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To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2010.01853.x Byline: KENNETH J. MEIER (1), LAURENCE J. O'TOOLE (2) Abstract: Networks and managing in the network have been central concerns of public management scholars for years (Provan and Milward 1991; O'Toole 1997; Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Herranz 2008). The literature has investigated the extent of networks (Hall and O'Toole 2004), the appropriate way to measure networks and networking behaviour (McGuire 2002; Meier and O'Toole 2005), and the role that networking plays in improving organizational performance (O'Toole and Meier 2003). Although there are qualifications in the literature to the rosy scenario that managing in the network is always a good thing (O'Toole and Meier 2004), and although the benefits of managerial networking show diminishing returns (Hicklin et al. 2008), there has not been much investigation of the factors that enhance or detract from networking's impact on performance. This study examines the interactive relationship between management capacity and managerial networking using a panel of several hundred public organizations over an 8-year period. The empirical results show that managerial capacity does interact with networking and enhances the positive impact of networking over an array of performance indicators. At the same time, building managerial capacity is a central management choice, and that decision has ramifications for organizations that are not always positive. The paper concludes with the managerial implications of the strategic choice to build management capacity. Author Affiliation: (1)Kenneth J. Meier is in the Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, and Cardiff University School of Business. (2)Laurence J. O'Toole, Jr is in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia. Article History: Date received 19 August 2008. Date accepted 13 July 2009.

Several studies are conducted to explain the correlation present between the network alarms, strategic management and the service performance of an organization. The public services are shown to be positively affected by the various strategy processes that are based on the rational planning.

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2009.01773.x Byline: KENNETH J. MEIER (1), LAURENCE J. O'TOOLE (2) Abstract: Do negative budgetary shocks reduce performance in public organizations? If so, by how much and in terms of which criteria? Are public managers able to make internal management choices to limit or eliminate the effects of such shocks? These questions are investigated in a set of hundreds of organizations over an 8-year period. For the most part, budgetary shocks of 10 per cent or more have only limited or no negative impacts on performance in the short term. The most salient policy objective and production for more disadvantaged clientele are especially insulated from shocks. Decisions about internal resource allocation and personnel management can be shown to protect core production while sacrificing more peripheral activities and capital investment. Questions that remain to be investigated include whether short-term protection comes at the expense of some longer-term losses, and-ironically-whether effective management under such circumstances weakens over time the political case for adequate budgets. Author Affiliation: (1)Kenneth J. Meier is in the Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University and the Cardiff School of Business, Cardiff University (2)Laurence J. O'Toole, Jr is in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, The University of Georgia. Article History: Date received 22 February 2007. Date accepted 15 July 2007.

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2008.00813.x Byline: George A. Boyne (1), Kenneth J. Meier (2) Abstract: abstract Research on turnaround has largely focused on the impact of retrenchment and repositioning, and has paid less attention to the impact of changes in the task environment and human resources on recovery from decline. Moreover, all of the empirical research on turnaround has been conducted on private organizations. We develop a new model that is derived from theories of environmental and human resource effects on organizational performance. We apply this model to failing school districts in Texas, and find that turnaround is influenced by changes in the munificence and complexity of task environments, and the appointment of a new chief executive and front-line staff. Author Affiliation: (1)Cardiff University; (2)Texas A&M University Article note: George A. Boyne, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK (Boyne@cardiff.ac.uk).

The field of policy theory abounds with numerous theories, with each theory having a set of practitioners that are working independently of the others. Resolving conflicts among policy theories as a result is difficult. This essay has a more modest goal of posing some questions and suggesting some avenues for future research. Key points include defining the purpose of policy theory, incorporating management into our theories, making strategic choices about areas of study, addressing the parsimony-comprehensiveness tradeoff, and providing a more nuanced role for institutions., ********** Participating in a "Policy Theory Shootout" is a daunting task. The field is populated by multiple theories that have relatively well-developed research agendas associated with them. To expect that [...]

Employee turnover is a neglected topic in public administration (Selden and Moynihan 2000, 74). One of the leading public personnel texts devotes only a single brief mention to turnover in [...]

