Public Administration Literature Research Articles

Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Race and Ethnicity in Public Organizations

Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Race and Ethnicity in Public Organizations

The Quest for Indigenous Administration: Asian Communist, Islamic Revivalist, and Other Models

This paper briefly explores instances of administrative indigenization—defined as native patterns neither imposed nor copied from Euro-centric systems—and implications for the study of Comparative Public Administration. China and Iran—as presented in the Comparative Public Administration literature, broadly defined—are suggested as iconoclastic administrative models which are both viable and interesting and in contrast with Western (Northern) models of study and application. Other emerging models—many of them based on grass-roots movements (not to be confused with terrorist movements)—also provide alternatives to the prescriptions of the New Public Management as well as to the conventional secular, “non-political” hierarchies. Comparative Public Administration needs to accommodate such alternatives on a coequal basis.

The Effects of Managerial Succession on Organizational Performance

The Effects of Managerial Succession on Organizational Performance

The Politics of Public Management: The HRDC Audit of Grants and Contributions

The Politics of Public Management: The HRDC Audit of Grants and Contributions, David A. Good, The Institute of Public Administration of Canada Series in Public Management and Governance; Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 240The literature in public administration in some ways suffers from not having more practitioners reflecting, writing and analyzing their experiences. Thus David Good's book analyzing the HRDC's so-called “billion dollar boondoggle” is a welcome contribution. His background as both a senior manager/executive within the Federal government and his academic credentials—a doctorate in policy and administration sets him apart—as a practitioner-academic. Good possesses the senior public manager's mind for detail and this book provides a clear account of the ebbing and flowing of events, beginning with the January 2000 release of HRDC's internal audit that implied a loss of a billion dollars, to the Auditor General's report of October that same year which, while critical of monitoring and reporting practices, concluded that only $85,000 was unaccounted for. The media and the opposition, at this point quickly lost interest.

Public reporting: A neglected aspect of nonprofit accountability

AbstractNonprofit organizations have a compulsory external accountability (largely involving financial reporting) to government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and state regulators. They also have a pragmatic “must‐do” accountability to their funders, clients, and other obvious stakeholders. But are nonprofits also accountable to the public at large? If so, how can such accountability be implemented, given the diffuseness and breadth of the public as an audience? This article suggests that nonprofits should consider the citizenry as a stakeholder, if only due to the substantial taxpayer subsidy of the sector. The theory of public reporting that emerged in public administration literature beginning in the 1920s and 1930s can be helpful. Using principles, templates, and examples from public administration, nonprofit organizations can pursue more vigorous public reporting as one method to increase citizen confidence in their activities and in the sector as a whole.

Different Perspectives on the Practice of Leadership

Public administrators need not only practical and intellectual permission to exercise leadership, but also a practical and intellectual understanding of what leadership actually is. Much has emerged in the public administration literature and practice about the need for and legitimacy of public managers exerting leadership in their work, complementing the traditional functions of organizational management and policy implementation. Calling on the experiences and ideas of practitioners, this article offers an empirical understanding—both descriptive and prescriptive—of what leadership actually looks like as it is practiced by public managers. It uncovers five leadership perspectives (ranging from leadership as equivalent to scientific management, to leadership being a whole‐soul or spiritual endeavor) held by public managers and discusses their implications for public administration. It legitimizes the notion that leadership is a crucial part of public administration and offers public managers the chance to improve or enhance those legitimate leadership activities.

