Displacing the burden of representation: Engaging with critical Whiteness to expand the theory of representative bureaucracy

Abstract

The theory of representative bureaucracy has provided an important yet limited framework for understanding exclusion in the public sector. This theoretical paper engages with critical approaches to argue for an expanded theory that centers social equity. Close attention to the relationship between the public and nonprofit sectors illuminates how public institutions protect and reproduce White, masculine space by shifting the burden of representation onto racially minoritized public administrators and community-based nonprofit organizations led by and for people of color. An expanded theory will (1) advance an understanding of both sectors as institutional spaces that protect Whiteness and impede full representation and (2) recognize the importance of the labor required to counter inequities and actively represent minoritized constituents.

Keywords:

• Community-based nonprofit organizations
• racial state
• representative bureaucracy
• representative burden
• white institutional space

Introduction

Can public bureaucratic institutions represent the public? Do government officials act in ways that benefit the interests of the people they serve? All the people? These questions have animated the study of representative bureaucracy in the U.S. for decades as scholars have aimed to reconcile the ideals of democracy with the workings of bureaucratic organizations (Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003; Headley et al., 2021; Riccucci & Van Ryzin, 2017). On the one hand, U.S. liberal ideology lauds the principle of government by the people and for the people. On the other hand, all levels of the large-scale bureaucratic organizations through which government operates—departments, agencies, bureaus—are staffed by workforces that are less than fully representative of the publics they serve (Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003). Representative bureaucracy theory posits that when government organizations hire public administrators who reflect the demographic characteristics of the public, they are more likely to make decisions that benefit those they serve (Meier & Nigro, 1976). Through extensive inquiry, the scholarship on representative bureaucracy has come to serve as the dominant approach for empirical examinations of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in public employment (Portillo et al., 2022). As Bishu and Kennedy (2020) argue, scholars have tested the theory to study workplace diversity and equity, enhancing our understanding of how historically disenfranchized groups may be better reflected in government agencies and better served by government policies.

Scholars have also argued that the theory of representative bureaucracy has limitations and needs to include new perspectives and a wider range of methodologies. Recent reviews of the literature argue that studies have primarily used quantitative, empirical approaches to test the theory in a limited range of settings; that representation has been measured predominantly using static, discrete demographic categories of race and gender; and that studies often lack adequate nuance or attention to intersectionality (Bishu & Kennedy, 2020; Kennedy, 2014). Researchers have primarily focused on those who have been excluded from public workplaces, concentrated on the individual level of bureaucrats from minoritized identities, and paid limited attention to macro-level policies and meso-level organizational practices (Ray et al., 2022; Wooten & Couloute, 2017). Emphasis has been more on the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness of the representative labor performed by minoritized workers, and less on the core value of social equity. In this way, representative bureaucracy scholarship has tended to reinforce the “siloing” of social equity from the core of public administration (see Blessett et al., 2019), leaving fundamental assumptions about the representativeness of government largely unquestioned. More pointedly, the ways that public bureaucracies reproduce hierarchies of Whiteness and masculinity remain largely unexamined, thus risking reinforcing white masculinity as an “ideal type” within public administration (Portillo et al., 2022). The call, therefore, has been for an expansion of the theory of representative bureaucracy in ways that embrace complexity, confront the myth of administrative neutrality, uncover new questions, and illuminate the ways that Whiteness and masculinity are embedded in public organizational structures, settings, and policies.

This theoretical paper takes on this challenge by critically engaging and applying the emerging scholarship on racialized organizations to the question of representation in the U.S. I argue that an expanded and revised theory of representative bureaucracy needs to center social equity, counter racialized assumptions embedded in the scholarship, and attend to the often segregated and under-valued labor required of racially minoritized employees as they work against inequities and exclusions. To establish this claim, I apply theories of the racial state and Whiteness (Lipsitz, 2018; Mills, 1997), racialized organizations (Ray, 2019; Ray et al., 2022; Wooten & Couloute, 2017) and representative burden (Humphrey, 2022) to the early scholarship on representative bureaucracy and expectations placed on minoritized workers in public bureaucracies, underscoring the essentialism and racialized assumptions embedded in the concepts of passive and active representation. Next, through a close attention to the relationship between the public and nonprofit sectors, I find that public, bureaucratic institutions protect and reproduce White, masculine institutional space, at least in part, by shifting the burden of representation to specific people, often public administrators with minoritized identities, and displacing this labor to specific spaces, often community-based nonprofit organizations led by and for people of color. Through decades of devolution and disinvestment, public-private partnerships have placed much the burden of representation onto the shoulders of the staff of community-based nonprofits, resulting in profound effects on the responsibility, mechanics, and potential for full and active representation in the U.S. The paper concludes with a call for an expanded theory of representative bureaucracy that acknowledges, centers, and values the representative labor required by minoritized workers to address the racial exclusions and disparities that are deeply embedded in both sectors.

