Contemporary Public Administration Research Articles

Comparative Program-Performance Evaluation and Government Accountability in New Mexico—Some Applied Lessons for Intergovernmental Relations

In Strategies for Using State Information: Measuring and Improving Program Performance (2003), Shelley Metzenbaum poses a series of “key questions” about the federal-state performance reporting relationship. Metzenbaum asks whether there should be a uniform accountability system across the American states and whether it should be required of the states by the federal government. Ancillary questions include what uses should be made of state performance information and whether federal agencies should publicy report such information.These questions are important in light of the burgeoning performancemanagement movement in contemporary public administration. The extension of performance measurement and reporting systems to state governments is largely due to the impact on states of the federal Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA), and generally to the ascendancy of new public management perspectives in governmental practice.The experience of the State of New Mexico with regard to intergovernmental performance reporting in recent years, under both Republican and Democratic gubernatorial administrations, suggests that closer integration of federal and state performance reporting is necessary, that more comprehensive performancebased systems (that include comparative performance measurement and strategic planning frameworks) are essential, and that new evaluative models are needed to address the sometimes cooperative and sometimes adversarial nature of intergovernmental relations. Lessons from the MPA classroom arising from these interrelated concerns and from the authors’ applied research with state government are addressed at the conclusion of this study.

Looking for Evidence of Public Employee Opposition to Privatization

Contemporary public administration encompasses a wide variety of service delivery options. During the past two decades, privatization has become an increasingly utilized and legitimized approach. The perception that privatization poses a threat to public employment is seemingly widespread. Indeed, public sector unions often challenge the adoption of privatization programs. There is little evidence that individual rank-and-file public employees oppose privatization, however. In this study, the authors develop a multivariate model of support for privatization. Using a large-size public opinion data set from Georgia, the authors test the model and find that an individual’s employment in the public sector is a predictor of opposition to privatization. The authors then discuss the practical implications of public employee opposition to privatization. The authors conclude with a discussion of ways for reducing such opposition.

Social Contract Theory

Social contract theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries provide diverse accounts of human nature and the social processes that shape conflict, cooperation, and compliance. These ideas are applied to the challenges of contemporary public administration, specifically; the effort that often underlies both the search for public administration's identity and professionalization more generally: the effort to build consensus on shared values and ideals and ensure ethical practice with a minimum of external policing. A consideration of social contract theory yields a heavy dose of realism when it comes to this objective but invites neither despondency nor complacency.

Valeurs et motivations dans le service public

<titre>Values and Motivation in Public Administration&#160;: Public Service Motivation in an International Comparative Perspective </titre> Public service motivation (PSM) is an important variable within contemporary public administration, as it has been linked to various human resources processes in a public environment (eg. recruitment, performance, preference for incentives). It refers to motivational factors that are specific for government. It has been originally conceived as an American concept and therefore there are some difficulties in applying it to other (national) contexts. This article compares the original model of PSM by Perry to two other cases&#160;: France and the Netherlands. Next to the original dimensions of PSM (attraction to politics and policy-making, public interest, compassion and self-sacrifice), the authors distinguish five other dimensions (religion, equality, tradition in service delivery, technical competences and bureaucracy). These dimensions are presented in an extensive and comparative way. Although PSM proves to be a universal concept, both the French and the Dutch case display different elements. These observations provide support for a new institutionalist approach to public service motivation and to motivation in general. As such, they refute the narrow self-interested motivational bases of rational and public choice theories applied within new public management.

The dictionary of public policy and administration

The Dictionary of Public Policy and Administration offers definitions of all the key terms, concepts, processes and practices of contemporary public policy and administration. Included are brief biographies of major scholars and influential practitioners, summaries of major rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, overviews of significant laws, descriptions of important government agencies, and explanations of historical trends and governing doctrines. The Dictionary is designed to be the single most useful tool that a student or practitioner of public administration could have-the book to keep at their side while they are reading other textbooks in the field.

The public administration theory primer

In the past thirty years, public administration has developed more systematic patterns of inquiry about the substance of public organization behavior, public management, and public policy implementation. This book explores how the science and art of policy administration is definable, describable, replicable, and cumulative. Frederickson and Smith describe several theories and analytical approaches that contribute to what we know about policy administration. This book asks: Which theories or approaches are the most promising, the most influential? Which are the most important now and likely to be the most important in the future? The purpose of this effort is to set out a detailed description of key theories in contemporary public administration and thus improve the reliability of our knowledge and our understanding of public administration.

