Public Administration Scholars Research Articles

When intragroup conflict is a good thing: Team diversity and use of force by police

Public administration scholars, and those in other fields such as business management and social psychology, have long been interested in the effects of workforce diversity on performance. Results thus far are decidedly mixed, in large part because different research traditions operate at different levels of organization and test different performance measures. Drawing from the broader literature on diversity outside public administration, we focus specifically on work team, as the unit of analysis, in this article. We argue that intragroup conflict on a diverse team is potentially beneficial when lower levels of trust and cohesion among group members reduce counterproductive work behavior and thus improve performance. We test this assertation in an analysis of police use of force on citizens in Dallas, TX, between 2013 and 2020. Findings show that demographically diverse teams reduce the use of force against citizens. The largest effects are found in response groups that include variation on both race/ethnicity and gender. We conclude with a discussion of these results and the implications for research on diversity and social equity. Limitations are also discussed.

Liking or Needing? Theorizing on the Role of Affect in Network Behavior

AbstractInformal networks are crucial for the functioning of public organizations and the quality of government service. Because of this, public administration scholars increasingly theorize on what drives informal network behavior, particularly in terms of whom public officials contact for information or advice. However, existing studies provide a rather rational and strategic account of how such networking occurs, pointing to factors, such as preference similarity, resource availability, and social capital as its main drivers. This article critiques the microfoundations of existing theoretical models, arguing that they (a) potentially require too extensive information-processing capabilities on behalf of individual decision-makers and (b) discount the role that affect and emotive responses are likely to play in the social activity of networked interaction. In response, this article proposes three lines of theorizing on how (interpersonal) affect can be incorporated into theorizing about the network behavior of public officials: (1) affect as a fallback strategy; (2) affect in the driver’s seat; and (3) affect as a decision distorter. Several methods are discussed to empirically pursue the presented lines of theorizing.

Reporting Workplace Discrimination: An Exploratory Analysis of Bystander Behavior

Reporting workplace discrimination has garnered renewed attention in public administration scholarship. Missing, however, from the literature is bystander reporting, a relatively new and understudied mode of reporting. Using a sub-sample of respondents (i.e., bystanders) who witnessed others encountering workplace discrimination—specifically race- ( n = 886) and/or sex-based discrimination ( n = 1,152)—this study finds that less than one fifth (18.7% and 16.6% respectively) of all bystanders reported the alleged offense. However, this study suggests that personal characteristics such as age, race or ethnicity, and veteran status, as well as occupational variables such as supervisory status and tenure duration, significantly impacted bystander reporting after witnessing race-based discrimination. Likewise, personal characteristics such as age, as well as occupational variables such as grade level, supervisory status, and tenure duration, also significantly impacted bystander reporting after witnessing sex-based discrimination. These findings are important because a different mode of reporting may increase agency accountability for acts of workplace discrimination or retaliation.

Critiquing scientific writing for knowledge development in South African public administration scholarship

As qualitative research, this article aims to critically engage on the level of scholarship by modern scholars for pursuing knowledge development in South African public administration. The article also concludes that the purpose of peer review is to evaluate and improve the text and that if scholars perceive their purpose in review as to criticise and not to critique the scientific work for areas of improvement, they expose their weaknesses and biases, which does not contribute to knowledge development and improvement in the scholarship debates.

The use of theoretical frameworks by Master of Public Administration (MPA) graduates at a selected South African university of technology

Scholars contend that public administration, as a discipline, is still in its infancy and, more often than not, fumbles for its own identity. It is generally regarded as an amalgamation of various disciplines. It is therefore no wonder that scholars in public administration, more often than not, fail to locate their empirical research, in sound theoretical frameworks for research in public administration, in general. The core objective of the study was to determine whether Master of Public Administration (MPA) graduates, from a selected university of technology in South Africa, grounded their research in theoretical frameworks, rooted in the identified public administration domains. Desktop research was employed where purposely selected MPA dissertations were scrutinised, using content analysis. MPA qualifications generally comprise a range of modules in conjunction with the production of a mini-thesis. This has not been the case at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) since 2016. MPA graduates are required to produce a full dissertation only. The study intended to highlight the importance of conducting research that contributes to public administration theory development, especially at universities of technology. The study found that if CPUT wants to acquire a competitive edge in the international higher education landscape in general and in the field of public administration in particular, it must aspire to deliver MPA graduates who demonstrate the ability to grow the mass of theoretical knowledge in the discipline. The study recommends that theoretical frameworks, in the study domains associated with research in public administration be taught explicitly in the form of seminars in the absence of teaching them in formal credit-bearing modules, which is the case at CPUT.