Revisiting the theory of representative bureaucracy

The concept of representative bureaucracy first emerged with an awareness of the contrast between the ideals of a democratic society and the limited demographics of public bureaucracies. When coining the term in 1944, Kingsley writes explicitly against Weber’s ideal or “pure” type of bureaucracy as dehumanizing, as it eliminates the personal, irrational, and emotional elements from official business of government (Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003). Kingsley laments the elite hierarchies that structure the British service class and warns that an aristocratic and unrepresentative public service is democratic “only in the loosest sense,” directing his attention to the “slow and sometimes painful evolution” from the “splendid ruins of government by gentlemen” to a representative, middle class bureaucracy in England (2003, pp. xx, iv). Kingsley focuses on gender and class-based exclusions, and his proposed solutions include changes in education, recruitment, pay, and promotion for greater integration of women and middle-class public servants. Race, however, is only referred to indirectly. For example, he speaks of the “world supremacy” of 19th century England and analogizes British civil service to the caste system, but he also dismisses any influence or association between the British civil service and the colonial administrators of the East India Company (pp. 3, 13).

The scholars who brought the concept of representative bureaucracy to the U.S. in the 1950s shared similar concerns about gender and class, with similar implicit references to racial exclusions. In his discussion of the history of the U.S. civil service, Van Riper compares the ideal of democratic pluralism and merit with the persistence of elite systems of “spoils and patronage” (Van Riper, 1976, p. 1). After Mosher (1968) expresses concern about the early dominance of the “landed gentry” and the ways the professional public service in the U.S. mirrors the “pecking order” of social class in Britain, he also challenges the influence of the Protestant ethic as the “parent” of merit ideology in the service, with its heavy emphasis on individualism, egalitarianism, scientism, separatism, and unilateralism (p. 57). To justify reform, both authors invoke the principle of a government by the people for the people. Mosher asks, “What does [government] ‘by the people’ mean? By all the people? If not, by which people?” (p. 2). And Van Riper (1958) argues that the reformers must create policies that ensure an “opportunity for all” those who are interested and potentially qualified (p. 199; author’s emphasis). But the racial exclusions in the implementation of these ideals remain implicit and unresolved. Thus, when he emphasizes the desirability of a federal bureaucracy which is “close to our grass roots,” Van Riper also argues for a “reasonable cross section of the body politic” with minimal clarification about who is ‘reasonable’ to be included (p. 196).

It is notable that the earliest scholarship focuses on passive representation, achieved when the bureaucracy “mirrors” the demographics of society such as occupation, education, family income, social class, race, and religion (Mosher, 1968, p. 12). At the time, scholars were hopeful that such demographic matching would counter the deficiencies in the representativeness of elected officials, improve responsiveness, and ensure that people’s values and needs are met (See Hindera, 1993; Pitkin, 1967). Mosher (1968), however, adds an important discussion about active representation, which involves bureaucrats “pressing for the interests and desires of those” they represent. Further contrasting representative bureaucracy with the Weberian ideal of the detached bureaucrat, Mosher emphasizes the complexities of actively representing the public, noting that the “process of socialization” will shape a public servant’s “orientation and behavior” in office (p. 13). More pointedly, the capabilities, orientations, feelings, and values of public service officers will impact the decisions they make and the ways they interact with the public. The attention to active representation—that is, representation as an intentional action that ensures that the interests of the “whole people” are met—challenges the more static, essentialist notions of identity embedded in earlier scholarship on passive representation. Still, Mosher, like Van Riper, is concerned about too much active representation in the bureaucracy, offering a warning that “rampant” active representativeness would constitute a “major threat to orderly democratic government” (p. 12) while glossing over the ways that the bureaucracy has been built to over-represent the perspectives and interests of White, male workers.

In the decades that followed, Mosher’s distinction between passive and active representation influenced the analysis and theoretical development of a vast contemporary body of scholars on representative bureaucracy. As Dolan and Rosenbloom (2003) emphasize, the original animating questions remain central:

“Can public bureaucracies be representative institutions? That is, can they represent the public, or portions of it, in terms of policy preferences or interests, ideologies, characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, and social class, or other dimensions? If so, how and with what limitations? Is it important for democracies to promote bureaucratic representativeness? (p. 3)”

Researchers have addressed these questions largely through empirical, quantitative study, working to document the extent to which minoritized groups are represented across and within government agencies. The results have played a significant role for scholars and administrators who have sought to change institutional practices and diversify government workforces (Kennedy, 2014).

More recent research has assessed the links between passive and active representation, generating valuable insights by focusing on the micro-level with the individual bureaucrat as the unit of analysis, and street-level encounters as the venue of potential discrimination (Watkins-Hayes, 2011). Numerous empirical studies have concluded that historically minoritized administrators are likely to implement policies or use their discretion in ways that reduce disparate treatment of their historically minoritized clients (Meier et al., 1989; Selden, 1997). Through the theory of symbolic representation, scholars have examined the ways that state actors make representative claims about themselves and their constituents (Saward, 2008). Studies have assessed the impact of active, passive, and symbolic forms of symbolic representation on policy making, spending, and implementation and have measured program outcomes in areas such as in education, social services, equal employment, and health (See Meier & Bohte, 2001; Selden, 1997; Sowa & Selden, 2003).