The legacy of david hume for american public administration: empiricism, scepticism, and constitutionalism

This paper examines the ideas of David Hume and their importance to American public administration writing and practice. Hume’s ideas on empiricism, scepticism, and constitutionalism have indirectly, via their impact on modern philosophy, encouraged both support for and criticism of empiricist approaches in public administration. Also, Hume’s ideas on constitutionalism, because of their influence on the Founders' writings and design, provide an important legacy for the practice of public administration. The paper argues that Hume’s notion of mitigated scepticism, as well as his constitutional ideas, have continuing relevance for the study and practice of contemporary public administration. This paper examines the ideas of David Hume and their importance to American public administration writing and practice. Hume’s ideas on empiricism, scepticism, and constitutionalism have indirectly, via their impact on modern philosophy, encouraged both support for and criticism of empiricist approaches in public administration. Also, Hume’s ideas on constitutionalism, because of their influence on the Founders' writings and design, provide an important legacy for the practice of public administration. The paper argues that Hume’s notion of mitigated scepticism, as well as his constitutional ideas, have continuing relevance for the study and practice of contemporary public administration. This paper examines the ideas of David Hume and their importance to American public administration writing and practice. Hume’s ideas on empiricism, scepticism, and constitutionalism have indirectly, via their impact on modern philosophy, encouraged both support for and criticism of empiricist approaches in public administration. Also, Hume’s ideas on constitutionalism, because of their influence on the Founders' writings and design, provide an important legacy for the practice of public administration. The paper argues that Hume’s notion of mitigated scepticism, as well as his constitutional ideas, have continuing relevance for the study and practice of contemporary public administration. This paper examines the ideas of David Hume and their importance to American public administration writing and practice. Hume’s ideas on empiricism, scepticism, and constitutionalism have indirectly, via their impact on modern philosophy, encouraged both support for and criticism of empiricist approaches in public administration. Also, Hume’s ideas on constitutionalism, because of their influence on the Founders' writings and design, provide an important legacy for the practice of public administration. The paper argues that Hume’s notion of mitigated scepticism, as well as his constitutional ideas, have continuing relevance for the study and practice of contemporary public administration.

Knowing and Skilling in Contemporary Public Administration

Knowledge is the latest buzzword in public administration, yet contemporary debates demonstrate a poor understanding of how knowledge is constructed and valued and of how public administration knowledge frames are changing in response to major structural shifts in political imperatives. In particular the retreat from economic rationalism and the embracing of social and human capital ideas with the search for ‘third ways’ and ‘triple bottom lines’ are bringing more constructivist knowledge frames back into play. In this way centralised ‘rational/expert’ knowledge is being challenged by knowledge arising from cooperative, local inquiry and multiple knowledge frames are now being brought to bear in public administration. Yet public administration, as a profession, seems unsure of whether this is an elegant finesse implying little real change or an exposure of the naked pretension of previously dominant unitary frameworks. This article uses a historical comparison to show how changes in the ontology and epistemology of public administration are demanding new skills of contemporary public administrators.

Politics and Administration in U.S. Local Governments

Public administration scholars often have focused on the relationship between elected and appointed officials. This study assesses the extent to which public administrators‘ relationships with elected officials conform to the three models that scholars have used to characterize that relationship: the orthodox politics-administration dichotomy, the modified dichotomy, and a partnership model. In addition, the study seeks to determine whether demographic, structural, and experiential variables relate to respondents’ preference for each of the three models. The data come from a mail survey of a random sample of U.S. local government managers. Using factor analysis, the study finds that managers identify with all three models, with the modified dichotomy model explaining the most variance among the managers and the orthodox dichotomy model the least. Salary, governing board size, private-sector experience, and gender relate positively and at significant levels to identification with the orthodox dichotomy model; public administration education and population relate negatively to this model. Several experiential variables relate positively to the partnership model. Public administration education relates negatively to identification with the partnership model. The identification of local government managers with both the orthodox and the modified dichotomy models indicates a continuing emphasis on insulating administration from politics. That most managers posit a strong role for themselves in policy making by identifying with either the modified dichotomy or the partnership model indicates that these public administrators see themselves very differently from the image of the passive handwringer sometimes depicted by those who criticize or caricature bureaucracy. The dominant model espoused by contemporary public administration scholars, that of the partnership model, does have a strong empirical referent among practicing public administrators, indicating support for the potential strengths of blending politics and administration in policy development and administration.

