When people think of what public managers do, often the tasks and responsibilities that come most readily to mind are those tied to the internal functioning of a public organization: motivating staff, organizing tasks, structuring work relationships, handling the budget and other resources such as information technology, appraising individuals' performance, and the like. We begin our empirical examination of public management from another angle: the externally oriented actions of managers as they seek to do their jobs and advance their organization's causes. We do so for two reasons. First, this aspect of public management is often given short shrift in standard accounts, and yet – as explained earlier in this volume – contemporary governance arrangements typically enmesh the actions and objectives of specific public organizations in a web of relations with other actors. Second, in the development of our own research program, we began by studying the external efforts of managers and sought to explore their performance-related implications. Accordingly, in this book we proceed in like manner.

Networks and networking

As noted earlier, public programs and public organizations are often situated in networks – arrays through which many aspects of contemporary governance are handled. Networks are structures of interdependence involving multiple organizations or parts thereof, in which one unit is not merely the formal subordinate of the others in some larger hierarchical arrangement. Networks exhibit some structural stability but extend beyond formally established linkages and policy-legitimated ties.