Recent discussions and reviews of the literature, however, have also pointed to the need for a reexamination of the theoretical approaches and the methods associated with representative bureaucracy. Bishu and Kennedy (2020) note that researchers have focused on limited settings, with a primary focus on bureaucrats within redistributive agencies, education, and law enforcement in the U.S. and thus call for more qualitative or mixed-methods studies of a wider range of organizational and policy contexts (See also Kennedy, 2014). With their heavy emphasis on quantifying and testing the theory, researchers have approached race and gender as discrete variables, and have over-relied on measures of representation that force individuals into broad and bounded categories of race, gender, and sex without adequate understanding of racialization as a social, cultural, and political process (ibid, p. 580). As Ray et al. (2022) argue, we need to pay greater attention to the macro-level of policy and the meso-level of organizational practice that reinforce racialization of bureaucratic organizations (See also Watkins-Hayes, 2011). As a field, public administration has not fully grappled with the ways in which public organizations serve as critical locations for the “continuous creation” of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality (Acker, 2006, p. 441) where the exclusions of U.S. democratic practices are both challenged and sustained. Without attention to these areas, Van Riper’s and Mosher’s fears of “too much” active representation remain unquestioned. An unexamined theory of representative bureaucracy risks: eliding the central importance of active representative labor; - reinforcing Whiteness and masculinity as the ideal type of public worker (Portillo et al., 2022); renewing the sense that public bureaucracies are spaces made by and for White men; and ultimately reinscribing the exclusions it strives to address.

The theory of the racial state

Scholarship on race and racism provides an opportunity to revisit the questions of racial disparity and exclusion that lie at the heart of the theory of representative bureaucracy. Beginning with W.E.B. DuBois and his predecessors, scholars of race have pointed to the longstanding contradictions between U.S. democracy, with its liberal rhetoric of equality and freedom, and the realities of state practice. Racial state theory rests on the understanding that racism was never an “afterthought” or “deviation” from “ostensibly raceless” democratic ideals in the U.S. (Mills, 1997, p. 14). Nor have racial disparities been isolated occurrences situated in specific flawed institutions. By contrast, racial domination and subordination are systemic in the U.S., upheld by institutions and policies, sustained through conditions and rules, and embedded in a wider field of deeply unequal social relations (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 83). In other words, racism is part of the foundations and daily operations of the government, actively created, maintained, or left uncorrected by public agencies and actors (Mills, 2020, sec. 2, para. 8).

In the U.S., the racial state has been, and continues to be, deeply intertwined with the myths of White supremacy. From the earliest days, those in power in colonial institutions structured the rules and mechanics of government to promote a wide range of unearned advantages to White, propertied men. Never static, White supremacy has been maintained over time by laws and policies that direct economic benefits, political input, legal recognition, cultural influence, and moral standing to those classified as White, while those deemed “not-White” have been too often assigned an inferior moral and civil standing, subject to the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and denied full agency, autonomy and citizenship (Lipsitz, 2018; Mills, 1997). Thus, racial state theory views the U.S. government thoroughly racialized in “every respect:” in personnel, networks, institutional mandates, policies, ideology, and organizational structures (Bracey, 2015).

As a racial state, the U.S. government depends heavily on Whiteness, an ideology that works to normalize and promote lies and myths of White superiority (Baldwin, 2011; Du Bois, 2018) and the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunity (Mills, 1997), resulting in persistent racial disparities and discrimination that inflict harm on the lives, liberties and well-being of Black and Brown peoples (Matias & Boucher, 2021, p. 2). To be classified as White by the government is to be racialized into a category that relies on the erasure of Native peoples (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), the devaluation of Blackness (Gebhard et al., 2022), the promotion and protection of White femininity (Hurston, 1991; Watson, 2013), and competition between White and nonwhite workers (Robinson & Kelley, 2000). Whiteness operates as a valorized form of “treasured property,” rooted in systems of dispossession and domination of Black and Indigenous peoples, which confers a wide range of unearned advantages (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). As Harris (1993) argues, a property interest in patriarchal Whiteness forms the background against which legal disputes in the U.S. are framed and heard, with the public and private privileges afforded to Whites established as a “legitimate and natural baseline” that is affirmed, legitimated, and protected by law (p. 1714). A “possessive investment in Whiteness” is extended through policies and prejudices that advantage Whites and disadvantage people of color (Lipsitz, 2018). White Americans are encouraged to invest in Whiteness, to remain “possessive” and true to an identity that promises greater resources and power, while racial capitalism inflicts profound social and material harms on Black people through policing, dispossession and displacement, labor extraction, racial differentiation in wages and economic opportunities, predatory lending, taxation, depressed home values, disfranchisement, and exclusion from effective public services (Robinson & Kelley, 2000, p. xv).

