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Bureaucratic discretion continues to be one of a public administrator's primary powers while at the same time being one of their most controversial. Used in a positive way, bureaucratic discretion can enhance social equity; however, this practice can create administrative legitimacy dilemmas. As such, this paper conceptually discusses the theoretical position of public administrators that contributes to their engagement in legitimacy dilemmas, which is further complicated by the tenets of New Public Service. We argue that if public administrators are engaged in authentic interactions with the public and use their discretion to reflect the interests of the public, then they are engaged in truly democratic governance. We place this argument in the context of achieving social equity and highlight an avoided question in public administration. Finally, recommendations for future research are offered as a means progressing the social equity agenda in public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do citizens want? How do citizens think public servants should behave? Although such questions seem straightforward, little is known about the values citizens expect public servants to uphold. This paper therefore identifies such values through extensive coding of qualitative data from representative samples of United States (n = 395), Dutch (n = 369), and South Korean (n = 379) citizens. Surprisingly, and contrasting to assumptions in the literature on citizen satisfaction, citizens hardly value effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability. In contrast, we found that the top three universal values that citizens desire from public servants are serviceability, responsiveness, and dedication. These values are generic across countries, age, gender, and education level. However, some values are more important in some countries than in others. These differences show the influence of a country's longstanding public administrative tradition and its current situation. Our findings challenge scholars and government officials to rethink what citizens want from their civil servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of legal training and experience upon the behavior of policy decision makers has been a source of both academic and popular concern. This paper is a preliminary investigation of factors that might contribute to an undue influence of legal training on governmental policy making. The specific focus of this paper is higher-level federal executives in the career service. The distribution and number of high level executives with legal backgrounds are determined, and comparisons between legally-trained executives and executives from other backgrounds are made with respect to career patterns and attitudinal orientations. Executives with legal backgrounds are found to vary marginally on some specific characteristics, but there do not appear to be any systematic differences between groups which would lead to a variation in policy-making behavior. These findings do not support the assertion that lawyers dominate executive institutions of government. Lawyers do not appear to dominate the federal bureaucracy in numbers, nor do the data suggest that they are particularly different from other executives. Legal training, therefore, does not appear to have a direct, unmediated impact on the formation of public policy, at least to the extent that administrative agencies are involved in such policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is adapted from the presidential address delivered at the 1985 national conference of ASPA. President Naomi Lynn invites ASPA members to join in a celebration that will continue through the end of this decade. This period is important because it includes anniversaries of significant events in our country's and ASPA's histories. Although public service is going through a difficult period, it has much in which to take pride. ASPA members are encouraged to support the oral history project inaugurated this year in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the Society's founding. PAR and the Committee on Three Centuries also solicit papers to stimulate debate and reflection on the constitutional bicentennial. ASPA's greatest challenge is to apply the understandings and ideals of the past to the ever-changing, practical problems of the present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been several studies this decade of union-management relations in the U.S. federal government. Most of these studies have presented an optimistic view of federal labor relations, particularly with regard to the changes since 1962 and President John F. Kennedy's Executive Order 10988. However, to date, no empirical longitudinal studies of federal labor relations have been published. It is the purpose of this paper, drawing from data collected in a longitudinal multiple-case study, to examine the most important changes occurring in six federal union-management relationships between 1972 and 1976. The major causes of the changes and discussion of specific problem areas will be presented. It is particularly appropriate now to review this area in light of President Jimmy Carter's civil service reorganization and the changes in federal service labor relations resulting from the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. The paper will also discuss whether either the flow form of labor relations, which is common in the private sector, or the generational form, which is common in much of the public sector, is applicable to the federal service.

