies, perpetuating the current state of dysfunctionality and mistrust in the public sector. Honig skillfully articulates an alternative approach to holding bureaucrats accountable for their performance and to make public sector organizations more effective. Rather than more management for compliance (“route C”), government teams and agencies would benefit from more management for empowerment (“route E”). This approach, by recognizing bureaucrats' autonomy, seeks to cultivate their competence and deepen their connection to peers, to their agency's mission, and ultimately to the purpose of improving people's lives. Along the “route E,” bureaucrats are more accountable to their peers, the citizens they serve, and the agency's mission than to scorecards, pay-for-performance schemes or other incentives, and top-down rules and directives. Honig effectively argues that this alternative type of accountability and its approach to governance is very often underutilized in public sector organizations, but it holds the promise of a more effective and people-centric public sector. To support this argument, the book successfully threads evidence from original data analysis, the author's studies and experience with a variety of public sector organizations, a wide range of empirical studies from across the social sciences (including public management, public policy, political science, sociology, economics, and management), and well-crafted profiles of mission-driven bureaucrats from all around the world. Throughout the book's nine chapters, the author carefully dissects the implications of the argument, balancing attention to rigorous evidence from academic studies, the voices of people on the ground, and the practical needs of policy reformers. Mission Driven Bureaucrats has a number of features that make it a unique contribution to the study of government agencies, setting it aside from other studies of governance in the public sector. First, it puts management at the center. Be it at the level of the team, the agency, or the country, Honig emphasizes the dilemmas of managers and how they can use the tools of management for empowerment to attract, retain, and motivate mission-driven bureaucrats and thus boost citizen welfare. Second, Mission Driven Bureaucrats takes seriously the importance of perceptions and narratives and how they interact with management practices. Honig shows that all-present stories of bureaucrats who are lazy or uninterested and of bureaucracies that are slow and ineffective often call for more compliance-oriented management, thus crowding out motivation (and motivated bureaucrats themselves) and complicating performance. Existing narratives can, therefore, become powerful, self-fulfilling prophecies. A key contribution of the book is teaching us to see government agencies (and the bureaucrats who populate them) from a different lens—one that recognizes and nurtures bureaucrats' mission motivation, empowers teams and agencies to deliver on their mission, and enables them to improve people's lives. Third, Mission Driven Bureaucrats does not shy away from nuance. The book recognizes that there is important variation across individual bureaucrats, tasks, and agencies and that compliance-oriented management can be key to successful bureaucracies. For individuals who are not intrinsically motivated, or for tasks that are more easily monitored and incentivized, compliance-oriented management is likely to work. Honig thus invites readers and practitioners to think through and find the right equilibrium of route C and route E—which are not alternative but rather complementary paths in bureaucracies' transformative journey toward better performance. Finally, Honig's book delves deep into the difficult issue of change. Rather than just describing two equilibria, Mission Driven Bureaucrats analyzes the dynamics of how different management styles can change the selection, retention, motivation, and performance of bureaucrats, thus pushing agencies further from or closer to their “performance-possibility frontier.” Honig draws attention to how the composition of the workforce, existing perceptions and narratives, and political factors may constrain reformers. But he skillfully shows, through data analysis, academic studies, and cases, that change is not only desirable but also possible for government agencies all around the world. One of the chapters in Mission Driven Bureaucrats provides a diverse set of feasible policy options for managers, agency leaders, and politicians to consider. All in all, Mission Driven Bureaucrats is a rich, cogent, and evidence-based account of why public sector agencies underdeliver and how to get them closer to their performance possibility frontier. By expanding our imagination on public sector governance and providing us with a language to talk and think differently about government performance, Honig's book can crystalize both reform and research agendas. The author has nothing to report.