Even with its persistence and pervasiveness, White supremacy and Whiteness are largely unnamed and “taken for granted,” serving as the background against which other systems and processes are highlighted (Mills, 1997, p. 2). Critical Whiteness scholars have argued that colorblindness is a core mechanism of the reproduction of Whiteness. As Mills (1997) explains, Whiteness persists through an epistemology of ignorance, a certain “schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities” that obscures self-transparency and a genuine understanding of social realities (pp. 18–19). White people frequently interpret norms adopted by a dominantly White culture as racially neutral and fail to recognize the ways that those norms are race specific (Delgado & Stefancic, 1997). This White racial ignorance serves as a “convenient amnesia” about the past that silences critical engagement and dissent (Matias, 2022). Colorblind ideology masks reality, enabling Whiteness to masquerade as universality through the language of abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization. Through colorblindness, White people soften, deny, blame, and explain away racial injustices and a sense of danger while claiming the mantle of equal opportunity, fairness, respectability, morality, and benevolence (Bonilla-Silva, 2014; Hooks, 1997). People who are socialized as White are shaped by Whiteness and receive unearned advantages even when they do not think of themselves in racial terms. Thus, Mills (1997) explains, all Whites are beneficiaries of the racial contract, even when they are not signatories to it (p. 11).

Public organizations as White institutional space

Through a growing body of work, scholars have identified organizations as primary sites for racialization (Alexander & Stivers, 2010; Conyers & Wright Fields, 2021), and for the social and material reproduction of Whiteness in particular (Bohonos, 2019; Ray, 2019). This scholarship has advanced our understanding of how specific institutional settings become and remain “White spaces,” locations where White norms, ideologies, hierarchies, and practices are simultaneously normalized and justified through a colorblind commitment to abstract liberalism (Evans & Moore, 2015, p. 215). Whiteness may be embedded materially in physical spaces, but also mentally through stereotypical perceptions and imagery, and socially through the activities of individuals and institutions (See Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Tuttle, 2022). Scholars have documented the process by which Whiteness is put into place in public spaces, workplaces, and neighborhoods (Anderson, 2015; Woody, 2021), schools and colleges (Moore, 2008), museums (Domínguez et al., 2020), and other places of employment (Evans & Moore, 2015). As White spaces, institutions utilize a false dichotomy between Whiteness and nonwhiteness to establish organizational hierarchies that uphold White supremacy, establishing patterns of advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action, and emotion, and meaning and identity (Moore, 2008). Whiteness serves as an exchange value in employment practices, where security, status, and freedom flow disproportionately to Whites (Nayak, 2007). By contrast, when Black, Indigenous and other people of color enter White institutional spaces, they face expectations that they will actively manage their actions, emotions, and physical appearance (Evans & Moore, 2015) or face social and physical jeopardy (Anderson, 2015).

Scholars have begun to explore how bureaucratic public organizations operate as key sites for the production of racism and other forms of discrimination (Alexander & Stivers, 2010; Conyers & Wright Fields, 2021; Heckler, 2017, 2019; Ray et al., 2022). Building on the related literature on gender and work (Acker, 2006), they have argued that hegemonic power relations and assumptions are built into the organizational assumptions, processes, and practices of public bureaucratic organizations in ways that support systemic racial discrimination and disparities in power and resources (Byron & Roscigno, 2019; Ray, 2019). Significant research has theorized how Whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity are encoded in implicit standards of the ideal public service worker, and in the consequences faced by public administrators who do not fit the ideal type (Colvin & Meyer, 2022; Heckler, 2017; Portillo et al., 2020). Bracey (2015) asserts that state institutions operate as White institutional spaces, arguing that White dominance is embedded in state administrative practices by design, no longer requiring explicit bigotry.

As Ray et al. (2022) argue, everyday public administrative practices are shaped and constrained by racialized administrative burdens, the increased frictions added to services often experienced by minoritized publics when attempting to access public services. For example, immigrants face heavy compliance costs when interacting with dense requirements of the immigration service. Low-income students of color face high learning costs when navigating federal financial aid applications. Low-income welfare applicants face daunting psychological costs when faced with the stress, anxiety, and stigma attached to racially coded work requirements and monitoring (Moynihan et al., 2015; Ray et al., 2022). As policymakers deploy racial categories and stereotypes to develop differential levels and distributions of burden in particular policy areas (See Soss et al., 2008), street bureaucrats put racial administrative burdens into place. Studies have documented how administrators act upon their racial biases (Olsen et al., 2022) and use their discretion in ways that advantage White people and penalize people of color (Alexander & Stivers, 2010) with unequal access to public rights and services.

