Expressing political and administrative values through stories: A semiotic analysis of the National Performance Review.

Abstract

The argument presented here is that the stories in NPR are effective at communicating the values intended by the authors of the report. This finding supports what many administrative theorists have recently postulated about the power of storytelling among public administrators. This research further shows that NPR is driven primarily by the values of change and productivity. Stories serve to intensify the communication of these values.

This dissertation contributes to (1) existing literature on the application of semiotics to social science research; (2) knowledge of how political and administrative values are communicated within the public administration community; and (3) substantive understanding of American bureaucratic reform.

NPR is important because it is a high-profile administrative effort with strong political direction. It is the virtual embodiment of "reinventing government" and is an organizational model for all levels of government.

This dissertation analyzes the underlying values motivating the National Performance Review (NPR) and the reception of these values by public administrators. The research question is: "Are the stories within NPR effective vehicles for communicating the values intended by the authors of the report?" NPR is compared with the implicit theoretical framework for effective organizations as suggested by organizational theorists. This framework is exemplified by the Competing Values Model (Quinn, 1988) based on numerous studies involving factor analysis and multidimensional scaling.

Semiotics serves as the major epistemological assumption governing this dissertation's methodological approach. Semiotics is a form of research which analyzes social life by attempting to discern underlying patterns of meaning as communicated through signs in the social universe. Within a semiotic framework, this dissertation employs two methods for uncovering the latent value structure of NPR. The first is a quantitative content analysis (based on the coefficient of imbalance) of NPR's lead report. The second method is a quantitative story analysis based on the values perceived to be promoted by the stories within NPR. Practicing public administrators from various levels of government serve as evaluators for the story analysis. Partial correlation of the results of these two methods is conducted controlling for the professional values already held by public administrators in the sample.