The social composition of government bureaucracies has important implications for social and political systems. In this paper comparisons are made between national samples of federal civilian employees and nonfederal employees on key social and occupational characteristics. Federal employees differ modestly from the general employed public in several respects, one of the most important being the bureaucracy's openness to minorities. Nevertheless, the similarities between the two work forces are perhaps more striking. Furthermore, federal workers have had extensive experience in a representative variety of nonfederal pursuits. There is little persuasive evidence that federal workers are not broadly reflective of the American social Structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the factors and issues related to the personnel mobility in government agencies of the U.S. The author focuses on the central policy considerations likely to be faced in any wideranging effort to manage mobility in the public service more effectively at all levels. The author refers to the National Conference on Mobility in Public Service, addressed by the American Society for Public Administration at Arden House, Harriman, New York. According to the author certain baseless assumptions were taken in the conference. As freedom of movement is a basic democratic value, it was therefore taken for granted that only a national crisis accompanied by almost total consensus would warrant the solution of mobility problems by such devices as restricted occupational choice, arbitrarily channeled education, forced labor, and so on. Talking about the geographical mobility in the U.S., the author says that the rural-urban migration is continuing to result in drastic reduction of the farm population.

Age discrimination is a systemic problem of the American administrative state that undermines both the caliber and performance of the U.S. federal government workforce. A theory is proposed, anchored on discrimination against age‐eligible employees (age 40 and over) representing a social identity group, to explain how status‐group power differentials between supervisors and non‐supervisors within U.S. federal agencies explain the organizational incidence of formal discrimination complaints. The theory predicts that the incidence of age discrimination formal complaints is declining in the share of supervisory personnel who are discrimination age‐eligible while increasing in the share of non‐supervisory personnel members who belong to this group. Evidence is obtained for these hypotheses using objective data on Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's age discrimination formal complaints about an unbalanced panel of 130 U.S. federal agencies between 2010 and 2019. The empirical evidence underscores the structural challenges to combatting ageism within the U.S. federal government workforce during an era of an intergenerational personnel change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over a century, the value of employee protections and limits on direct political control has been the sine qua non of a merit‐based bureaucracy for the US public service. Such assumptions are at odds with the desire of populist governments to exert control over institutions of governance. This tension emerged during the Trump administration. Trump's Schedule F Executive Order sought to transform much of the career public service into political appointees, allowing them to be removed if they were not performing according to the president's goals. In the chaotic last days of the Trump administration, the order was not implemented, but Schedule F offers both a glimpse of an alternative process for public management policymaking that excludes the field of public administration, as well as a potential harbinger for the future of the US civil service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although public administration scholars have long studied discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity, class, and gender, little to no research exists on whether street‐level bureaucrats provide differential services based on the religious identity of their constituents. This article reports the results from a large‐scale correspondence study of street‐level bureaucrats in the American public school system. The authors emailed the principals of a large sample of public schools and asked for a meeting, randomly assigning the religious (non)affiliation of the family. To get at potential causal mechanisms, religious belief intensity was also randomly assigned. The findings show evidence of substantial discrimination against Muslims and atheists on a par with, and sometimes larger than, the racial discrimination found in previous studies. These individuals are substantially less likely to receive a response, with discrimination growing when they signal that their beliefs are more intense. Protestants and Catholics face no discrimination unless they signal that their religious beliefs are intense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the author, public service, in the minds of many, is synonymous with government service. However, this would omit the important role played by the host of nonprofit organizations, somewhat unique to the United States, that perform functions which are of a public character. Concerns about the public service, especially the federal service, stem in part from the debate on the role of government. The career service in particular has been caught up in the crossfire of political debate and campaign slogans. In its broadest sense, public service is a concept, an attitude, a sense of duty, even a sense of public morality. These attributes are basic to democratic society-attributes lacking or of low priority in an authoritarian society. Policies, however well conceived, will fail if poorly administered. It was Alexander Hamilton, an American Statesman, in the Federalist Papers who stated as an axiom that "A government ill executed, whatever might be the theory, is in practice poor government." In the federal government, it is the President who must bear the prime responsibility to assure that measures enacted by the U.S. Congress are faithfully and effectively carried out.

The article presents information on the bureaucracy in the U.S. America is a home of frenzy. Whether it has more or less than other countries may be left to philosophers for debate, but it has its full share. Among the latest deliriums is that of waging war on the bureaucracy, now full of noise and promise. Some of the very best people of the U.S. are doing it, usually without discrimination, for discrimination takes the edge off of propaganda. The perfect case against "this new menace to civilization," the bureaucracy, was recently presented in graphic form in a Los Angeles paper. It is to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, to give as little as possible for as much as one can get. Year in and year out another branch of the bureaucracy, composed of engineers, biologists, and bacteriologists, is supplying the very best citizens with water which they can safely drink and doing this without thought of cutting any melons for themselves.