Colorblindness plays an essential role in the operations of the administrative state, papering over the contradictions between the powerful ideologies of liberalism and neutrality and the dominance of White norms and practices (Delgado & Stefancic, 1997; Heckler, 2017). Colorblindness reinforces Whiteness in public service interactions through colorblind strategies, including minimization, abstract objectivity, and technocracy, which reinforce disparities and discrimination in human resource practices within organizations (Bohonos, 2019). Colorblind ideology narrows the set of choices for street-level bureaucrats (Bonilla-Silva, 2014) and obscures the disparate and discriminatory treatment of people of color. Even as public officials reproduce disparate treatment, they invoke “facially neutral rules” using the “language of seemingly neutral administrative values” such as efficiency or innovation, or through racially coded references to fraud, illegality, or deservingness (Ray et al., 2022, p. 10). Thus, actions by public administrators consist of “racially consequential decisions made by racially interested actors who are constrained by race inflected social norms” (Bracey, 2015, p. 555). Whiteness becomes widely visible during moments of conflict or change. When confronted with disruptions to their expectations of the racial status quo in specific locations, White people are more likely to react with resistance, hostility, and violence (Embrick & Moore, 2020).

The impact of the racialization of state institutions is profound for public administrators with minoritized identities. People of color in public service often face a “representative burden,” an expectation that they will actively represent minoritized publics, taking on the labor of mediating interactions between the state and their clients (Humphrey, 2022) and using their discretion in ways that “resist or undermine rules to reduce burdens, policies” (Ray et al., 2022, p. 2). Some scholars of representative bureaucracy have found that people of color working in public service roles can help “level the playing field” and address disparate outcomes of public organizations (Humphrey, 2022, p. 752). Others argue that sharing an identity between public administrators and clients does not necessarily ensure that the administrators will represent the concerns and interests of those clients. For example, Watkins-Hayes (2011) found that organizational culture and intragroup politics within minoritized communities can greatly inform how race is mediated in public bureaucracies. (Wilkins and Williams, 2008) found that organizational socialization can hinder the link between passive and active representation for minoritized bureaucrats. Administrators who are personally supportive of racial equality may still “faithfully apply onerous administrative practices” that harm their clients (Ray et al., 2022, p. 2). Either way, representative bureaucrats are faced with complex expectations about the labor they will perform to balance the demands of public bureaucracies with the needs and interests of minoritized publics.

As White institutional spaces, public organizations require significant emotional labor from minoritized public administrators, expecting them to follow and enforce the “feeling rules” that shape which emotional expressions are acceptable, when and for whom (Rivera, 2015). Humphrey notes the complexity of the “in-between” role for minoritized public administrators which requires emotional labor on both ends—“during interactions with the public to defend organizational interests” and “during interactions with organizational members to defend the public’s interest” (p. 753). Yet, such emotional labor is often underpaid and undervalued in the public sector (See Guy & Newman, 2004). As Humphrey concludes, administrators who assume the representative burden and perform racialized emotional labor in organizations with low racial competence are more likely to be unrecognized and unrewarded. Furthermore, by placing the burden of representation onto workers of color, public bureaucracies are reinforced as seemingly neutral, White institutional space. As minoritized administrators assume a representative burden, White administrators are further removed from the need to confront and address the racial disparities and exclusions in their organizations and in the public sector at large.

Privatizing inclusion: Shifting representative burdens to the nonprofit sector

To understand the full context of racialized representative burdens in the U.S., we must also extend our analysis beyond the formal locations of public bureaucracy and recognize the impact of the relocation of the labor of representation from government to private, nonprofit organizations. More than sixty years of devolution and disinvestment has had a profound impact on the expectations placed on government, altering assumptions about where minoritized communities can expect representation, particularly active representation in which their interests are upheld. Just as the “friction” of the administrative state has been shifted to minoritized publics, much of the responsibility for inclusion has been privatized and outsourced to nonprofit organizations which now mediate the access to public goods and services, participation, and representation (Dunning, 2022). In this section, I argue that a close attention to the role of Whiteness in the rise of public-private partnerships illuminates the ways that racial governance is reinforced in the interactions between the sectors. To do so, I turn to the partnerships between public organizations and community-based nonprofits as a larger organizational field (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008) where White supremacy is reinforced and reproduced.

Collaborative relationships between government, business, nonprofit and neighborhood groups have a long history (Beauregard, 1998). However, an emphasis and investment in public-private partnerships as a preferred model of governance rose dramatically in the second half of the 20th century with the hollowing of the administrative state (Milward & Provan, 2000). As the central government retracted, a wide range of government agencies began to “share their authority” with nonprofit and private organizations in new “networks of mutual dependence” (p. 361). Government reliance on the nonprofit sector for providing services became a “new norm” leading to a sharp rise in the size and scale of formal contracts with nonprofit organizations (Smith & Lipsky, 1995) as well as more informal partnerships (Gazley, 2008). As investment in the government’s capacity to deliver services shrank, nonprofit employment grew dramatically across the country.

