Public Administration Literature Research Articles

The Well-Read Administrator: An Introduction to Public Administration Literature for Collegiate Middle Managers

The Well-Read Administrator: An Introduction to Public Administration Literature for Collegiate Middle Managers

Recent Public Administration Literature in Costa Rica

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Perceptions of Incentives in Business and Government: Implications for Civil Service Reform

7 he deleterious impact of civil service systems on incentives in government organizations is frequently asserted, yet very little systematic research on this problem is available in the public administration literature.' This is surprising, since correction of this alleged harmful impact of merit systems on motivation and the administration of incentives is usually one of the major objectives of civil service reform efforts at various levels of government. Indeed, emphasis on this problem in the Carter administration's reform proposals has created such an upsurge in public discussion that the complaints should by now be quite familiar. Critics deplore the excessive constraints on the firing or disciplining of even the most grossly inadequate employee. Pay and promotion, they allege, are related to performance only weakly, if at all. For these and other reasons, it is charged that civil service systems in the United States tend to impose an excessive procedural rigidity and complexity on the administration of certain major incengives, such that the systems are detrimental to effective management, employee motivation, and productivity. In spite of the frequency of such criticisms, however, and their importance as an impetus to civil service reform, research on this issue is surprisingly sparse.2 The dearth of research may be due to some formidable difficulties in undertaking it. There are major conceptual and methodological challenges, including those encountered in any research on motivation and incentives.3 Difficulties in generalizing across the variety of personnel systems in the various governments in the United States might make any but the most massive study seem inadequate. Perhaps some persons regard the problem as quite obvious by now, and not in need of further analysis.

A Political Perspective on Leadership Emergence, Stability, and Change in Organizational Networks

A political approach to leadership in organizational networks in presented. From a review primarily of the political science and public administration literatures, a theoretical perspective is developed suggesting individual, processual, structural, and environmental variables affecting leadership emergence, stability, and change. A list of hypotheses hopefully describes much of the political dynamics of organizational leadership. Based on the hypotheses, leadership may be seen as a more complicated and political process than much current literature indicates.

The Literature of American Public Administration: Its Contents and Contributors

Professional journals of public administration play a prominent role in influencing the study and practice of administration. As both a creature and creator of significant trends in administrative thought, periodicals are an important means of disseminating knowledge in the field. The purpose of this article is to examine a sample of this literature in order to discern the scope and direction of American public administration. This inquiry should be of interest to several groups of people interested in public administration. Members of the profession, for example, may expect that leading journals are receptive to most contributions regardless of subject matter or author affiliation.' Empirical evidence will be presented to shed light upon such expectations. Secondly, students in public administration will find information that will give them a better grasp of the literature that they read. Finally, the editorial boards of the journals will receive a disinterested empirical account of their publications have contributed to the discipline. The major question posed for all readers, then, is how do the major journals and their contributors represent the study of public administration in the 1 970s? Although other professions have published investigations similar to that presented here,2 surprisingly little attention has been paid to this aspect of public administration. Previous work has been limited to specific aspects of the literature and to commentaries on the state of the field.3 There is no comprehensive study of the contents of journals and their contributors in public administration. Through a statistical analysis of seven representative publications, we hope to fill this gap by discussing the characteristics of their articles and authors.4 The journals are published by professional associations, universities, academic publishing houses, governmental organizations, and civic groups. The reviews are the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), Administration and Society [(A&S), formerly the Journal of Comparative Public Administration], Public Administration Review (PAR), the Bureaucrat, the Midwest Review of * This article examines the periodical literature of public administration in order to discern the scope and direction of the field. Through a statistical analysis of the articles published in seven journals, the contents and contributors to the literature in the '70s are discussed. The intellectual perspective, subject matter, and research methodology of 1,407 articles includes their institutional affiliation, professional identification, organizational rank, and sex. A number of interesting findings about the characteristics of the literature are reported that generally reflect the broad, interdisciplinary nature of the study of public administration. The evidence demonstrates, however, that the journal literature is not necessarily representative of the membership or content of the field.