This paper describes an important and pervasive use of policy analysis as a retrograde tactic in bureaucratic politics. Employed by those opposed to a policy initiative, the retrograde tactic permits bureaucrats to delay and sometimes reverse political initiatives at various stages of the policy process through the demand for analysis. After placing the retrograde tactic into the general context of the bureaucratic environment, we focus on the case of the controversy over the appropriate size of the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve-a controversy where the demand for analysis was used as an effective retrograde tactic by opponents of expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public administration has made a major commitment to mid-curriculum internships. At least part of the rationale for that commitment is that the internship is considered an investment in the future, a way of reducing the front-end costs of learning the labyrinthine byways of complex organizations. That commitment is not inexpensive. A rough calculation of the direct cost of last summer's intern group at Indiana University cost the University, the interns, and the host agencies roughly $110,000 to support 55 interns. Applying estimated national enrollment figures, if the average direct cost of an internship is $2000 per intern, and if even half of the 20,000 students enrolled in M.P.A. degrees take an internship, then total direct cost could be somewhere around $20,000,000. Rather than focus on the monetary benefit of an internship, the question this paper attempts to explore is "what makes an internship satisfactory or unsatisfactory to the intern himself?" Certainly direct benefits may occur to an agency, to the student, and to the school itself. For example, the host organization may get a sophisticated project done at low cost.

Public employees are expected to be good stewards of public resources and engage in pro‐environmental behaviors (PEBs). Using different categorizations of PEBs, this article examines whether public employees perform these PEBs in workplace and non‐workplace settings. The article further investigates how PEBs are influenced by salient characteristics of public organizations—that is, public service motivation (PSM) and civic participation categorized as civic engagement and cognitive engagement. Data were collected through a survey of public employees in two city governments in Florida. A structural equation model was employed to test the proposed model. Findings indicate that PSM has a positive influence on workplace PEBs and similar PEBs in the non‐workplace settings. Civic engagement has a positive influence on both workplace and non‐workplace PEBs. Barriers significantly moderate the effects of PSM and cognitive engagement on workplace and non‐workplace PEBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the determinants of nonprofits' involvement in cogovernance, or the planning and design of public services, using a unique data set of park‐supporting nonprofit organizations in large U.S. cities. The results indicate that nonprofits are more likely to get involved in cogovernance when they are younger, larger, and operate in communities that are more resourceful and stable. In addition, the likelihood of nonprofits' involvement in cogovernance is negatively associated with the level of social capital and government capacity to provide corresponding public services. The article points to an emerging mode of government‐nonprofit collaboration that goes beyond the production and delivery of public services. As public managers face extensive challenges in sustaining the desired level of public services, these findings have important policy implications for efforts to promote citizen participation and cross‐sector solutions to complex social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Public service motivation (PSM) theory suggests that the alignment of values may explain sorting into public service work. Evidence suggests that people with high PSM cluster in government and nonprofit organizations. However, reliance on cross‐sectional data leaves open the question of whether observed patterns are the result of public and nonprofit organizations attracting and selecting high‐PSM people or cultivating PSM through socialization within the sector. Using longitudinal data, this article analyzes the relationship between motivational bases, such as PSM, and sorting into the public, for‐profit, and nonprofit sectors. The results indicate that PSM‐related values, measured before labor market entry, predict the sector a person will select for employment. Moreover, the effect on sector selection does not operate through some commonly cited alternative predictor of sector employment, such as college completion. Rather, PSM predicts sorting into college majors in a manner consistent with sector sorting in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tremendous attention has been paid to local election administration since the 2000 presidential election meltdown, yet policy makers still lack basic information about what happens at the polling place. One strategy to understand the interactions between citizens and street-level election bureaucrats is to turn to administrative data. Using logs collected by polling place workers, the authors analyze more than 66,000 individual incidents recorded from four different statewide elections. Such data provide novel insights and guidance for the administration of elections. Findings indicate that task scale (in terms of the number of ballots) and complexity (in terms of absentee ballots) increase the incident rate. Managerial choices about how polling places are run also matter: the use of electronic voting machines and central count processing of ballots reduce the incident rate, while splitting poll worker shifts increases it. Operator capacity, measured in terms of experience, also reduces the number of incidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores whether union commitment dampens public sector job satisfaction. By examining the connection between union commitment and two workplace attributes that are presumed to be more prevalent in public sector workplaces-perceptions of higher red tape and greater public service motivation-this article develops three hypotheses exploring the direct and indirect relationships between union commitment and public sector job satisfaction. The findings from a series of structural equation models indicate that union commitment directly increases members' job satisfaction, but it more prominently increases members' job satisfaction indirectly by reducing perceived red tape and enhancing public service motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pursuit of the common good must be understood from the reality that governing is ugly. The ability to grapple with situations that are ambiguous requires administrators to be cognizant of action that might be suspect but necessary to accomplish the public interest. This often requires them to become active players. John Rohr postulates that the U.S. Supreme Court's standards of strict scrutiny is one approach that could be used to justify such action. Building on this line of thinking, the strict scrutiny test can be used as a guide to shape the constitutive character of administrative statesmanship while simultaneously restraining it. The ability to balance formative action and restraint provides a different dimension to an understanding of administrative statesmanship. Even though this process is not easy, it helps administrators refrain from going beyond the mark and enables them to act like statesmen in seemingly unresolvable situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional labor has become an important topic in the study of organizational behavior, but no research has examined how it is affected in individuals' motivational bases. Public administration scholars have started to study this concept, but empirical studies are still in their infancy. Focusing on a particular type of motivational base-public service motivation (PSM), this article assesses how PSM and its three dimensions (attraction to policy making, commitment to public interest, and compassion) affect two common emotional labor activities (surface acting and deep acting). Using data from a survey of certified public management students, the results show that PSM is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting. Among the PSM dimensions, attraction to policy making is positively associated with surface acting; compassion is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting; and commitment to public interest is not associated with surface acting or deep acting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the use of pay-for-performance systems in the United States government. It is noted that such systems are not unique to the U.S. Several previous studies on the topic are cited and the results of a meta-analysis are presented, which indicate that these systems typically do not work well. The history of pay-for-performance systems in the U.S. is discussed, including the Merit Pay System which was part of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, the Performance Management and Recognition System (PMRS), which lasted from 1984 to 1991, and 21st-century approaches used by the U.S. military and the Department of Homeland Security.