Much has been written about the ways that the hollowing of the state drew from racial and gendered stereotypes to justify the withdrawal of services and benefits from minoritized communities. As Wacquant (2002) argues, a neoliberal paternalism underscored the logic of devolution, which ultimately operated as an integrated system to discipline, contain, and dishonor poor communities of color, and Black communities in particular. Gilmore (2022) labels the result as an “organized abandonment” of communities that had been advocating for equal treatment and access under the law for generations, and a turn toward more punitive approaches. As core state functions were contracted out to the private and nonprofit sectors, devolved to states and localities, and restructured to competitive markets, social welfare programs became more restrictive (Soss et al., 2008) and the state’s responsibility to actively represent the need and interests of all members of the public was diminished. The state maintained an investment in the symbolic representation of racialized communities, shaping the depictions and portrayals of their constituencies (Saward, 2008) through tropes of anti-Blackness, gender, and poverty. For example, policies introduced by welfare reform in the 1990s combined White backlash and longstanding racist and sexist tropes of low-income women of color to justify increased monitoring, sanctions, and exclusions of welfare recipients (Neubeck & Cazenave, 2002) even as government investment in policing and incarceration rose sharply. This punitive turn in government was bolstered by the New Public Management (NPM) movement which encouraged public administrators to prioritize markets, competition and performance standards over equity and empathy (Norman-Major, 2011).

The nonprofit sector, by contrast, was portrayed through the seemingly colorblind vocabulary of community innovation and initiative. Localized, community-based approaches were lauded as ideal strategies for identifying needs, mobilizing resources, and customizing services to local conditions (Ferguson et al., 2002). Even as proponents of devolution emphasized the need to lessen the role of the federal government in local affairs, they listed the benefits of relying on local leaders to “take responsibility” for local problems. In a 1986 press briefing, for example, Reagan cited the American people’s “spirit of generosity” and faith in voluntary action to argue that public-private partnerships “have emerged as one of the most effective methods of providing services to our citizens.” Yet, Reagan’s language of local initiative was coded—implicitly and explicitly—in racialized and paternalistic tropes of urban decay and charitable generosity. Alongside childcare, neighborhood revitalization, education, and food distribution to the needy, he argued for the need for private sector leadership to tackle the “most insidious of all evils:” the flow of drugs over “our borders” and the drug pushers on the streets and in the schoolyards. The George H. W. Bush administration extended this to frame charitable, faith-based organizations as the solution to social issues (Smith & Lipsky, 1995) and the Clinton administration later entangled racial and gendered stereotypes of welfare recipients with praise for private corporate, faith-based and neighborhood action.

By downplaying the need for equity and empathy within government and displacing the responsibility of addressing racism to the nonprofit sector, the processes of devolution and disinvestment reinforced the illusion of colorblindness in public administration. Conyers and Wright Fields (2021) describe the “racial paralysis” in the organizational cultures of contemporary public bureaucracies. When race is a salient factor, public organizations may choose not to act. Technocracy, coupled with the language of liberalism and neutrality, allows public administrators to opt out or avoid situations that require making complex decisions about race. Evolving forms of idleness and concealment produce a “plausible ignorance” which masks the need for active, representative labor to address the needs of minoritized communities (p. 489). The rise of public-private partnerships, as Gazley (2008) points out, reinforced the argument that certain people are not reachable and that certain issues and policy arenas are beyond the scope of government, allowing the government to avoid public hostility and to leave racial disparities unaddressed. Shifting the burden of representation also assisted public bureaucracies to satisfy a publicly desired colorblindness (Heckler, 2017) and maintain the illusion of neutrality.

Community-based organizations within the nonprofit system

While shifting the burden of representation to the private and nonprofit sectors, government agencies have been particularly interested in the work of community-based nonprofit organizations (CBNOs). CBNOs have long been defined by their embeddedness in communities and sustained engagement with local, neighborhood or regional issues (Cnaan & Milofsky, 2008). Representation is a core aspect of the functioning of many CBNOs, where staff draw from shared knowledge to develop and sustain trusting relationships with the communities they serve. And the labor of many CBNOs is social and cultural, as staff provide language, spiritual and emotional support to communities not served by other institutions (Vu et al., 2017) and nurture what Yosso (2016) calls community cultural wealth—the histories, memories, knowledge and relationships that connect and sustain communities of color in the face of oppression (Yosso, 2016).

