Instalación de Faenas

15. Thomas (1997a, pp. 128-29). A study (Gans and Horton, 1975, p. 84) of thirty service integration projects in the early 1970s reported, "The most detrimental attitude was the desire of service providers to retain agency prerogatives with respect to control of service d e l i v e r y . . . . It appeared often in super-agencies in which the integrator was attempting to consolidate established, traditional state or local government departments with their own clientele, federal grants, and degree of influence." However, Gans and Horton do not con- jecture w h y service providers had this attitude—whether because of concerns about turf, autonomy, budget, mission, and so on. On alliances in the health sector, see Zuckerman, Kaluzny, and Ricketts (1995).

thereby, does not threaten autonomy if, after a souring of the relation- ship, it is easy to downsize or to find an alternative source of funds. In fact, the more varied the sources of funding, the less dependent an agency is on any one of them.

Agencies will therefore attempt not just to eschew autonomy-threat- ening relationships but to recast necessary relationships in their least threatening form. This may sometimes undermine ICC capacity to take effective action. In 1982 the commission constituted to review the 1980 East Bay Hills fire argued without success for a joint powers authority with taxing power. Some of the same players chose not to try the same arguments in 1992 and opted for the voluntary Vegetation Management Consortium instead. This concession to the spirit of localism, as well as to the complexity and duration of the process that would have been required to form a joint powers authority, may have been unavoidable. Most participants at the time also thought it would be inferior to a more informal arrangement in terms of effectiveness.

That autonomy is threatened by collaboration implies that agencies that are confident of their autonomy are more likely to collaborate than those that are not. Charles Bruner, a former Iowa legislator who led a movement to integrate funding streams for children's services, has writ- ten, "Healthy and secure agencies usually find it easier to collaborate than those in less favorable circumstances. Agencies mired in budgetary or other crises, lacking leadership, or subject to internal dissension are less likely to negotiate as equals with collaborative partners."16

Because many collaborative ventures start as pilot or demonstration projects with limited-term funding, agency managers may be reluctant to absorb such a project lest they create claims on funds for higher pri- ority activities when the project funds run out. In addition, managers do not like the prospect of having to lay off people should they hold the line against reallocating funds to continue the "demonstration" project. A former Marin County health and human services director rejected a proffered foundation grant for these reasons, and critics accused him of having a "fear of funds."

A C C O U N T A B I L I T Y . Informants have rarely told me that they per- sonally were concerned about turf or budgets, and they have only occasionally talked about autonomy. But they have frequently voiced

concerns about their agencies' accountability for certain kinds of per- formance that they have hesitated to entrust to their ICC partners. Conversely, they have attributed concerns about turf and budgets to their partners, concerns that these partners, they said or implied, were disguising as concerns about their accountability.

Consider a case of child sexual abuse followed by death that occurs while a family is under the nominal supervision of the Child Protective Services agency but in which the agency has delegated the management of this particular case to a public health nurse who works in the child's school and sees the child and her mother regularly. How likely is it that the Child Protective Services director will have to answer to legislators (and perhaps the press as well)? It takes only one legislator to make the life of the agency director miserable. The purposes that might inspire any one of dozens of legislators to go on the attack are numerous and varied, ranging from the desire to conduct responsible oversight to the wish to embarrass the executive branch controlled by the opposite polit- ical party.

In any case, the director should realistically fear that she will be held accountable in the event of trouble. Would not any director prefer to have direct control over the circumstances that might cause trouble rather than indirect control via a partner agency? The answer is not nec- essarily yes. Countervailing considerations might be that (1) Public Health might generally be better equipped to prevent such incidents than Child Protective Services, or (2) there might be such superior results from the partnership with Public Health across such a range of cases that a slightly increased risk of catastrophe was worth taking. One may suspect, however, that very few Child Protective Services directors would be able to view their personal risks, when faced with such a cal- culation, with the detachment required to opt for delegating the super- visory role to Public Health and the school system.

A much more pervasive anxiety than being criticized for ostensibly permitting a child's abuse and death is the anxiety that arises from the alleged mismanagement of public monies. The funding agencies that supported The Door were extremely reluctant to consolidate their over- sight of The Door's expenditures with the oversight activities of other funding agencies l e s t . . . . Well, lest what, exactly? I asked many of the participants in the master contract and consolidated auditing reform what might happen. None would provide more than a vague scenario

that "there could be trouble," and none would say that "trouble" was really very likely. But one could never t e l l . . . .

ET-HNOCENTRISM. One might have thought that such concerns as were expressed in the previous section would be traceable to one or two historical incidents in the tribal bureaucratic memory in which perfectly honorable bureaucrats had been scapegoated by publicity-hungry leg- islators or something of this sort. I was unable to find any traces of such memories, however. This fact might signify that bureaucrats are the vic- tims of irrational fears, or that they are selfishly self-protective even against relatively slight, but real, risks, or that the realistic basis for fear was large and properly understood but simply unknown it its details. Whatever the truth of the matter, it does sometimes make sense to think of agencies as being like tribes. Consider, for instance, the ethnocentric us-versus-them language that one frequently hears when people talk about relations between their agency and some partner agency. "We" are striving to carry out our mission, unite our diverse constituencies, muster our scarce resources for the common good, negotiate in good faith, and cooperate rationally in joint problem-solving. But "they" are unduly interested in protecting turf, hiding their real resources, pushing their policy agenda, and keeping control.

The ubiquity of ethnocentrism in h u m a n groups suggests that it would be present in this case, as in so many others.17 The question is what it might explain that other perspectives—say, the dozen or so that I have already discussed in this chapter—could not explain more par- simoniously, meaning by that term in this context rationally and com- monsensically rather than emotionally. The answer lies not just in the tendency to be unduly suspicious of involvements with agency out- siders but in the propensity to conform strongly to the customs and adhere to the beliefs that prevail in the agency.18 These customs and beliefs sometimes include looking askance at the comparable practices that prevail among agency outsiders. In this situation, the ethnocen- trism hypothesis predicts that antagonists collaborating with some other agency could effectively use insinuations of disloyalty to try to muzzle those who might be more favorable and to keep them from