Institutional Isomorphism and Public Sector Organizations

Although public sector organizations have long been seen as driving the institutionalization of business firms and nonprofit organizations, government agencies themselves have only occasionally been studied as subjects of institutional pressures. This research examines whether public sector organizations, when compared to organizations in the business and nonprofit sectors, are more or less as susceptible to mimetic, normative, and coercive pressures. Using data from the National Organizations Study (Kalleberg, et al., 1996), we discover that governmental organizations are in fact more vulnerable to all three types of institutional forces than other organizations, while the effect of institutional variables on for-profits and nonprofits is more sporadic. The susceptibility of public sector organizations to institutional pressures raises important questions for the field of public administration and has consequences for nonprofits and business firms, which are funded and regulated by government. Institutional Isomorphism and Public Sector Organizations Though it has not penetrated deeply into the public administration literature to date, the new institutionalism in organizational analysis has made significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamics of organizations. It has moved research away from overly rationalistic explanations of organizational behavior toward explanations that recognize that organizations are embedded in larger cultural and political contexts. It has shifted the focus of research from explaining why organizations are so heterogeneous to why organizations are so similar. Over the past decade, as its reach has extended across different topics, institutional theory has focused often on nonprofit organizations, such as art museums (DiMaggio 1991), colleges and universities (Kraatz 1998; Brint and Karabel 1991), humanitarian groups (Christiansen and Molin 1995), associations (Halliday 1993), and drug abuse units (D'Aunno, Sutton, and Price 1991). A number of studies has demonstrated the relevance of the institutional approach to for-profit organizations, including large corporations (Haunschild and Miner 1997; Davis and Greve 1997; Galaskiewicz and Wasserman 1989; Holm 1995), railroads (Dobbin 1995), law firms (Tolbert 1988), and high-tech companies (Suchman 1995; Powell 1998). Some research has also looked at public sector organizations (Tolbert and Zucker 1983; Meyer, Scott, and Strang 1987; Meyer et al. 1988.).

The State of Bureaucracy: Public Opinion about the Performance of Government Agencies in Israel

In recent years we have witnessed a growing interest in the development of new avenues for improving public sector performance. The need to create reliable performance indicators for the administrative state that are based on numerous expectations of public functions and on multiple-stakeholders’ assessments has become an essential construct of the New Public Management (NPM) doctrine. A substantial bank of knowledge has already been accumulated in this area (e.g. Berman, ; Bouckaert & Peters, ; Halachmi, ; Wright-Muldrow, ). These dynamics have intensified and expanded, and have been applied across North America, Europe, and in other parts of the globe. They have created a much more demanding environment for evolving bureaucracies, stressing the clear need for improved measurement tools, scales, and methodologies as well as a comprehensive analysis of governmental outputs and outcomes. With the development of economic, financial, legal, and behavioral performance indicators, several formats for objective evaluations, especially from the point of view of citizens as clients or customers, have taken root in public administration literature and practice. The main goal of this paper is to offer an attitudinal-behavioral platform for the measurement of public sector performance, a format that is based on a recent two-year survey of Israeli citizens. The paper also focuses on several socioeconomic and demographic variations that may impact citizens’ evaluations of public sector activities. The meaning and implications of these variations in the Israeli context are also discussed. The paper begins with the basic assumption that there is no ‘one voice’ of public opinion and that demographic and socioeconomic differences do make a difference in evaluating the services of the public sector. It goes on to identify possible variations in citizens’ attitudes towards services in one modern state in the hope of generalizing this knowledge to other advanced bureaucracies of the modern world.

Faces and Phases of Transparency Reform in Local Government

The authors draw on public and official perceptions to discuss the discontinuities between various interpretations of transparency in local government jurisdictions. The article seeks to establish a theoretical understanding of transparency in public administration literature. Transparency in the formative years of a nation is not necessarily the same idea as transparency in a globalizing information age. Likewise, the meaning of transparency in least developed countries is changing with their acquisition of sophisticated information technologies and pressures to reduce corruption. Scholarship on transparency needs to recognize the different changes in meaning ascribed to this very important administrative principle. Evidently, universal lessons might be brought to bear to help develop a coherent theoretical basis on stages and interpretations of transparency reforms in local governments.

