Crosby B.C., Bryson J.M. - Leadership for the Common Good (2005)(en)

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Advocates and opponents of the proposals could try to persuade or lobby members of Congress to vote for or against the bills.

Because time is a limited resource, agendas are a crucial mediator among competing capabilities. Only capabilities applicable to dealing with agenda items become relevant. Thus in April 1982, when Henry Waxman came to Los Angeles to convene the first congressional hearing on the GRID epidemic, he wanted to hear from managers of federal health programs about their work only as it related to the epidemic. Additionally, the nature of an agenda item and its order on the agenda can differentially favor the relevant capabilities of competing actors or coalitions (Riker, 1986). For example, at Waxman’s hearing the testimony of federal bureaucrats was followed by testimony from the president of the American Public Health Association, who was then able to poke holes in the bureaucrats’ statements.

Agendas are composed of issues, which are points of controversy between two or more actors over procedural or substantive matters involving distribution of positions or resources (see Cobb and Elder, 1983). We define an issue more broadly as a public problem accompanied by at least one solution that has pros and cons (points of controversy) from the standpoint of various stakeholders. Complicated agenda rules can benefit a group that has considerably more political connections and financial resources than its opponents. Agenda rules can also permit some public decisions to be made with a minimum of public scrutiny.

Rules governing access to participation in an arena strongly influence who decides what, where, when, why, and how. Access may be based on formal rules, position, precedent, reputation, financial resources, or rhetorical skill. Regardless of the particular rules, the mere inclusion of some people and exclusion of others can be expected to affect what gets onto the formal agenda and, subsequently, which decisions get made on which issues and preferences. For example, Kraus and Westmoreland were among the few openly gay congressional staff members; their position as aides to two influential members of Congress gave them considerably more ability to affect federal health-related agendas than most other gay men possessed.

Most societies use rules governing access to establish hierarchies of arenas, reserving broader policy making for those nearer

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the top. Procedures for appealing policy decisions to a higher-level arena are also usually established. The rules of access and of appeal are basic methods of political management, allowing those further up the hierarchy to exercise greater power over those below. For example, Margaret Heckler, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services from early 1983 to late 1985, had power to set administrative policies about federally funded medical research around the country. In turn, she followed directives from the White House and had to comply with laws passed by Congress. As another example, the California state legislature was a broader arena than the policy-making bodies of the University of California, but when Marcus Conant and Michael Gottlieb violated the rules by going around university administrators to meet with Willie Brown, the powerful speaker of the California state assembly, to appeal for AIDS research funding, they were penalized by university administrators (Shilts, 1988).

To summarize, the social practice we refer to as making and implementing executive, legislative, and administrative decisions in arenas has several main effects. This social practice shapes categories of decisions and nondecisions and deals with overt and latent conflict; it also produces and reproduces bedrock structures of domination. More specifically, this social practice determines which proposed policies, plans, programs, and projects are considered by decision makers. Of those considered, it determines which are adopted, and of those, which are implemented. Finally, an arena is the proving ground for coalitions that support or oppose particular policies, plans, programs, and projects.

Courts and the Three Dimensions of Power

A court is used to judge or evaluate decisions or conduct in relation to ethical principles, laws, or norms, usually in order to settle disputes about what conduct is permitted and how it should be sanctioned. A court distributes and redistributes access to legitimacy and therefore helps maintain or change laws or other modes of adjudicating conduct (see Exhibit D.4 and Barclay and Birkland, 1998).

Examples of formal courts are the International Court of Justice, a traffic court, an ecclesiastical court, and a military tribunal. The most important informal court is the “court of public opinion.” A court that falls between the formal and the court of public

opinion might be a regulatory body hearing viewpoints before issuing or changing regulations, a professional licensing board conducting a disciplinary hearing, a dean’s office resolving a dispute between college departments or individual professors, a referee conducting binding arbitration, a special court-appointed master dealing with an individual case as part of a class-action settlement, or one of a host of “alternative dispute resolution” mechanisms. In each example, the emphasis is on conflict management through judging or evaluating policy decisions or conduct in relation to laws, rules, or norms. In the early years of the U.S. AIDS crisis, formal courts became involved when hemophiliacs and hospital patients

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who had contracted HIV through contaminated blood transfusions began suing for damages; eventually judges also had to decide what sanctions to impose on HIV carriers who knowingly exposed others to the disease and how to decide cases in which people suffering from HIV/AIDS were fired from a job or excluded from a classroom. Several disputes raged in the court of public opinion. By the mid-1980s in the United States public opinion had more or less decided that sexual practices between same-sex partners fell into the “consenting adults” category; as long as two adults agreed to some activity (that didn’t harm others), they were to be let alone. The court of public opinion also favored equal opportunity for gay people (Shilts, 1988). The big disputes in the court of public opinion were over whether people with HIV/AIDS could be excluded from the workplace or classroom.