The Consolidation of Urban Public Services: A Focus on the Police

A rguments dealing with the issue of the consolidation of urban governmental services and/or governmental units in metropolitan areas are familiar to most practitioners and academics concerned with the study of urban politics and administration. Most introductory texts on urban affairs, for example, characteristically devote a section of readings describing and evaluating the fragmented metropolis.' Moreover, unlike many issues of interest to political science and public administration, the question of governmental consolidation extends beyond academia. The consolidation of urban governments has been the subject of popular press coverage, numerous voter referenda, and has been the focus of attention of a variety of local, state, and federal governmental and nongovernmental commissions.2 While the debate on municipal consolidation has generally been couched in terms of multi-purpose governmental consolidations (e.g., city and county mergers, Unigov and Metro consolidation, etc.), an essential dimension of the arguments supportive of areawide metropolitan government has been the thought that the consolidation of particular urban governmental services, such as public safety departments, would lead to a more effective and equitable system for the provision of public services. The purpose of this article will be to review a rapidly growing body of literature which is highly critical of municipal consolidation, and, in particular, as consolidation relates to the provision of police services.3 In addition to reviewing this literature, this article will also attempt to do an empirical evaluation of some of the major positions relating specifically to the police. * A set of literature in public administration has recently emerged, associated with the Public Choice perspective, which argues against metropolitan consolidation-and police consolidation specifically. This article reviews the major assertions which the anticonsolidationists make in specific reference to the consolidation of urban police departments: (1) that larger police departments are not more efficient or economical; and (2) that citizen satisfaction with urban police services varies inversely with the size of the municipality. On the first assertion the authors find that evidence is still inconclusive regarding the economy and efficiency of larger police departments. To evaluate the second assertion Campbell and Schuman's study of citizen attitudes in 15 American cities was reanalyzed. The results indicate that, contrary to the anti-consolidationist viewpoint, citizen satisfaction with police services is more a reflection of the differentiated socioeconomic characteristics of central cities and suburban cities than a function of city size. Evidence further suggests that if all things were equal, larger jurisdictions would produce more satisfying police services.

Nonincremental Policy Making: Notes Toward an Alternative Paradigm

Much of the literature of policy analysis and public administration is dominated by incremental and “divisible goods” paradigms. Policy is assumed to be a process of marginal and adjustive decision making in which benefits are dispensed piecemeal—proportionate to prevailing distributions of power or publicized need. This essay asserts the existence of a class of nonincremental, indivisible policy pursuits for which the analytical weaponry of political science is largely inappropriate. Such policies display a distinctive set of political and administrative characteristics. These characteristics are explained and examined in connection with manned space exploration policy. An assessment is offered of the challenges posed by nonincremental policy to contemporary outlooks in political science.

Forms of Bureaucratic Representation in the Federal Service

The concept of representative bureaucracy has now been in the literature of public administration and political science for about three decades. It has been of greatest importance in the United States and has been used as an explanatory tool in discussions of the federal service. The concept remains somewhat ambiguous and under-developed, however, and its origins, meanings, and applicability have yet to be explicated fully. This essay seeks to develop the concept of representative bureaucracy further by analyzing the major forms of bureaucratic representation found in the federal service. The importance of such an enterprise is heightened at the present time by the fact the creation of a sociologically representative bureaucracy has recently become an important objective of federal personnel administration.

Program Management and the Federal Evaluator

The next two papers are written by authors in agencies of the legislature, Richard Brown and Ray Pethtel from the state level and Keith E. Marvin and James L. Hedrick from the federal. The paper by Brown and Pethtel summarizes developments in the states and gives illustrations and observations from their experience with the New York State Legislative Commission on Expenditure Review, an agency concerned with program audits. Keith E. Marvin and James L. Hedrick discuss new developments in Congress and the General Accounting Office that affect program evaluation. Of particular interest is the concern with evaluating program evaluations and synthesizing the results for Congress. They also suggest the possibility of using computer simulations in place of actual experimentation. The last paper, Program Evalution and Administrative Theory, the only paper by a non-practitioner, attempts to relate program evaluation to the academic and theoretical literature of public administration.

Political Science and "The Public Interest"

T HE CONCEPT OF public interest is important for at least two reasons. In the first place, the debate over the meaning and usefulness of the term in recent academic literature, especially in the field of political science but also to some extent in law, contains a great deal of intrinsic interest. The idea is important in the law of regulatory commissions; it appears frequently in the literature of public administration; and it abounds in political speeches and editorials.1 Recently the activities of public-interest lobbies on behalf of consumer and environmental causes have attracted extensive attention and comment.

Mayor-Manager Relationships in Large Council-Manager Cities: A Reinterpretation

American mayor and the city manager found in the literature of public administration and political science are related to the realities of those offices in much the same way as Smokey the Bear is related to the grizzly bear of the Northwest. The literary figures are benign, simplified caricatures of complex and not completely tameable realities. It is true that in recent years some recognition of the potential power of these offices has begun to filter into the literature. The manager was recognized as a community leader by his own code of ethics.1 The code, however, makes no positive suggestion on how the manager is to express that leadership role. Officially, the mayor is still limited to presiding over council meetings and ceremonially representing the city.2 The realities of the mayors' leadership roles are beginning to be investigated.3 This article sketches some of the authors' preliminary findings on the interrelationships of mayors and managers in 45 council-manager cities with populations greater than 100,000, and some of the conceptions of managers and mayors suggested by an interpretation of the information collected. In the summer of 1965, a 34-page questionnaire was mailed to the city managers of the 55 cities and one urban county function-