Public managers must often cope with competing and conflicting goals. The common formulation is to assume that managers must trade-off goals against each other. But is this always true? An alternative hypothesis is that sometimes managers may instead be able to improve outcomes on multiple goals simultaneously--by altering management practices. We test this 'trade-off' notion using a panel of state-level administrative data from the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system from 1997 to 2004 and qualitative interviews from selected states. The trade-off examined is timeliness of UI benefit payments versus the quality of UI determinations. In general, we find that state administrators often adopt management practices that facilitate improved outcomes for both timeliness and quality, indicating no trade-off but instead a synergy between outcomes. We also find evidence of a feedback effect linking higher performance on timeliness to better quality determinations., Introduction Public programs and public organizations typically carry more than one objective, and managers must consider these multiple criteria in strategic and day-to-day decisions. These circumstances, it is often assumed [...]

In recent years, the research literature on public management has begun to focus on the link between management and public organizational performance (for instance, Boyne and Walker 2005; Ingraham and [...]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2007.00667.x Byline: RICHARD M. WALKER (1), LAURENCE J. O'TOOLE (2), KENNETH J. MEIER (3) Abstract: Increased complexity in the world of public management has resulted in the growth of networks of actors who, operating interdependently, co-produce public services. Much of the prior networking literature conflates structure (the network) with behaviour (networking). Based on this concern we analyse the managerial networking practices of over 1,000 officers in English local government. We find extensive networking activity amongst three groups of officers and show that corporate officers, chief officers and service managers develop logical patterns of interaction among network nodes and initiation that reflect their level of management. We conclude that where you are in the organizational hierarchy matters for networking behaviour and discuss the implications of these findings for future research. Author Affiliation: (1)Richard M. Walker is a Professor in Public Management and Policy at the Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, University of Hong Kong and School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. (2)Laurence J. O'Toole, Jr. is the Margaret Hughes and Robert T. Golembiewski Professor of Public Administration and Head of the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. (3)Kenneth J. Meier is the Charles H. Gregory Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and Professor of Public Management in the Cardiff School of Business, Cardiff University. Article History: Date received 27 May 2005. Date accepted 12 December 2005.

Systematic evidence has accumulated in recent years that public management makes a difference in a variety of ways when programs are implemented (for recent coverage, see Ingraham and Lynn 2004; [...]

Scholars of public organizations have begun to emphasize emotional labor in studies of gender in the workplace, finding that the skills women bring to organizations are often overlooked and undercompensated even though they play a vital role in the organization. Emotional labor is an individual's effort to present emotions in a way that is desired by the organization. The authors hypothesize that employers with greater emotional labor expectations of their employees will have more effective interactions with clients, better internal relationships, and superior program performance. This article tests the effects of emotional labor in a bureaucratic workforce over time. Multiple regression results show that organizations with more women at the street level have higher overall organizational performance. Additionally, emotional labor contributes to organizational productivity over and above its role in employee turnover and client satisfaction.

Scholars and practitioners within the U.S. education system have focused considerable attention on developing new programs aimed at raising educational achievement for disadvantaged students. New programs are only one way to improve student performance, however; recent work in public administration suggests that public management and implementation practices might also have a large impact on student performance. Existing research shows that managerial networking, managerial quality, and effective personnel management can significantly improve the quality of the education received by disadvantaged students. Additional work highlights the contribution of representative bureaucracy. Because these research agendas have targeted the public administration literature rather than the education policy literature, this article seeks to bring this research back to education policy. Using data from several hundred Texas public school districts, spanning 1995 to 2002, and focusing on disadvantaged student performance (Latinos, blacks, and low-income students), this article illustrates how both management and processes to enhance the representativeness of teaching faculty produce benefits for disadvantaged students., How to improve minority student performance is a perennial question in education policy. Although numerous programs have shown promise in small numbers, how to 'get to scale' in education reform [...]

The literature on political control of bureaucracy reveals that bureaucracies are highly responsive to political forces. This paper argues that the political control literature misses evidence from other academic literature that bears directly on this phenomenon. Specifically, researchers need to consider the values of the bureaucracy in any effort to assess the degree of political control. An empirical test is presented using a data set from public education. Results show bureaucratic values to be far more influential in explaining bureaucratic outputs and outcomes than political factors. These findings suggest that a reinterpretation of previous empirical research is urgently in order.

Do men and women manage differently? Do their efforts have different impacts on public program performance? Building from a formal treatment of public management and performance, this study investigates how the interaction of gender and management strategies influences organizational performance. Focusing on several hundred public organizations and their top managers over a three-year period, the analysis maps the gender question onto Mark Moore's distinction among managing upward toward political principals, downward toward organizational agents, and outward toward the networked environment. Findings indicate that women and men as top managers have different performance impacts, and these impacts vary by managerial function as well.