These connections and relationships are sought out by the state. As Alexander and Nank (2009) argue, the public sector has relied on CBNO’s “intimate knowledge” to provide a “point of access,” enhance the legitimacy of government, and foster relationships of trust and accountability with seemingly unreachable communities (pp. 365, 385). Numerous studies have documented how the public sector has relied on CBNOs to engage immigrant and refugees (Vu et al., 2017); overcome antagonism and active distrust during the implementation of an urban child welfare initiative (Alexander & Nank, 2009); facilitate collaborative decision-making with residents of rural areas (Abrams et al., 2016); and secure census and demographic information from a wide range of “hard to reach” communities (Feit et al., 2022). With the COVID-19 pandemic and struggle for racial justice, the pressures on CBNOs to mediate between the failures of government and the unmet needs of communities has only escalated (Douglas & Iyer, 2020). Today, it is the norm for government officials and private funders to expect and require CBNOs to serve as representatives of minoritized communities and low-income neighborhoods, and for residents to depend on these organizations to advocate and bring in essential resources (Levine, 2016).

Even as the demand for their work has risen, CNBOs continue to operate with highly restricted funding streams, small budgets, and often limited organizational capacity. Early on, many scholars framed this lack of capacity as a deficit within individual organizations. Jennings’ (2001) study concluded that Black and Latino communities receive lower quality services because the CBNOs in their neighborhoods tend to rely on public funds but have a harder time attracting public monies. Others shared their skepticism about the fiscal, managerial, and service delivery skills of community groups (Rubin, 1993), warning that a lack of management expertise, staffing, equipment, and technical resources would limit the ability of CBNOs to sustain services (Ferguson et al., 2002) or comply with public contracting requirements (Smith & Lipsky, 1995). Public administration and nonprofit studies scholars spent years debating issues of CBNO accountability and responsiveness (Fredericksen & London, 2000), with studies citing reports of uncontrolled growth, fraud, and mismanagement (Bonds, 2006) and lack of ability to meet the contracting requirements of government funding. Others addressed the political capacity of CNBOs, expressing concern with their gatekeeping role and subsequent outsized local political influence (Levine, 2016; Marwell, 2004).

More recently, scholars have shifted their attention to the systemic inequities that have led to the disinvestments (de Graauw & Bloemraad, 2017) that diverted resources to White, elite interests. Within the nonprofit sector, the uneven distribution of funding between predominantly White organizations serving predominantly White communities and organizations led by and for people of color has been well documented (Dorsey et al., 2020). Within organized philanthropy, the interests of White elites have shaped access to resources in profound ways. Philanthropic organizations reproduce racial segregation and discrimination on their boards and staffs and racial biases are embedded in philanthropic funding decisions (Feit, 2019; Shea, 2016). As Eikenberry (2009) points out, philanthropic organizations often raise and spend their money in elite geographies and do little to redistribute resources to economically disadvantaged communities. Elite philanthropy has helped to normalize generations of unearned White wealth (Allen, 1970; Morey, 2021; Rodriguez, 2017; Villanueva, 2018), divert social movements (Francis, 2019), center the interests and emotions of White donors, and constrain the work of racial equity and racial justice organizations (Cyril et al., 2021). The economic segregation in the sector is reflective of long-standing regional and residential segregation, where the overrepresentation of White, suburban interests in high-capacity nonprofits leads to the defense of White, suburban interests (Danley and Blessett, 2022.

This dynamic also shapes relationships between the public and nonprofit sectors. Rather than serving as a panacea for addressing social problems, government-nonprofit collaborations too often reinforce power asymmetries, serve the interests of influential elites, and dilute attention away from structural change (Leach & Crichlow, 2020; See also Danley, 2018; Mananzala & Spade, 2008). Dunning (2022) has argued that government grantmaking serves as an expression of power, requiring neighborhood groups to compete for scarce resources and leaving room for favoritism and prejudice (pp. 9–10). In their study of the census count, Feit et al. (2022) document the federal government’s heavy reliance on CBNOs for the decennial census, while offering uneven and highly limited financial support for the work required. Like minoritized workers in public bureaucracies, the staff of CBNOs are often tasked with the complex labor of active representation without receiving adequate compensation, support, or recognition.

With a critical framework, it is apparent that longstanding anxieties about CBNO capacity cannot be understood outside of a larger White racial project of abandonment and disengagement from minoritized communities. The standards for nonprofit organizational effectiveness, upheld by public and private funders alike, have been thoroughly criticized for an overemphasis on managerialism and operational autonomy (Eikenberry, 2009), competition (Meyer et al., 2013), technical solutions (Hvenmark, 2016), and neoliberal standards for professional education and training (Mirabella & Nguyen, 2019). The result has been a narrowing of effective nonprofit activity to a list of “best practices” that often exclude CBNOs or frame them as failed corporate entities (Cnaan & Milofsky, 2008). The standards of nonprofit effectiveness have also encouraged CBNOs to “assimilate to standards rooted in White professionalism” that reward individualism, technocracy, and effectiveness, and devalue the trust, relationship, and community building that lies at the heart of the work they do (Nishimura et al., 2020, p. 32; See also Cheng & Sandfort, 2023). Furthermore, the funding awarded to community organizations often comes with heavy restrictions, limiting CBNO’s ability to invest in the staff and infrastructure required to respond to community needs (Nishimura et al., 2020). These standards and practices reinforce the racialization of the nonprofit sector, where Whiteness is a credential (Ray, 2019) and organizations with less proximity to Whiteness and masculinity are excluded or hampered from securing funding and other resources.