This article distinguishes the competing interpretations of the politics–administration dichotomy, noting that as, originally framed, it was intended to detach partisan politics and patronage from sound public management. Waldo, the author suggests, concerned himself with the later, more expansive conception of the dichotomy, which included the process of policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of 9/11 have influenced policy making in public administration. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Department of Homeland Security, contained language that empowered the secretary of homeland security and the director of the Office of Personnel Management to establish a personnel management system outside the normal provisions of the federal civil service. Why did civil service reform succeed as part of this legislation when previous attempts at large-scale reform had failed? A case analysis of the enactment of civil service reform in the Homeland Security Act points to theories of policy emergence and certain models of presidential and congressional policy making. In this case, civil service reform became associated with national security instead of management reform. An assessment of the rhetorical arguments used to frame this policy image offers a powerful explanation for the adoption of the personnel management reforms in the Homeland Security Act. This case has implications for understanding how policy makers might approach future management reform agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government contracting, especially for information technology products and services, has accelerated in recent years in the United States. Drawing on the insights of privatization studies, the authors examine the economic and political rationales underpinning government decisions to contract out e-government services. This article tests the extent to which economic and political rationality influence governments’ contracting decisions using data from multiple sources: a survey conducted by National Association of State Chief Information Officers, a survey by the National Association of State Procurement Officers, the Council of State Legislatures, and macro-level state data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Important factors affecting the state-level contracting decision are population size, market size, the competitiveness of the bidding process, the professional management of contracts, the partisan composition of legislatures, and political competition. Political rationales appear to play a major role in state contracting decisions. Some arguments associated with markets and economic rationality are clearly politically motivated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking back on the twentieth century, the American public has witnessed numerous incidents of unethical behavior by a variety of federal, state, and local government officials. Ongoing cases of political and bureaucratic corruption raise questions about what governments are doing to prevent these ‘ethical lapses’. Most state governments have comprehensive ethics laws and ethics commissions to enforce these laws. Very few studies have examined the role of ethics commissions in state government. This article stems from research conducted during 1997–98 involving more than 60 anonymous interviews with ethics officials and stakeholders in Connecticut, Florida, and New York. This analysis reveals that ethics commissions are instruments and symbols, policemen and consultants, politicians and neutral technicians, and interpreters of and prisoners to the ethics laws. The article concludes with 10 recommendations to improve ethics enforcement and the ethics- building capacity of state governments as society enters the next millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reform is a common theme in American public administration. During the twentieth century at least 12 major administrative reforms have taken place at the federal level and countless others in state and local governments. Frequently, these reforms have addressed the operation of public personnel management systems. Recent efforts associated with the reinventing government movement, for example, have proposed numerous alterations to civil service rules and procedures, and many jurisdictions have implemented significant changes in their personnel practices. This article examines the extent to which these kinds of personnel reforms have been implemented by state governments. A reform index is developed to document the considerable variation among the states in their approach to personnel practices. Several state characteristics are associated with scores on this index, including legislative professionalism, which bears a positive relationship to reform, and the level of unemployment within a state and the proportion of state employees associated with public employee unions, which are both negatively associated with reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an exploratory study of ethical reasoning among public administrators in Russia. Survey interviews and focus group follow-ups with civil servants participating in graduate training programs at the Russian Academy of Public Service provide information about their preferred mode of ethical reasoning; the demographic, attitudinal, organizational, and professional factors associated with that reasoning; and the behavioral choices implied. Using a sample of 113 public officials who represent a broad spectrum of regions in Russia, this study assesses moral reasoning, examines variables associated with alternative models, and compares these responses with findings from studies conducted in Poland and the United States. Based on this exploratory study, we suggest implications for theory, research, and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how members of Congress refer to individuals in government on the House floor. Using content analysis, floor speeches from the 103rd and 104th Congresses were examined to determine the way in which terms such as "bureaucrats" and "public servants" were manipulated in floor speeches, and the political gain members seek to achieve from these moves. The data show that the Republican takeover of Congress led to a marked change in the tone of debate, and a sharp increase in pejorative discussions of individuals in government. Republicans tended to use bureaucrats in legislative debate in their efforts to shape the debate over the size and role of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a representative democracy, we assume the populace exerts some control over the actions and outputs of government officials, ensuring they comport with public preferences. However, the growth of the fourth branch of government has created a paradox: Unelected bureaucrats now have the power to affect government decisions (Meier 1993; Rourke 1984; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). In this article, the author relies on two competing theories of bureaucratic behavior-representative-bureaucracy theory and Niskanen's budget-maximization theory-to assess how well the top ranks of the federal government represent the demands of the citizenry. Focusing on federal-spending priorities, the author assesses whether Senior Executive Service (SES) members mirror the attitudes of the populace or are likely to inflate budgets for their own personal gain. Contrary to the popular portrayal of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat (Niskanen 1971), the author finds these federal administrators prefer less spending than the public on most broad spending categories, even on issues that fall within their own departments' jurisdictions. As such, it may be time to revise our theories about bureaucratic self-interest and spending priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pursues a detailed understanding of strategic considerations in large-scale partnership negotiations that have implications for public service over the long term. Specifically, this study focuses upon the strategic context of negotiation between governmental entities and private firms as fundamental to partnership viability. Metaphorical comparison between U.S. patent policy (especially as it pertains to cutting-edge biotechnical and digital information issues) and public-private partnership is used to coax out new insight about the latter. The first section sketches an outline of U.S. patent policy as a means of generating analogous questions that can structure discussion of strategy in public-private partnerships. The second section explores the intricacies of public partnership by responding to four questions derived from the patent metaphor. In probing the implications of strategic partnership issues for public managers, the final section defines new capacity-building roles that are consistent with governance as an emerging form of public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the federal merit system and challenges for the public service sector in the United States for the 21st century. Ensuring that the federal service of the future has the flexibility, the vigor, and the focus to be effective is a formidable task. It involves new analyses of some of the most closely held tenets of federal service: merit, the statutory bases of the current system, and the ideas of risk, reward, and accountability in the public service. The ever-changing global economy, dramatic technological change, and increased expectations about government performance demand a new attention to the complex set of public-service skills and capacity. The foundation of the public service--its human capital--must be strong, capable, and committed. The presence of this talent cannot be assumed, however. The reality of the marketplace is that there is a strong competition for talent, and the public sector must compete with the private sector for human resources with increasingly complex skills.