"A Think Piece: Setting an Agenda for Pedagogical Research and Scholarship: Key Questions for Public Administration Scholars, Practitioners, and Leaders — Why the next Decade of Pedagogical Research and Scholarship Matters"

"The period from the late 1980s to the present has been one of change and disruption at all levels of contemporary public administration. It is possible to categorize this period of change through different lenses from those of social and economic issues to those of significant political and environmental changes. At different times over the last forty years these changes have disrupted the existing institutions of government in nation states and the assumed models of governance and administration. The focus of these changes has often concentrated on the impact they have had on civil society, communities and nation states including the roles of representative governments. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which public administration pedagogues and scholars adapt to these changes and adapt their ways of working or understanding the context within which they function. This Think Piece seeks to identify what the changes have led to in terms of the pedagogical questions they raise; the issues that inform the design of the curriculum; and the implications these have for the education and training as well as the continuing professional development of practitioners and leaders of public administration."

The Fruits of Diversity and Globalization: Participation and Contributions of East-Asian Scholars in Public Administration

The growth of East-Asian scholars in the American public affairs and administration (PA) field is increasingly apparent in recent years. Their participation demonstrates the diversity of the academic community and the globalization of higher education. However, little attention has been paid in the literature to this minority. From the broader perspective, Asian minorities have been overlooked in the discourse on diversity, equity, and inclusion, although they certainly confront social challenges such as inequity, injustice, discrimination, xenophobia, and even hate crimes. Our research attempts to address this gap in the literature by objectively documenting the participation and contributions of East-Asian scholars (EASs) to the American PA field. We find that across the top 100 PA schools, approximately 5% of the total full-time faculty members are East-Asian scholars, and that almost 20% of the peer-reviewed articles published in the top 10 PA journals are contributed by that scholarly community. However, the representation of East-Asian scholars in journal and association leadership teams remains low, which does not rise to their level of their contributions via peer-reviewed journal articles.

Reimagining race and gender in public administration and public policy: Insights from an interdisciplinary systematic review

AbstractPublic administration scholarship on race and gender is motivated by normative concerns about social equity, and dominated by work on bureaucracy and its representativeness. Despite decades of research on race and gender in public administration, there has been limited engagement with racializing and gendering processes. Relatedly, scant attention is paid to other disciplines that center on race and gender in theorizing. The purpose of this review is to explore public administration scholarship on race and gender in the context of allied social science disciplines, reveal limits of current approaches in public administration, and articulate strategies for enhancing understanding of race and gender in public administration scholarship. We use bibliometric and content analysis methods to map the intellectual structure of social science scholarship on race and gender, highlight public administration's place in this structure, and compare public administration scholarship on race and gender with other social science disciplines.

How does Workplace Incivility in the Public Higher Learning Institution in Saudi Influence the Job Satisfaction of the Faculty Employees?

Scholars like Vickers have made an interesting observation that while the public administration scholars have put a keen interest in management rhetoric, they have ignored an equally significant area that also has weighty impacts on the public administration practitioners as well as the people they serve; workplace incivility. For this end, this paper examines the prevalence of workplace incivility in the Saudi Arabian public universities’ faculty as well as how does workplace incivility in the Saudi Arabian public universities’ faculties influence the job satisfaction of the faculty employees. The findings revealed that job satisfaction has a positive correlation with workplace incivility. The findings supported the hypothesis which postulated that workplace incivility among the Saudi faculty members could result in reduced job satisfaction. These findings have important policy implications. First, the management of public universities in Saudi Arabia should endeavor to create a healthy workplace climate by cultivating an organizational culture that is intolerant of uncivil practices, and where such practices are actively discouraged by all employees. Second, organizations can mitigate workplace incivility by enforcing a clear policy that defines workplace incivility. A zero-tolerance to incivility policy should be enacted, and efforts should be made to nurture a civil workplace culture through training, counseling, and punishment where necessary.

Public data primacy: the changing landscape of public service delivery as big data gets bigger

The growth and expansion of “Big Data” is fundamentally changing public service delivery. Big Data is getting “bigger,” and public organizations will have new opportunities to cultivate and challenges to address. To understand the effects of the growth of data on public organizations, we introduce the Public Data Primacy (PDP) theoretical framework, which builds on existing scholarship through four propositions about data, technology, and its use in the public sector. The framework posits that public sector work will become increasingly data-centric as data continues to get “bigger.” Ultimately, the PDP leads to two predictions about the public sector. First, we predict that the primacy of data in the delivery of public services is inevitable. Second, this forthcoming reality will require public servants to adopt new models of public service oriented around data. The PDP theoretical framework provides a systematic lens in which public administration scholarship can evaluate the future of data growth and its impacts upon public service delivery.

