Professional expertise can be sustaining under stress, even in the professions in which the public has less confidence. Studies have demonstrated that the professionalism of education is less established than that of medicine, but it too fosters essential hope. Not all children have learned to read, but the credibility of the efforts of licensed teachers is remarkable, and it guides the support of parents for expert teachers. The familiar bumper sticker puts it succinctly: "If you can read this, thank a teacher."
The authority of professional knowledge and skill-part myth, part reality- becomes a valuable instrument for the commissioner as entrepreneur. That is evident from the studies in this volume. The professional expertise of policing, medicine, education and the law-all these have provided resources for imaginative leadership. Such professionalism creates commitment-building public goods and promises incentive-building private goods. Professional endorsement and accreditation help to mobilize constituent support for programs and to defend such programs from undue, nonprofessional attack. The political neutrality of professional expertise can be good politics. American science has used its apolitical character with great political skill to obtain millions of dollars from the government for scientific research. For all its utility, however, professionalism is far from sufficient for coping with impossible jobs.
The problems presented by conflicting goals and conflicting demands offer the professional commissioner the political challenge of inventing a way out. Standard solutions are not likely to be available. Successful strategies of the past are almost always inapplicable to present cases, because of new issues, personalities, and contingencies. More important, invention is a personal matter. The new situation requires the commissioner to reach into past experience and to draw on personal skills to find a strikingly novel way of coping with a problem of distributing both idealistic public goods and pragmatic private goods, a problem that may not in itself be new. Stock solutions lack not only luster but also the personal imprint so important to the heroic style of the entrepreneurial commissioner.
The commissioner tries to discern what threats and promises worry powerful groups the most, and he or she emphasizes actions that address those concerns. While the commissioner vigorously acts on the most salient focal concerns, he or she takes only limited or no action on other incompatible concerns, but neither credits nor discredits them. If the commissioner's actions credibly and energetically address (not necessarily relieve) what he or she has correctly sensed as the prevalent focal concerns of the society, the result will be only minimal concern about what has been neglected-and what concern there is will be confined to the less powerful or less concerned of the constituents. The commissioner must always be prepared, however, for a shift in focal concerns and be ready to respond by shifting resources to possible (or sometimes impossible) professional mitigation of the problems stressed by the new concerns. The commissioner gambles that he or she has correctly picked a focal concern that does not antagonize the most powerful constituents and that contributes at least some manifest progress to long-term, idealistic goals.
For example, Miller and Iscoe show how a program in which former mental patients maintain their own residences affects different constituencies. First, it mitigates the concern of constituents who are worried that their relatives will be trapped and forgotten in the custodial backwards of mental hospitals. At the same time, it stimulates and develops a focal concern among the former patients' neighbors, a concern about safety, maintenance, and value of their neighborhood. It also stimulates and develops a focal concern about indiscriminate discharge among families whose profoundly ill members do, in fact, require hospital care. And further, opening such residences also raises concerns of the communities in which mental hospitals are located: Will the hospital lay off workers?
Allowing furloughs to selected prisoners eases the focal concern of constituents about the isolation of prisoners from pro-social, cooperative community influences. The furloughs also intensify the worries of constituents about the dangers of additional criminal acts committed by convicted criminals on furlough from prison, as in the recent Massachusetts experience. However professionally adept, if a commissioner acts at all, he or she is likely to relieve the focal concern of some and increase the focal concern of others. When the constituencies with opposing concerns have about equal power to influence the allocation of resources to the agency, the commissioner is often wise to dilute each group's impact by spreading his or her resources among the several focal concerns. But how are the powers of the constituencies to be assessed?
The commissioner must develop the intuition to recognize the mutable patterns of focal concerns and power relationships among the multiple conflicting constituencies. Recognition, however tenuous, of the shifting patterns allows the commissioner to choose salient, practical, visible programs to address a current focal concern and, with intuitively calculated risk, strategically bypass other concerns. The use of social and historical criteria in assessing the processes and potential of actions allows the commissioners to see progress toward ambiguous and idealistic goals. As undesirable as they are, low frequency, high cost, high visibility incidents can be useful as well as embarrassing, if the commissioner can accept responsibility and push for action that will mobilize support for a needed new program.
Sometimes the commissioner must undertake to change recognized focal concerns and networks of coalitions. The best chances come from actions have these properties: (a) They affirm a strongly held value, idealistic as it may be; (b) they are taken in concert with constituents who are powerful enough to influence others, who have a strong commitment to those values, and who are uneasy about the current practices; (c) they require a specific, easily observed, change in manifest current practices; and (d) they stimulate commitment to the specific change, commitment publicly announced by powerful-enough people.