From Responsiveness to Collaboration: Governance, Citizens, and the Next Generation of Public Administration

The evolution of the New Public Management movement has increased pressure on state bureaucracies to become more responsive to citizens as clients. Without a doubt, this is an important advance in contemporary public administration, which finds itself struggling in an ultradynamic marketplace. However, together with such a welcome change in theory building and in practical culture reconstruction, modern societies still confront a growth in citizens’ passivism; they tend to favor the easy chair of the customer over the sweat and turmoil of participatory involvement. This article has two primary goals: First to establish a theoretically and empirically grounded criticism of the current state of new managerialism, which obscures the significance of citizen action and participation through overstressing the (important) idea of responsiveness. Second, the article proposes some guidelines for the future development of the discipline. This progress is toward enhanced collaboration and partnership among governance and public administration agencies, citizens, and other social players such as the media, academia, and the private and third sectors. The article concludes that, despite the fact that citizens are formal “owners” of the state, ownership will remain a symbolic banner for the governance and public administration–citizen relationship in a representative democracy. The alternative interaction of movement between responsiveness and collaboration is more realistic for the years ahead.

Alterity and the Environment: Making the Case for Anti-Administration

This paper seeks to create a linguistic space in which a discussion of the environment might occur through an appeal to conceptions of alterity. It seeks to challenge our thinking on alterity by exploring the limits of language in our relations with the other, best epitomized through our relationship with the natural world, and in particular the non-speaking animal kingdom. To explore our moral relationship with the other we turn to Heidegger’s conceptualization of dasein, thus illuminating the limits of language. Contrasts are then drawn between the technocratic administration epitomized by Pinchot’s early administrative practices and those espoused by Aldo Leopold, deep ecologists, and ecofeminists. Administering anti-administratively is offered as afruitful middle ground between the two discourses, with alterity as the centerpiece of administrative practice. Exploring alterity through an environmental lens exposes the territoriality of contemporary public administration (PA) discourse, and seeks to challenge the exclusion of environmental concerns from both public administration theory and practice.

Business Improvement Districts and the Management of Innovation

Innovation is a major theme in contemporary American public administration. Innovative structures are assumed to change both service delivery and managerial behavior. This assumption is currently being tested in many policy areas but perhaps nowhere better than in the management of a recent innovation in public administration: the business improvement district (BID). To discover the relationship between the innovative structure of BIDs and the adoption of an entrepreneurial approach to management, a national survey of BID managers was undertaken. As expected, the survey found that almost half of the BID executives emphasized entrepreneurial activities. But, unexpectedly, the other half were less interested in finding new ways of doing things and more focused on either local political problems or day-to-day supervisory tasks. The conclusion is that innovative structures provide managers with the opportunity to adopt an entrepreneurial approach to management but also with the possibility of not following such an approach.

A Paradigmatic View of Contemporary Public Administration Research

This article offers an empirical articulation of paradigmatic views that guide research in contemporary public administration. Based on the findings, the authors argue that the debate on whether there is an intellectual core in public administration is becoming less relevant. What is more important from this point on is public administration scholars’ self-consciousness and better articulation of these existing paradigms. A self-aware normal science practice in public administration offers us a clearer research focus, a sharper sensitivity for recognizing anomalies, and thus a better chance for advancing public administration theories.

Circa 1999: The Possibilities for Community and Democracy

There is a large movement in contemporary public administration and political science calling for a return to civic democracy and for the democratizing of public administration. What is assumed in these calls to civic democracy is that civic community and active, discursive citizenship are possible in the current political economy. It is argued here that the possibilities for citizenship and community are significantly constrained in the current corporatized, consumption-based U. S. political economy. Late 2th century individualistic consumerism has wrought a political economy that is devoid of care and love. Community and citizenship in a corporatized, consumption-based political economy need care and love to correct the imbalance between the “I” and the “We” that is at the heart of contemporary problems of governance and citizenship.

Public relations in public administration: a disappearing act in public administration education

How is public relations viewed when it is considered a sub-field of another discipline? In the profession of public administration, from its first textbook in 1924 through the end of the 1950's, public administration training—as mirrored in the most widely cited texts of the era—included teaching about the uses, importance and benefits of public relations to the public administrator-in-training. However, as measured by the most widely cited textbooks of the 1980's and 1990's, the subject of communications in general, and public relations in particular, largely disappeared from the agenda of public administration education. This article documents the rise and fall of public relations in public administration education, notes some early signs of renewed attention and suggests re-establishing public relations as a valuable part of contemporary public administration education.