An expanded theory of representative bureaucracy will recognize the ways that the racialized burden of representation has been shifted to CBNOs, which often take on these responsibilities despite the disinvestment in their work. The labor of bridging and mediating that is required of CBNOs requires extensive skill, time, and effort from staff with minoritized identities. Gazley and Brudney (2007) noted that public-private partnerships require extra labor as staff track policy changes and develop and sustain working relationships with public officials. Jennings (2001) found that this dynamic can alter the ways that staff spend their time, dedicating more attention to negotiating state regulatory demands and requirements and less attention to neighborhood development and civic participation. Other studies have noted that the act of bridging and mediating between governments and communities requires remarkable breadth and depth of social and emotional labor as minoritized staff are expected to be able draw from their lived experiences, relationships, and networks to provide services that translate and adapt facially neutral policies for the community they represent (Feit et al., 2022). Yet, the representative labor performed by CBNO staff continues to be devalued within the larger nonprofit sector. In her study of immigrant service organizations, Abad (2019) finds that employees of Latin American descent were initially valued as ideal employees who strengthen and lend legitimacy to their organizations by using their specialized social, cultural, and linguistic knowledge to serve Latin American immigrants. While these skills allowed access to entry-level work in immigrant services, representative staff were constrained from advancing professionally in their organizations and in the sector (Abad, 2019). Meanwhile, White service providers are given “great latitude” to rise in organizational hierarchies and become “politically engaged in ways not available to their Latino/a counterparts” (Abad, 2019, para 3).

Conclusion

I have argued that the study of representative bureaucracies is enhanced by a critical engagement with theories of the racial state and White institutional space. As a racial state, the U.S. has operated through contradictions between wide-spread, systemic exclusions and the ideals and promises of full and equal representation. Racialized minoritized staff in public and nonprofit organizations have been charged, both explicitly and implicitly, with representing minoritized publics. Yet the labor required to address deeply rooted inequities is regularly unrecognized and under-compensated. While studies of representative bureaucracy have brought much needed attention to exclusions within the public workforce, few have reflected on the assumptions and complexities that workers of color face as they represent their constituents (Humphrey, 2022, p. 752), ultimately leaving broader systems and policies that reproduce White dominance and White supremacy in place.

As Cheng and Sandfort (2023) argue, public administrators can take deliberative steps to address many of the concerns raised above. Through their study of an existing collaboration, they identify tactics that administrators can use to transform organizational routines and build more trusting relationships with nonprofits serving minoritized communities, including raising their awareness; changing their personal practices; building relationships; sharing power; adopting more participatory processes, and using their authority to refocus public funds. The authors note, however, that government-nonprofit collaboration takes place within the web of existing hierarchies. Genuine transformation will also require deeper changes in the organizational and structural forces that overly burden racially minorized staff and constrain the decisions and actions of administrators.

The need, then, is for research and practice that recognizes the role of racialization, including Whiteness, in distributing the burden of representation in organizations and institutions and purposively centers the labor required for full and active representation. For researchers, this shift will encourage a redefinition of the questions traditionally asked in the scholarship of representative bureaucracy, not just asking can the government represent all the people, but also asking: Why doesn’t the government fully represent all the people? Why is the active representation required of racially minoritized workers both necessary and undervalued? What are the mechanisms of segregating and displacing the responsibility for representation? What is the impact of expecting racially minoritized public administrators to address racially contentious issues for their organizations, while simultaneously alleviating the responsibility of White employees to do the same? How do White workers represent White constituents or reward proximity to Whiteness? What are the costs for people of color when they advocate for the interests of minoritized communities within the public and nonprofit sectors?

Researchers also need to engage with the staff of CBNOs as fundamental actors within a larger, racialized organizational field (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008) that shapes the possibilities for full representation. By shifting the burden of representation out of the public sector and onto the shoulders of the staff of CBNOs, public bureaucracies more readily operate as White, masculine institutional space. CBNOs, especially those led by and for minoritized people, face traditions and practices that reinforce Whiteness and the myth of White supremacy in both sectors. Even as they are expected to actively represent minoritized communities in ways that mitigate the failures and harms of both the state and the market, many CBNOs do so with limited resources, restricted funding, expectations that they will conform to White institutional norms, and pressures to disinvest in the social, cultural, linguistic, and political labor that their constituencies need and desire. Rather than relying on a narrow deficit approach of failed capacity, an attention to the racialization of CBNOs and the larger nonprofit system will lead to a fuller understanding of their role in the intricate, contested terrain of rights, voice, and full representation in the U.S.

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Maureen Emerson Feit

Maureen Emerson Feit, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Nonprofit Leadership at Seattle University.