Can Information and Communication Technology Help Reduce Corruption? How So and Why Not: Two Case Studies from South Asia

AbstractThe deployment of electronic governance over the past few years has enabled citizens to access government information and services with more ease and less cost. Unfortunately, the majority of governments embracing these technologies and making the citizen-government interaction easier to navigate are found primarily in the industrialized West. One exception is India, which is the focus of this paper. Beyond viewing electronic governance as a means of facilitating state-citizen interactions, I explore the linkages between electronic governance and corruption deterrence, and by doing so, fill in a crucial void in the current literature. After reviewing successful ICT-led government reform efforts in the West from public administration literature, a simple model is proposed to determine how these technologies may come to be utilized for reform. The model is then applied to the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and the neighboring government of Bangladesh to test the salience of the variables, and to determine why the former may be more successful than the latter.

Managerial Values and Accountability Pressures: Challenges of Crisis and Disaster

Conventional wisdom would expect government to react to disaster or crisis in order to prevent recurrence. Atrophy of vigilance theory contends that disasters in hazardous systems necessarily lead to such corrective policy. Yet policy change theory recognizes that even disaster or crisis spurs policy change only when there is a conducive political climate. When is disaster or crisis insufficient to produce a political climate favoring change aimed at preventing recurrence? What is the durability of policy change in the long term? This article uses three Israeli and two parallel American case studies to further understanding of policy reactions to disaster and crisis in environments dominated by production results pressures. Patterns of reaction do not conform completely with either atrophy of vigilance or policy change theories. Christopher Hood (1991) identifies three broad categories of administrative values: sigma values of economic and purposeful government, which we call production results values; theta values of honesty and fairness, which we call rectitude; and lambda values of security and resilience, which we call, in short, resilience. Managerialism promotes production results values and encourages entrepreneurial management to obtain desired results in innovative ways. At the heart of managerialism is the idea that managers are free to manage in accordance with their professional judgment largely unshackled by hierarchic and legal process stipulations. It has been suggested that environments in which production results values predominate are likely to be less capable of preventing breaches in values of honesty and fairness (i.e., organizational misconduct) and in values of security and resilience (i.e., accident and disaster) (Hood 1991). Considerable theoretical attention has been paid in public administration literature to the potentially negative consequences of the production results focus of managerialism on rectitude values (Bellone and Goerl 1992; Terry 1993, 1998; Kellough 1998; Box 1999). Several of these observers contend that production results dominated regimes necessarily weaken traditional hierarchic accountability and risk increases in dishonest behaviors. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied the influence of production results values on the advent of disaster. Public administration scholars Romzek and Dubnick (1987), for example, attribute the Challenger launch disaster largely to production

Of Citizenship, Virtue, and the Administrative Imperative: Deconstructing Aristotelian Civic Republicanism

Over the years, the public administration literature has generated many different strands in the definition and conceptualization of citizenship. In theory and in practice, our understanding of what it means to be a citizen is in danger of being muddled amid the diversity of perspectives and the epistemological confusion generated in the contemporary discourse on the subject. My aim in this article is to clarify and elaborate a common thread that runs through our contemporary understanding of citizenship and to advance the general thesis that our brand of theorizing reflects an earlier tradition that embodies the conservative ethos of Aristotelian republicanism. Can such a tradition survive in modern American society?

Managerial Responsibility

The concept of managerial responsibility is a shining thread in the literature of public administration, but its definition within our constitutional scheme remains elusive. How will we know responsible public management when we see it? We propose one answer: Public administration should be conducted according to what we term a “precept of managerial responsibility,” which involves four interrelated elements derived from the classical literature of public administration: judgment, accountability, balance, and rationality. We apply this precept to one of the most vexing problems of public administration theory and practice, institutional reform litigation. This application illustrates how the precept solves a major theoretical problem of American public administration by defining a role for administrative officers that fully comports with the Madisonian scheme of separated institutions—legislative, executive, and judicial—sharing power.

What Ethical Conduct Expectations Do Legislators Have for the Career Bureaucracy?