Parliamentarism or Presidentialism and Democratic Practice: Which way for Nigeria?

Government is the determinate agent of the State designed to express the will of the State aimed at satisfying the interests of the people. The system of government adopted by nations of the world, to accomplish this task could vary, including the Parliamentary and Presidential systems. Ultimately, the required end-result is the satisfaction of the interest of the citizens which is the essence of democratic practice. These popular systems of government have been used differently by nations of the world and have obtained good governance but why is this not the case with Nigeria which has experienced the use of both systems? This study set out to identify the cause of this anomaly, whether in terms of the system type or its implementation. The methodology adopted is majorly qualitative but with an objective analysis of key issues and processes relating to the systems of government. The results of this study will be useful to political leaders in government globally but particularly in developing countries of the world as well as scholars of public administration. Findings revealed that nothing was wrong with either of the two systems of government but rather the will to effectively implement the tenets of either, was defective. Some recommendations were posited to create a hopeful future of success in governance in Nigeria, even with the current presidential system.

Articulating Grounded Theory Methodology for Public and Nonprofit Administration Scholars and Practitioners

Abstract Grounded theory as a term and as a methodology has received increasing attention from public administration scholars since the mid-2000s. Unfortunately, the application of grounded theory methodology across social science research—including public and nonprofit administration—is often shrouded in vagueness; however, rigorously conducted grounded theory research, particularly classic ground theory, holds great potential to develop theory that is relevant to practice. This article seeks to provide clarity on grounded theory methodology by detailing it through the lens of classic grounded theory methodology (i.e., the foundational methodology). Additionally, the authors examine the interpretation and application of grounded theory methodology through a conceptual content analysis of top public administration journals. The analysis reveals scholars either do not have a clear understanding of grounded theory methodology or needs to improve their reporting of such, as the theory development process is not clearly reported. Insight on directions forward to improve the rigor of grounded theory research in the field is offered, including adhering to established methodology.

Network Effects Research: A Systematic Review of Theoretical Mechanisms and Measures

This article contributes to the network effectiveness literature by identifying the theoretical mechanisms and network measures scholars in public administration and policy use to draw inferences between network structures and network effects. We conducted a systematic review of empirical network effects research in 40 public administration and policy journals from 1998 to 2019. We reviewed and coded 89 articles and described the main social theories used in the network effectiveness literature and the associated mechanisms that translate network structures to network effects. We also explain how scholars operationalize those theoretical mechanisms through network measures. Overall, our findings reflect that there is limited use of social theories for the explanation of network effects and in some cases, inconsistent use of network measures associated with theories. Moreover, we identify several challenges confronting network effects research. These challenges include the difficulty of isolating specific mechanisms related to a particular social theory, the use of network structures both as a mechanism and as a measure, and the lack of data to examine network dynamics and coevolution.

Policy capacity during COVID-19 in Asia: A systematic literature review.

COVID‐19 has revealed the policy capacity of some governance institutions, both resilience and vulnerability. Hence, this circumstance has demanded public administration scholars and practitioners to rethink the existing governance practices, particularly in making effective crisis‐related policies. This paper reviewed primary and secondary studies exploring the application of policy capacity competencies in facilitating COVID‐19 handling in Asia. In achieving so, we did a systematic literature review of relevant studies published between January and October 2020. Applying the agreed search term to several databases, we found 2541 studies, while merely 30 were included for review. Findings from the studies are predominantly closely linked to operational capacity (n = 21). Other studies are related to political and analytical capacity (n = 14 and 7, retrospectively). We found that there are some dilemmas and inadequacy of understanding concerning the role of features in certain capacities (such as technology use versus individual privacy, the paradox of trust and legitimacy, or centralisation versus decentralisation), particularly in the time of crisis, which is a calling for future research.

Fragmentation of Political Authority and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship: Explaining Instances of Minority Accommodation in Israel and Estonia

Why do some ethnic nation-states committed to preferential treatment of the dominant nation choose to accommodate their ethnic minorities in some realms? I argue that power struggles between elected and non-elected officials account for the variation in the treatment of ethnic minorities. Fragmentation of authority creates opportunities for entrepreneurial bureaucrats to initiate policy changes and lead to unanticipated outcomes. Drawing on nationalism studies in comparative politics and principal-agent scholarship in public administration, this article outlines a theoretical framework focused on domestic factors accounting for variation in state policies toward minorities in a novel way. I apply this framework to education policy in Israel and Estonia vis-à-vis the Palestinian Arab and Russian-speaking minorities. This article illuminates an empirical puzzle of minority accommodation under nationalist governments and explains the conditions under which it occurs, offering generalizable theoretical expectations for similar contexts.