This article presents the results of a study investigating the efficacy of political influence over bureaucracy in regard to banking in the United States. The relationship between elected officials and unelected bureaucrats is one of recurring interest to students of government. It is widely asserted that the first generation of public administration scholars believed that bureaucrats could and should be absolutely controlled by elected officials. Politicians made policy, and civil servants applied their neutral, nonpartisan expertise to carry out the wishes of their elected superiors in the most efficient manner possible. This politics/administration dichotomy, however, later gave way to decidedly less optimistic theories about the ability of elected officials to control the bureaucracy. According to this literature, bureaucrats enjoyed considerable, if not almost complete, independence from the "macropolitical" system. Three federal agencies oversee the safety and soundness of the nation's 12,500 commercial banks: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Reserve, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. INSET: Methodology.

The article examines the management evaluation of intergovernmental personnel programs in the public administration sector in the U.S. Program performance at all levels of the intergovernmental system would benefit from improved understanding of the variety of indirect management techniques and their associated implications. Perhaps the most realistic and valuable metaphor for the evaluation of intergovernmental programs is that this activity itself become part of a broader societal learning system, rather than a one-shot, clear-cut assessment of success or failure. If this metaphor of learning is appropriate, and if key public officials can be convinced to take it seriously, then program evaluation can become a constructive, long-term catalyst for change.

This article discusses the essay that identifies negative aspects of government service in the U.S. The essay begins with a discussion of negative public attitudes toward government, the source of much of the frustration of officials at all levels of government across the country. The essay also included a description of how the news media, interest groups and candidates for elective office fuel these negative public attitudes. The procedural demands of policy making in an open society , the adversarial nature of decision making, the stress on self and family and the financial sacrifice is also discussed.

This article discusses the active management of conflict in the process and structure of federally-mandated, and state or locally administered activities in the U.S. The general failure of administrators at each level of government to achieve a positive perspective on conflict and its management is itself a barrier to effective intergovernmental management. The source of intergovernmental conflict is generally an issue that can be characterized as arising due to some structural condition (national vs. state goals) or process event (political changes). The output of conflict is change—parties engage in conflict behavior in an attempt to change their relative positions with respect to some mutually desired source (e.g., power, position, time, money). The final element in our conceptual framework consists of three general modes of conflict and conflict management which are drawn from the work of Louis Pondy: The first is bargaining, the second general mode of conflict is bureaucratic an the final mode is systems conflict. Planning reform demonstration are needed in order to facilitate rather than inhibit conflict management. Conflict management, as Kilmann and Thomas point out, involves three interrelated steps: (1) recognition; (2) diagnosis; and (3) intervention

This article addresses the deteriorating ability of federal agencies in the U.S. to assure the execution of public policy through changing administrations. Many of the major features of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 have the potential to improve the operations of the federal government. The Reform Act created a new personnel system, the Senior Executive Service for the 7,000 federal executives below presidential appointees. Therefore, the key to effective continuity of government operations and related citizen confidence has been and continues to be the career executive.

This article examines the administrative life patterns of staff agencies of the Executive Office of the President in the U.S. All agencies, including presidential staff agencies, display survival instincts. Survival, however, is but a necessary condition for agencies. Most of which want to prosper and grow so they might better serve the public interest and presidential needs. The present article is concerned with the different and variable administrative life patterns of presidential staff agencies.

This article addresses several issues pertaining to the civil service reform proposal of U.S. President Jimmy Carter as of July 1978. When the President proposes in a nationally televised speech the most sweeping reform of the Civil Service System since it was created nearly 100 years ago, and when he labels this the centerpiece of government reorganization during his term in office, the nation has an unparalleled opportunity to examine the dominant operational premises of public administration. The Carter statement combines a bleak view of human nature, the needs of civil servants at work, and how managers can best perform their jobs, with an incredible contradiction concerning the treatment of whistle-blowers--those who bring to public attention what the President terms as gross management errors and abuses. Many have recommended the establishment of a group of senior managers who move from agency to agency in accordance with specific program needs of the moment. It thus seems attractive at first glance to read that a group of about 9000 managers above grade GS-15 will be held accountable for program success, goal-setting and achievement. Indeed, there is little in the concept of increased mobility with which to find fault. The problem lies in the theory of how the Senior Executive Service ought to be managed.