The Ideology of Technocratic Empiricism and the Discourse Movement in Contemporary Public Administration

The Ideology of Technocratic Empiricism and the Discourse Movement in Contemporary Public Administration

The economic perspective on public administration

Public administration as a body of thought and field of study is changing from a paradigm dominated by political science to an eclectic array of theoretical contributions from all of the social sciences, particularly economics. Basic education and training in economics is essential to an effective contemporary public administration. Without a fundamental understanding of economics the “do-it-yourself-economics” which is practiced in policy-making contributes to basic errors in policy. As the size and significance of the public sector has grown, increased attention has been paid to the discipline of public administration. What began as a structured way of describing the operation and structure of public management and public organizations has evolved into a discipline that has a much broader scope—the analysis of policy making in the public and not-for-profit sectors. In addition, employment in the public administration profession is more likely to be viewed as a vocation rather than as an avocation, in contrast to the past. Once the repository of generalists in the areas of public management and organizational behavior, public administration has become a hodgepodge of individuals with varied backgrounds and training. This has resulted in a discipline that has notable strengths and weaknesses. A major weakness, and source of criticism from outsiders, is the discipline's lack of a paradigm—there is no easily identifiable intellectual structure. Its strength lies in the diverse theoretical, conceptual, and methodological contributions borrowed from other disciplines. The most prominent contributor has been political science, where the discipline of public administration had its origins. Political science's influence on public administration still is evident: numerous public administration programs are located in political science departments; a large number of faculty in public administration programs are political scientists by training; and public administration professional societies and publications are dominated by political scientists. Economics has made forays into public administration and established garrisons in some of the larger and more prominent programs. But, economics has failed to have a distinct impact on everyday public policy making. This is evident in many policy decisions that lack much semblance of basic economic understanding on the part of decision makers. Recent examples include the handling of the federal deficit, solutions to airway and airport congestion, the war on poverty, housing programs, dealings with international trading partners, proposed solutions to the third world debt crisis, resolution of the acid rain problem, and so forth. Although other explanations can be offered for the absence of good economic reasoning in many policy decisions, a lot of the blame lies with public administration's failure to adequately integrate economics. Economics does not wield substantial influence in either the discipline's curricular matter or administrative structure. This failure partially can be attributed to a lack of understanding of what economics has to offer the discipline and partially can be attributed to the insolent demeanor of many economists. This paper proposes to discuss what role economics can and should play in public administration. First, the relationship between public administration and economics is discussed. Second, deficiencies within the economics discipline that keep it from becoming an integral component of everyday policy making are discussed. Finally, ways to better blend economics into public policy making are proposed.

The Paradox of Transforming Public Administration

Directing organizational change requires the ability to interpret—and reinterpret—the meanings customarily ascribed to crucial institutional values, norms, and events. If public managers are prepared to live with contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity, they can gain a new perspective on the complex social process of organizational change. An appreciation of the inherent tensions among crucial constructs in public administration—the binary opposition of bureaucracy and democracy, leadership and representation, policy making and implementation, centralization and decentralization, and the like—would allow administrators to determine if it is possible to reconcile tensions in particular instances. One element of contradiction in contemporary public administration is found in the debate concerning “modern” and “postmodern” perspectives of administrative practice, representing conflicting interpretations of substantive and normative aspects of institutional change. This study probes this issue at the intersection of the social and administrative sciences with administrative practice and also examines what the authors see as the paradoxical interplay of postmodernist theory, critical theory, and theories of political and economic development. An ancillary purpose is to assess the prospective value of critical-modern and postmodernist models for contemporary public administration.

The challenges of change: emerging issues in contemporary public administration

The challenges of change: emerging issues in contemporary public administration

An Alternative Source for Contemporary Public Administration

Jewish cultural sources include scriptural narrative, Talmudic discourse, legal and ethical code, case law, and municipal regulation, developed over some 4 millennia of recorded history under a broad variety of diverse social and political circumstances. Nevertheless, they are rarely invoked as sources for the study of contemporary public administration. A review of normative Jewish thought may uncover long-dormant insights and inferences at variance with those rooted elsewhere. It further may set the stage for analysis of other nationalcultural precedents and add to the diversity that informs the field. This article analyzes Jewish tradition relative to its consideration ofpublic service and human resource issues regarding tenure andjob security, collective bargaining, and accountabilityfor quality assurance.