Weberian Bureaucracy and the Military Model

IT IS NOW OBVIOUS that few students of public administration have been moved to heed the periodic cries that the military organization be considered an integral part of their field of study. Despite the importance of the military today, more scholarly care seems to have been lavished on mosquito abatement districts. In the literature of public administration, there are neither sufficient theoretical foundations nor adequate empirical data available to enable us to comprehend the intricacies of operating this massive consumer of public energy and wealth. Such indifference has not been shared by other academics, and, of late, they have not been reluctant about offering advice on the conduct of military affairs. It is still too early to evaluate the outcome of this invasion, especially by the economists, but one can speculate that perhaps future historians of our turbulent times will judge it to have been a national disaster. Rather than repeat the futile pleas of the past for a revision of research priorities within public administration, this article takes a more subtle approach. Perhaps scholars need to be shaken out of the complacent assumption that they already know enough about military administration, having learned their lessons directly from a churlish first sergeant or indirectly from literature fairly hostile to all aspects of military life. Perhaps they might be enticed to reexamine the phenomenon more thoroughly if it could be demonstrated that military theories of administration are far more compli-

The Short and Happy Life of a Research Consultantship

Even had I pondered deeply the meaning of this little passage by Znaniecki and the section on Technological Experts which it introduces, I doubt if the sequence of events which marked my first brief experience as a research consultant would have been seriously altered. It may, however, provide amusement, and perhaps even instruction for some of my equally virginal colleagues if I fill in the salient details of my own case history. It is a case which has the further function of documenting the situation Znaniecki was writing about. I had received my initiation into the mysteries of political science in the accepted fashion and emerged certified as a journeyman. I, of course, did not see myself as an expert, and especially not in the affairs of state government. However, I had studied diligently under two men whom I believe to be among that field's most illustrious adornments. This was the period immediately after World War II. This meant that I had participated in the reaction against chartism, management, the short-ballot school, and a coterie of allied notions which suffered in the doldrums between the decline of scientific and the rise of mathematical approaches to Theory. Organization Man had not yet arisen, nor had his theoretical rationale. We postwar Ph.D. candidates confidently dismissed all of the old administration doctrines as shibboliths. We cracked clever jokes about these woefully unsophisticated legalisms and formalisms. The newer social science disciplines, we agreed, led to more realistic (or, as we put it, fruitful) results than did the empiricism of the man-hole cover counters. Politics, we agreed, was more revealing about the process of administration than was the structural literature of traditional Public Administration. Inevitably, Leonard White emerged as our scapegoat; the symbol of error. We were embarrassed for him. But magnanimously we agreed that he had served a useful function for a less perceptive age. All that was happily behind us. Nor was all this mere second-hand erudition pirated from the creative younger faculty members. Most of us in that postwar graduate training period had previously been administrators of one sort or another. Or at least, we had

The Impact of Mechanization on Administration

A LTHOUGH practicing public administrators should be credited with a far greater interest in office mechanization than it is generally believed they have, this interest is not reflected in public administration literature. In contrast, the literature of private administration abounds with articles on mechanization, ranging from practical articles on office machines to highly abstract and theoretical papers on electronic data processing. The disparity between the two literatures reflects, to a degree, the divorce of the public administrator and the academician, under whose care public administration literature is nourished. To the extent that this condition exists, the interflow of ideas between the administrative laboratories and the idea centers is slowed, and the development of a science of administration thwarted. This paper represents an attempt to place the relationship of mechanization to administration in a perspective that will be meaningful to both practitioner and academician. The problem will be approached from three standpoints: (a) the general evolution of data processing, (b) the direction of its future development in one of our state governments, and

Federal-State Personnel Relations

T HE rapidly expanding literature of public administration has wisely ignored much of the old-line political science which was one of its several parents. It has not worried itself greatly about sovereignty or pluralism or academic distinctions between types of states, and has thus avoided much confused metaphysical thinking, all unrelated to reality. At the same time, however, public administration should be alert to pick up any political science viewpoints which may affect the basic goals of our administrative institutions. Recent treatments of administrative aspects of American federalism have been unfortunately devoid of careful analysis of the manner in which the fundamental goals of our American federal system are affected by the administrative institutions described. For example, Professor V. 0. Key's otherwise brilliant study of The Administration of Federal Grants to States 1 omits the most fundamental reason for operating governmental services through grants to the states rather than through a Federal agency-the value of political decentralization for the maintenance of constitutional, democratic government. Moreover, although the book mentions such other important purposes of a grants-in-aid system as the desirability of flexibility, it consistently omits mention of instances in which an excess of Federal administrative zeal has defeated these purposes. Similarly, Professor Jane Perry Clark portrays The Rise of a New Federalism 2 in a volume which, however stimulating, makes almost no