Increasing workforce diversity poses some of the most challenging questions for the management of public services (Riccucci 2002). Governments around the world have legislated to ensure that public organizations are [...]

The dependent variable in all the articles presented in this symposium issue of JPART was organizational performance in public agencies. Management variables included organizational strategy, resources, leadership, goals, workforce diversity, [...]

Representation scholars link descriptive representation of blacks and Latinos in legislative bodies to substantive policy representation. We examine this relationship on local school boards where issue salience is high, the cost of gaining legislative access is relatively low, and nonpartisan elections produce a greater likelihood of linking policy preferences to racial cues. Theoretically, we connect substantive representation to the method of election; blacks and Latinos elected at-large face different constraints than their ward-elected counterparts, and thus behave differently on an at-large board than they would on a ward-elected one. This theoretical story suggests a number of hypotheses that we test using cross-sectional data from 1000+ school districts in Texas. Using OLS, we find that the type of election has significant direct and indirect effects on the hiring of black and Latino administrators and teachers to the school district, after controlling for other factors. We find that election type has descriptive representational effects for Latinos, but more importantly, electoral constraints produce variable substantive policy outcomes once both black and Latino officials take office.

The theory of representative bureaucracy concerns whether bureaucracy mirrors the origins and values of the population and, if so, whether such representation makes any difference. This article extends Hindera's examination of active bureaucratic representation within the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to determine the effect of introducing new goals (disability discrimination) and priorities (sexual harassment) on the EEOC's representational patterns. Using data from the late 1980s and late 1990s, we find the extent of active representation of African Americans declined. Although the EEOC is now pursuing more cases of sex discrimination, no evidence of active representation exists for women in EEOC district offices.

Pathbreaking work in public policy is virtually guaranteed to draw challenges from those whose fundamental beliefs have been systematically destroyed; thus, it is no surprise to see rejoinders from Richard [...]

This paper investigates the determinants and consequences of Latino political representation in the field of K-12 education. The first task is to examine the association between Latino population and the Latino presence on school boards. We then investigate if Latino representation is affected by the electoral structure of school boards, as scholars have reached differing conclusions on whether at-large and ward systems hinder or enhance minority descriptive representation. The next step examines the consequences of Latino representation, specifically whether beard membership is associated with the share of Latino school administrators and teachers. The regression results show that Latino population positively affects Latino board representation, but that at-large systems hinder descriptive representation. The primary determinant of Latino administrators is Latino school board membership, and the primary determinant of Latino teachers is Latino administrators. In sum, at-large elections negatively influence Latino educational representation, which produces a ripple effect that ultimately reduces the share of Latino teachers.

Most literature on public-sector networks focuses on how to build and manage systems and ignores the political problems that networks can create for organizations. This article argues that individual network nodes can work to bias the organization's actions in ways that benefit the organization's more advantaged clientele. The argument is supported by an analysis of performance data from 500 organizations over a five-year period. A classic theoretical point is supported in a systematic empirical investigation. While networks can greatly benefit the organization, they have a dark side that managers and scholars need to consider more seriously.

Many organization theories suggest that divergent goals can hamper an organization's pursuit of its primary mission. An earlier version of this article analyzed the effect of the pursuit of divergent goals on American public schools. This is an update of the original article that adds two years of data to the original study. Using an educational production function, this article assesses the relationships between athletic budgets and various aggregate measures of academic performance. Controlling for various known components of academic performance, athletic budgets have a significant negative relationship with academic performance. Schools that devote a large amount of resources to athletic budgets have lower levels of academic achievement. A focus on athletics seems to institutionalize goals that conflict with the schools' academic missions., American schools are busy places. They do much more than provide the basics of a K-12 education for their students. They are a source of civic pride, a major agent [...]

In the United States, intergovernmental programs have become more the rule than the exception. Most 'national' public initiatives are implemented with active involvement by states and localities, and a large [...]

This article examines the political relationships between Latinos and African Americans in 194 multiracial school districts. The empirical results indicate that at times the relationship between Latinos and African Americans is competitive and at times it is complimentary. When scarcity is a factor, such as in administrative and teaching positions, gains by one group often result in losses by another. When the focus changes to policy questions where scarcity is not a factor (e.g., student performance), both groups gain at the same time.

