How do organizations and governance systems shape performance, and how do managers influence what happens? In this chapter, we develop a model to answer these questions and guide our exploration of the real world of management. We model two distinct levels: the organizational and the network. While much of the empirical work developed later in this book focuses on how management makes a difference on the organizational level, many programs are implemented via complex networks that combine the efforts of multiple organizations. This structural variance means that it is important to discuss management in the context of the broader patterns of governance now evident in many public programs.

Since much of the rest of the book explores these theoretical ideas empirically, we also discuss data and data requirements. We start with an assessment of the type of data needed to test our theories. We then discuss the Texas schools data set, our primary data set, and its relative strengths and weaknesses. We then note other data sets used in various work in the public management–performance research agenda, including in some of our own studies. Several of these other data sets have enabled researchers to explore in other venues some of the important questions examined in this book, and we refer to a number of such studies in later chapters. Finally, we provide a specific discussion of performance measures for the Texas schools data set as well as the production function used in subsequent analyses.