The principal activity (first dimension of power) in a court is moral evaluation and sanctioning of conduct, especially through conflict management. The disputes handled are typically “residual”; they remain after an arena has established policies and made decisions or when, for some reason, the political or economic arenas are unable to deal with them. The activity of a court either affirms or modifies policies and/or the underlying norms in the system. The deep structure (third dimension of power) of a court is two disputants plus a third party to help them resolve their dispute, along with at least partially shared principles of legitimation, to govern resolution of the dispute. Action and structure are linked through conflict management and sanctioning capabilities, rules governing conflict resolution, jurisdictions, conflict resolution methods, and access rules (second dimension of power).

Conflict management and sanctioning capabilities are vital tools that leaders bring to a court in varying degrees. Formal judges or appointed arbitrators have authority to impose fines, settlements, or other requirements such as community service or jail sentences. Wise judges and ethical leaders are skilled in identifying which ethical principles, laws, and norms apply to which cases. They are adept at applying precedents and procedures to resolve conflict among principles, laws, and norms and to maintain the legitimacy of the courts. Informal judges, such as parents resolving a dispute among their children, have authority to decide whose argument trumps the other or to develop some other settlement between dif-

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fering points of view. They might also offer a reward that encourages the children to solve their own dispute. The court of public opinion enforces and reinforces informal sanctions, such as shunning and moral condemnation.

Rules governing conflict resolution may be formal, such as legal due process requirements, or informal (norms, widely applied standards of etiquette or fairness). For example, people who contracted HIV/AIDS from blood transfusions in the United States during the early 1980s had difficulty winning lawsuits against blood banks because the banks were legally protected from product liability claims. A more successful route for the plaintiffs was claiming negligence on the part of the blood banks, accusing them of violating a standard of due care as they continued to furnish blood supplies after having credible evidence that they were contaminated with HIV. Both formal and informal rules of fairness prevailed when official and unofficial judges decided that people with HIV/AIDS should not be excluded from the workplace or classroom, given that the disease could not be spread through casual contact.

Jurisdiction denotes the spatial and substantive extent of a court’s authority to interpret and apply norms to resolve conflict. For example, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration licensed the first AIDS antibody test, gay organizations petitioned a federal (rather than a local or state) court to prevent distribution of the test until safeguards were in place against the tests’ being used to screen gay men generally or to discriminate against individuals who tested positive for the AIDS antibody.

Conflict management methods significantly affect the outcomes of the conflict management process, since they favor some decisions and modes of conduct and rule out others (see, for example, Fisher and Ury, 1991). The selection of methods is therefore one of a leader’s most important actions in any court, since certain methods favor certain objectives. Standard methods include use of a go-between, mediation, arbitration, and substitution of law and office for consent (the traditional method in a formal court). These methods differ in the extent to which they rely on consent or coercion on the one hand and nondichotomous or dichotomous solutions on the other. In a nondichotomous solution, each party gets something; in the latter, the winner takes all (Shapiro,

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1981). The attraction of a method such as mediation is that participants must consent to the process and the outcome, and that it is likely to produce a nondichotomous solution, thus reducing the likelihood that any participant feels coerced and unfairly treated. (This approach is also likely to make future interaction between the participants more amicable.) By contrast, coercion on the part of a formal court often has to be used to enforce laws and resolve disputes. The legitimacy of formal courts is highly important since it affects the willingness of plaintiffs and defendants to accept the verdict.

Formal courts can and do impose dichotomous solutions, but a wise judge also recognizes the need for all participants to feel they are treated fairly. Legal precedents and procedures offer several methods for enhancing the perception of fairness, or procedural justice. For example, a dispute over something that is indivisible—as with injury, trespass, or breach of contract—can be turned into something that is divisible (usually money). Or a dispute over right and wrong can be converted into a dispute over “balancing of equities” (Shapiro, 1975, p. 288). The use of a jury of peers also enhances defendants’ perception of fairness.

Additionally, courts can channel the bulk of legal conflict into negotiation between the disputants, who are threatened with eventual court action if the negotiation fails. Even when a case is decided in a formal court, the loser typically has several channels of appeal. Moreover, the court usually has limited capability to monitor compliance with its rulings; it reintervenes to ensure compliance only at the request of one of the disputing parties (Shapiro, 1975).