Administrative ethics is a principal concern of the ethics-in-govemment movement, yet there is little empirical research ascertaining the expectations of elected officials for civil servants. This article reports legislator preferences for (1) virtues taken from the public administration literature, (2) overarching bureaucratic and democratic frameworks, and (3) administrative accountability. Significant partisan and gender differences are highlighted, and the resultant implications, especially for the American Society of Public Administration Code of Ethics, are suggested.

Virtue Ethics: A Policy Recommendation

This article presents a moral intervention theory designed to morally upgrade ethical thought and moral behavior in public administration. The theory is, based on bringing virtue ethics into the public management arena using a ONENESS ethical paradigm firmly rooted in the literature of public administration. The theory suggests four key independent variables, that would lead to the desired moral upgrading of our organizations,. The article explains the theory in such a way that other researchers, can go the next step of empirically testing the theory to determine its validity and usefulness,.

Auditing Performance Data in Local Government

Performance measurement for local government represents the implementation of performance measurement systems, the collection of performance data, and the calculation of performance measures for operational accountability. There is another dimension of performance measurement that has gone unnoticed in public administration literature, auditing the accuracy of performance data used to create performance statistics. This article describes why performance data must be audited and presents an approach to auditing the accuracy of them. It concludes that additional research is needed on auditing performance data and that the auditing process sets the stage for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery.

The relationship between politicians and administrators – a logic of disharmony

The relationship between politicians (elected officials) and administrators (appointed officials) is the cornerstone to understanding the governing process and has always been highly debated in the public administration literature. Traditionally, the debate focuses on Weber’s clear separation between politicians and administrators and a criticism of the basic assumptions of Weber’s model. An alternative model is the Dichotomy–Duality–Model which gives a more varied description of the relationship between politicians and administrators. This article argues that in order to get a more thorough understanding of the complicated interaction between politicians and administrators, it is necessary to pay attention to the two groups’ logic of action. It is argued that politicians are driven by inductive logic of action while administrators are influenced by a deductive logic of action. These two opposites create a logic of disharmony between the two agents. Empirical findings from counties in Denmark support the present and the resistance of the logic, since management tools designed to create a harmonious relationship between politicians and administrators are unable to change the logic of disharmony.

Particularism versus Universalism in the Brazilian Public Administration Literature

The author draws on the Brazilian public administration literature to discuss the conflict between the need to remain open to lessons from elsewhere, while at the same time remaining grounded in a particular local context. The article begins by presenting calls by a number of Brazilian public administration scholars for what might be termed an “administrative particularism,” or an assertion that universal lessons do not apply in the discipline. This is followed by a discussion of the challenges that these and other Brazilian public administration scholars identify. Further discussion will suggest these challenges, and many of the solutions most commonly offered for them, imply that, far from a uniquely Brazilian public administration, the country seeks to move closer to the model of public administration practiced elsewhere, especially in the developed world.

The Purse Strings and the Policy Process: Bureaucratic Shaping of Industry Policy Capacity after 1945

Much literature in public administration debates the role of the public servant in the policy‐making process. Some literature acknowledges an integral role of the public servant in the process. However, this role often remains obscure, due to being couched in abstract terms. The hierarchical structuring of responsibilities and power within bureaucracies imparts the capacity for differential influence. This paper provides a case study of the role of the Public Service Board (power over staffing) and the Australian federal Treasury (power over the purse) in the shaping of the bureaucratic structure. The case study centres on the industry policy bureaucracy in the volatile decade after World War II. In shaping the bureaucratic capacity, the Board and the Treasury exerted a discretionary influence on the policy process itself.

Cross-cultural issues in latin america

In this issue of the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior a myriad of topics are covered with an eye toward culture, change, and development in Latin America. The actual special issue theme of “Cross-cultural issues in Latin America” was somewhat broadly defined by design. Because this corner of the world has received little attention in the management and public administration literature, I thought that it would be interesting to dedicate an entire issue to this topic. As the Western Hemisphere continues to build cultural and economic bridges, it will be inevitable that many social science researchers will follow suit with more interest.1