Why is contracting used more frequently under some circumstances than others? What is its impact on spending for core mission and on service quality? These questions are explored with data from more than 1,000 Texas school districts. The evidence for a recent three-year period shows that contracting is negatively related to spending on school districts' central task and is not positively associated with district performance. Why, then, do districts contract? While several variables are associated with the degree of contracting, the most interesting is the relative size of a district's bureaucratic staff. Furthermore, the relationship between contracting and bureaucracy is reciprocal: Each is associated with subsequent growth in the other. The dynamic suggests an updated version of Parkinson's law. These findings indicate the need for researchers to probe the causes and consequences of contracting more thoroughly to help public managers assess this important option.

The seminal work of Derthick and Quirk (1985) argues that public policy changes when the intellectual debate of ideas establishes that policy options are legitimate and current policies are ineffective. (1) Overlooked in their otherwise exceptional analysis is the role that country music plays in the politics of ideas. (2) The thesis of this article is that country music is a crucial part of the politics of ideas, and, in fact, many policy debates are resolved in country music well before the intellectual community of policy analysts reaches a consensus. This article will recap some of the key policy debates in which country music set the agenda, (3) established the key policy alternatives, or resolved the policy debate and permitted the adoption of public policy (Anderson, 1994). (4), Criminal Justice Policy Perhaps the most noteworthy contribution to public policy has been country music's framing of the death penalty debate after Furman v. Georgia. On the one side is [...]

Previous studies indicate that in cases of relatively low issue salience, the interest group model best explains lesbian and gay antidiscrimination policy in the American states. The analysis of state [...]

The incarceration rate in federal penitentiaries has tripled in the past twenty-five years, marking an unprecedented incursion by the federal government into what was the near exclusive domain of sub-national jurisdictions. Numerous scholars, particularly outside the field of political science, have hypothesized about the causes of the burgeoning prison population; but few have systematically tested these propositions. Borrowing insights from organizational theory and the literature on bureaucratic politics, this article proposes a framework that incorporates the most plausible hypotheses from the literature and empirically models the environmental, structural, and political influences on the implementation of federal criminal justice sanctions. The analysis demonstrates that federal incarceration rates are largely uncorrelated with the national crime rate, but that other variables significantly affect the number of commitments, the average sentence of convicted prisoners, and the number of paroles annually. The model also reveals that the outputs of criminal justice bureaucracies are extremely autoregressive, with current sanctions determined largely by past agency behavior.

Camilla Stivers. 2002. Gender Images in Public Administration: Legitimacy and the Administrative State, second edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 184 pp. The distinction in Western liberal thought between public and [...]

In Luther Gulick's classic essay 'Notes on the Theory of Organization,' he argued that span of control structures relationships between leaders and subordinates in organizations. Commenting on the state of knowledge about span of control, Gulick lamented the lack of systematic research on what he viewed as three key determinants of span of control: diversification of function, time, and space. This study adopts Gulick's approach to studying span of control by examining the effects of diversity of function, time, and space in structuring relationships among personnel in a sample of 678 texas public school districts. We then investigate Joan Woodward's link between span of control and organizational performance. Our results reveal that although Gulick was correct in asserting that diversity of function, time, and space play a role in determining how spans of control are structured, these variables have different meanings that depend on the level of organizational hierarchy analyzed.

Ideas swing wildly in and out of fashion--take, for instance, the notion of stability in administration. For decades conventional wisdom simply assumed that stability contributes to public administrative performance. Such [...]

This study demonstrates a quantitative approach to assessing gender discrimination in public salaries at the individual level. Using data from more than 1,000 school districts in Texas over a period of four years, the results show that gender differences in superintendents' salaries are subtle rather than systematic. Female superintendents who replace male superintendents receive lower compensation. Local district wealth also interacts with gender to affect salaries., Nearly 40 years have gone by since the passage of the Equal Pay Act, the first modern statute directed at protecting workers against wage discrimination. The Equal Pay Act of [...]

Studies of representative bureaucracy highlight both passive and active forms of representation. Passive representation refers to similarities in demographic characteristics between bureaucrats and client populations. Active representation refers to situations in which bureaucracies work to further the needs of a particular group of people. In this study, we examine the role employee discretion plays in linking passive and active forms of representation in a sample of six hundred school districts in Texas. Specifically, we argue that active representation is enhanced in organizations that vest greater discretion in their employees. Our study reveals that minority student performance improves under organizational structures that promote, rather than limit, minority teacher discretion., Bureaucracies are political institutions that are capable of representing the interests of citizens just as legislatures or executives do (Mosher 1969; Rourke 1984). Some bureaucracies are designed to be active [...]