Finally, rules governing access to participation in a court strongly influence which residual conflicts are resolved according to which norms, and therefore which actions—especially which decisions and policy preferences—are allowed and which are not. Access may be based on evidence of rule violation, demonstrated injury, formal rules (including rules of appeal), position, precedent, custom, financial resources, or some other criterion. Access rules are used by virtually all societies to establish a hierarchy of courts, reserving the most fundamental pronouncements to those at the top.

To summarize, adjudication of disputes and sanctioning of conduct in courts plays several crucial roles in public policy making.

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This social practice determines how ethical principles, laws, rules, and norms are applied to disputes over policies, programs, and projects. It also decides which behaviors are permitted and rewarded and which are disallowed and punished (Barclay and Birkland, 1998).

The operation of courts also produces and reproduces the bedrock of legitimation. Courts, in effect, are a form of social control because conflict management almost invariably draws on norms held by society at large, or in the case of intraorganizational conflict resolution, by the organization itself. The use of such norms to resolve a dispute reproduces social control on the basis of those norms. For example, the people who contracted HIV/AIDS through blood transfusions in the United States were able to sue for damages in formal courts, thus giving them and their families an outlet for their outrage and offering the possibility that the underlying norms of fairness would be enforced. Recourse to the courts and outcomes that are deemed relatively fair keep U.S. citizens from turning to civil disobedience when they are injured by the operation of organizations and institutions.

Social control also results from using formal courts because they make supplementary laws. When judges and court-appointed administrators apply general rules to specific cases, they often add details that become a precedent. Courts also develop their own rules to manipulate factual issues to achieve policy goals. Presumption, burden of proof, and pro se rules are typically open to such manipulation. Appeal procedures are also a means of hierarchical social control. The possibility of appeal tells the loser in one court that he or she has access to another higher court and thus need not contemplate changing the system. Procedures for moving through the appeals hierarchy also allow judicial and political authorities time to explore the implications of basic legal changes that may be mandated by a “final” ruling of the highest court. Appeal procedures thus allow central authorities to do two things: monitor lower court operations to enforce compliance and uniformity throughout the legal system, and prepare for changes as they work their way through the system. Since the chain of appeal typically ends with the chief political authorities, appeal may thus be seen as a means of centralizing political control and change.

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Summary

Public action is of three main types: communication, policy making and implementation, and settling disputes and enforcing the system’s underlying norms. In turn, each social practice is shaped by the three dimensions of power. The first dimension consists of observable behavior; the second of various ideas, rules, modes, media, and methods; and the third of bedrock social, political, and economic structures.

A forum is the setting in which human beings engage in creation and communication of meaning; an arena is the setting for policy making and implementation, and a court is the setting for settling disputes and reinforcing systemic norms. By understanding how the three dimensions of power function in each setting and focusing mainly on the second dimension, policy entrepreneurs can help their advocacy coalitions achieve major progress in remedying complex public problems.

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years. Participants use marking pens to record key events along each timeline; then they work in small groups of diverse stakeholders to construct a story about some part of the timelines.

Each group then has three minutes to tell the story to the larger group. When the stories are done, the facilitators ask, “What did you get out of that? What did you learn? What did you hear?” Weisbord comments: “This task has the effect of getting everybody on the same planet very quickly. We like the symbolism: the walls belong to everybody, anybody can use the markers, everybody’s information is relevant, everybody has a story to tell, it’s all part of a much larger picture. We don’t have to say that, because people experience it in the first few hours of the conference” (Flower, 1995, p. 39).

Current Reality: Step Two

The next step in the conference is compiling a group “mind map” of current reality. It could be constructed using ovals (as in the oval mapping process of Resource B). Everyone writes on ovals the current trends he or she believes are affecting female literacy. The ovals are then attached to a wall covered with flipchart sheets, and similar ovals are clustered.

The participants explain what their ovals mean, giving concrete examples. Participants are given colored dots to place on the ovals they think are most important, and the group talks about the ones that garner the most dots. Often, says Weisbord, the map is an “overwhelming portrait of the world’s troubles, as seen through the eyes of the people in this particular room at this particular time. . . . People will often report feeling down.”

By the time this exercise is done, around 5:00 or 6:00 P.M., it is time to quit for the evening and let participants sleep on the results so far.

On the second day, the facilitators organize participants into small groups, but this time people who have a similar stake in the problem are grouped together. In a conference on female literacy, all the teachers would be together; the youth workers would be together; young women would be together, as would be educational administrators, and so on.

In each small group, participants reinterpret the mind map constructed the previous day. They may even revise it on new flip-