Racialized Organizations in the Public Sector: Exploring Race and White Normativity

Central to understanding race and racism is understanding how public organizations are racialized and create systems that maintain inequity. This paper seeks to address this area of scholarship by constructing a framework of racialized public organizations. The framework emphasizes that similar to how many public organizations are gendered as masculine, they are also raced as white. Specifically, underlying the functioning of many public organizations, is the concept of white normativity. By recognizing how organizations are embedded in white normativity, public administration scholars and practitioners can more effectively pursue racial equity.

When do disasters spark transformative policy change and why?

Floods, earthquakes, droughts, and other recurrent disasters around the globe have sparked renewed interest in whether and how disasters can be leveraged as turning points for transformation toward more sustainable and resilient societies. As the transformative potential of disasters increasingly gains prominence in different research fields, it is important to describe how different scientific approaches view the relationship. This article synthesises key insights from the policy sciences and public administration scholarship regarding the link between disruptive disaster events and policy activity aiming towards societal transformation. Key explanatory perspectives are discussed, including dynamics associated with institutional crisis, policy subsystems, agenda-setting and issue salience, governance capacity, policy-oriented learning and concentration of power, and situated in relation to four scenarios of potential disaster impacts on policymaking aiming at transformation. The results of this synthesis seek to enhance our understanding of when disasters may spark transformative change. Based on these findings, the article identifies priorities for future research into policymaking in the wake of disaster.

Small Data Problems in Political Research: A Critical Replication Study

In an often-cited 2019 paper on the use of machine learning in political research, Anastasopoulos & Whitford (A&W) propose a text classification method for tweets related to organizational reputation. The aim of their paper was to provide a 'guide to practice' for public administration scholars and practitioners on the use of machine learning. In the current paper we follow up on that work with a replication of A&W's experiments and additional analyses on model stability and the effects of preprocessing, both in relation to the small data size. We show that (1) the small data causes the classification model to be highly sensitive to variations in the random train-test split, and that (2) the applied preprocessing causes the data to be extremely sparse, with the majority of items in the data having at most two non-zero lexical features. With additional experiments in which we vary the steps of the preprocessing pipeline, we show that the small data size keeps causing problems, irrespective of the preprocessing choices. Based on our findings, we argue that A&W's conclusions regarding the automated classification of organizational reputation tweets -- either substantive or methodological -- can not be maintained and require a larger data set for training and more careful validation.

Do Faith-Based Foster Care Agencies Respond Equally to All Clients?

Recent laws and court rulings have increased legal protections for faith-based organizations that refuse to provide services to certain individuals based on deeply held religious beliefs. Using data from a 2019 email correspondence study, we examine if religiously-affiliated foster care agencies respond to inquiries from white same-sex couples differently from public and secular foster care agencies. This paper provides preliminary, descriptive results that public sector discrimination can vary by the type of organization that is providing the service. We find suggestive evidence that religiously-affiliated foster care agencies are less likely to respond to same-sex male couples. However, this study lacks sufficient statistical power to find conclusive evidence of differential treatment by type of organization, which highlights the challenges of conducting correspondence studies that examine intersectional discrimination. Despite this limitation, we argue that it is increasingly important for scholars of public administration and public policy to examine and understand how discrimination in the public sector may vary by group membership or organizational type. While exploring this intersectional discrimination may be limited in certain contexts, understanding how and why organizations and public servants are more or less likely to respond to particular groups is an important first step in designing interventions or crafting policies to reduce differential treatment.

DEFINING AND ASSESSING THE VALUE OF CANONICAL MIXED METHODS RESEARCH DESIGNS IN PUBLIC POLICY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

AbstractMixed methods research (MMR) designs are well suited for answering policy‐relevant questions, yet they remain underutilized in public policy and public administration scholarship. To provide a deeper understanding of the effective use of such designs, this article examines the prevalence of MMR in public policy and public administration journals, drawing a key distinction between “canonical” and “non‐canonical” MMR. Canonical mixed methods studies are characterized by (1) an explicit rationale for using mixed methods (i.e., a clear connection between methodological decisions and research questions), (2) effective integration of qualitative and quantitative strands, and (3) design transparency. We demonstrate the value of a canonical approach in public policy and public administration research by highlighting differences in quality between canonical and non‐canonical mixed methods studies. Our findings indicate that a canonical approach to mixed methods research makes positive contributions to methodological quality and knowledge development.