Byline: JOHN Bohte (1), KENNETH J. Meier (2) Keywords: organizational performance; span of control; education; organization structure; organizational effectiveness Abstract: Scholars of public organizations have long been interested in understanding how organizational structures shape organizational performance. This is an important question because if links between structure and performance exist, then manipulating organizational structures may lead to improvements in organizational performance. This study examines how one structural attribute, span of control, shapes performance in a large set of public organizations. Specifically, our focus is on how structure shapes performance when task difficulty varies. We hypothesize that structural attributes such as spans of control have limited effects on performance when organizations address very easy or very difficult tasks. When organizations address moderately difficult tasks, the impact of structure on performance should be greatest. Our analysis of 678 school districts in Texas covering the years 1994 to 1997 reveals that span of control variables have the greatest impact on student performance under moderately difficult task scenarios. Author Affiliation: (1) Dept. of Political Science, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, 48309 (2) Dept. of Political Science, Texas A&amp M University, College Station, TX, 77843, 409-845-4232 Article History: Registration Date: 13/10/2004

Excise taxes are popular as regulatory policy. This popularity stems in part from their simple disincentive mechanism: higher prices mean less consumption of the regulated item. The size of the disincentive, however, may not be the whole story since governments rarely regulate without sending signals about why the regulation is necessary. This paper integrates signaling into a model designed to test the effectiveness of regulatory policies. By focusing on how signaling can be used in conjunction with more traditional policy analysis models, we offer a more complete understanding of regulation.

Objective. Two theories of politics predict that jurisdictional size will have different consequences for minority representation. Ostrom and colleagues suggest that representation is enhanced in smaller jurisdictions. The work of Giles and Olson, in contrast, implies that smaller jurisdictions will reduce minority representation. We expect that smaller jurisdictions will have fewer Latino representatives on school hoards and on the teaching faculty, and these representatives will have less impact on Latino students. Methods. We combine census data with school district data for 1,039 school districts in Texas. Results. All other things being equal, small school districts have lower levels of Latino representation on the school board and on faculties; the representation that does exist is less effective in generating benefits for the Latino community. Conclusions. Jurisdiction size is an important variable for quantity and quality of representation., Representation, minority representation in particular, is one of the most extensively researched concepts in political science. The result is an impressive body of scholarship that considers the relationship between minority [...]

Research on representative bureaucracy has failed to deal with whether or not representative bureaucracies produce minority gains at the expense of nonminorities. Using a pooled time-series analysis of 350 school districts over six years, this study examines the relationship between representative bureaucracy and organizational outputs for minorities and nonminorities. Far from finding that representative bureaucracy produces minority gains at the expense of nonminorities, this study finds both minority and nonminority students perform better in the presence of a representative bureaucracy. This finding suggests an alternative hypothesis to guide research: that representative bureaucracies are more effective than their nonrepresentative counterparts.

Principal-agent models, derived from such disparate disciplines as law, finance, accounting, and economics, have become the basis for an extensive set of studies relating bureaucracy to elected officials (see Mitnick [...]

Objectives. This study examines the effectiveness of state and federal taxes in reducing the consumption of cigarettes, estimates the impact of government health warnings, and shows how warnings and taxes interact. Methods. By means of a pooled time-series analysis from 1955 through 1994 with the 50 states as units of analysis, the impact of excise taxes on cigarette consumption for several different models and econometric techniques is assessed. Results. From 1955 through 1994, increases in state taxes were effective in reducing cigarette use. Federal tax increases, however, appear to have been more effective. This difference is partly the result of the 'bootlegging' of cigarettes across state lines and the size of the increases in the federal tax. Cigarette consumption also declined when health warning labels were added. Conclusions. Increases of taxes on cigarettes are associated with declines in the consumption of tobacco. Because of inflation, increased health concerns, and the declining percentage of smokers, however, large reductions in consumption require large tax increases. (Am J Public Health. 1997:87: 1126-1130)

In 'Democracy and Bureaucracy' Meier argues that the bureaucracy problem in the United States is, in reality, a governance problem. Framed in this way, he argues the key problem are failures of electoral institutions rather than failures of bureaucracy. As a result, public administration needs to broaden its focus and include the study of electoral institutions as well as the study of bureaucracy. Effective governance is possible only if students of public administration return to their reformist roots and address both bureaucratic and electoral institutions. As a starting point in such a debate, Meier proposes a series of reforms for U.S. political institutions., It hasn't been my aim to tell people what to think...I have tried, rather, to tell them how to think -- specifically, of course, about public administration. The United States [...]