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Inclusive Management


Inclusive management is a pattern of practices by public managers that facilitate the inclusion of public employees, experts, the public, and politicians in collaboratively addressing public problems or concerns of public interest.

The management component of the compound idea of inclusive management signifies that inclusion is a managed, ongoing project rather than an attainable state. The inclusion component means something different from the commonplace use of inclusion and exclusion to reference the socioeconomic diversity of the participants. The understanding of inclusion in this analysis emphasizes diversity in terms of the necessity of a diversity of perspectives to promote civic discovery in a deliberative setting. Inclusion involves active boundary spanning across differences in perspectives, institutions, issues, and time, which may or may not be founded upon work to integrate socioeconomically diverse participants.

The inclusion part of the idea is perhaps best encapsulated by the "50/50 rule", a term used by public managers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to invoke a variety of meanings. Sometimes "50/50" means that process and outcome are equally important, in other words that the effects of a process on community building are as important as the task completion. Sometimes it means that ideally 50% of the people involved in a process have participated in prior, related processes and 50% are newcomers, such that each policy-making effort acknowledges past conversations or decisions yet remains open to new ideas that may alter the previous consensus. From the perspective of the 50/50 rule, things like process and outcome or task and community are not in a trade-off relationship, and indeed are not even separable. In this context, concluding that participation was done "for the sake of participation" rather than to effect the outcome would be a damning critique. Keeping process and outcome, newcomers and old-timers, and past and present in play are ways of creating connections across individuals, groups, interests, and issues. Tasks are accomplished, yet opportunities continue to be open for revising as well as for moving on to the other issues and tasks that emerge or are next in line. This sense of inclusion is part of an ongoing stream of issues and people involved in one process or concern rolling forward into another echoes theorizations of democracy and civic engagement as an ongoing inquiry and never-finished project.


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