In this article the author presents his views on the role and importance of professionals in public services. The author remarks that one of the most significant trends in recent decades has been the growing dominance of those within government in the framing, the shaping, as well as the carrying out of public policies and programs. In the fields of health, housing, urban renewal, transportation, welfare, education, poverty, and energy it has been, in very great measure, people in government service, or closely associated with it, acting on the basis of their specialized and technical knowledge, who first perceived the problem, conceived the program, initially urged it on president and Congress, went on to help lobby it through to enactment, and then saw to its administration. The imbalance of professional representation in political or quasi-political positions is tremendous. Many professions whose numbers far exceed the lawyers are totally excluded from the judiciary and go virtually unrepresentative in legislatures and top levels of the executive branches, such as teaching, medicine, military, engineering, science, accounting, and others.

The article focuses on the role and influence of mental health professionals in government agencies in the U.S. Unlike general health care with its dependence on the private sector, the development of the mental health field largely has been the result of government action. Stimulated by the availability of state matching funds, local governments also have become heavily involved in mental health. The role of government as a major employer of mental health professionals is illustrated by a study of 10,000 mental health professionals whose training during the years 1948-1968 was supported at least in part by the National Institute of Mental Health. This dependence of the mental health field upon government is not reflected in the graduate education of mental health professionals. For the mental health professional who is also an administrator, there are several special attitudinal issues. The values of caring, support and therapy are often inconsistent with the exercise of power, the directive and perhaps authoritative stance sometimes necessary for successful administration.

The reciprocal relations of science with technology, and of both with society, had been an ongoing debate for long. When governments throughout the world spend billions of dollars on research and development, the centrality of science and technology to societal needs is no longer a subject of debate. As science and technology have become a self-conscious matter for government and societal concern, so also have scientists. Their knowledge proved relevant to the economic and political concerns of officials in government. Working for the government is not uncommon among scientists. A significant number are employed in government laboratories and in administrative positions in federal agencies. Despite the large numbers of scientists employed by the federal government and the growing technical orientation and involvement of many federal agencies, a career in government still poses some difficult value conflicts and barriers to policy influence for a scientist. The most important social aspect of the scientific profession is the orientation of scientists toward their work and peers.

In this article the author focuses on the role and problems of the professional accountants in civil services in the U.S. According to the author no institution, either in private or public service, can operate properly without the assistance of accountants. They fill a number of management needs that are essential in all enterprises. Here the author provides some idea of the extensive use of professional accountants in the federal government. The primary functions of management accountants are to assist the managers in carrying out their responsibilities effectively and economically, and to provide a proper accounting for the use of financial and other resources that have been entrusted to the organization. In recent years the audit function has been greatly extended beyond concern with accountability for funds and other resources and financial reports. In government regulation, professional accountants play an important role when they participate in the regulatory processes by developing, prescribing, and auditing financial and other data from private organizations subject to regulation.

The article analyses the increasing participation of economists in government services in the U.S. Most of these economists do technical work such as gathering and interpreting wage statistics in the Labor Department and forecasting future crop prices in the Agriculture Department. It is the work of these economists that is most likely to affect the scope and shape of public programs. Some studies show that, compared to other social scientists, economists are disproportionately represented. It is not clear precisely how many of these economists are involved with analyzing policy, but economists do hold positions which give them the potential to influence public policy decisions. Though economists are well represented in government, it is difficult to know how much influence they have had on public policy. Economics stands more for a particular way of looking at policy alternatives than for particular policies. Whatever the extent of their influence, economists' disproportionate representation in government suggests that those interested in public policy should understand their characteristic mode of thinking.

The article comments on federal civil service in the U.S. The federal civil service is now experiencing its first major retrenchment in forty years. The active buildup of the Vietnam and Great Society years has been replaced by job freezes and Reductions-in Force. The 1970s have ushered in a change in federal priorities. Whereas the Johnsonian Great Society emphasized social change, equity, responsiveness, and representativeness, President Richard Nixon's New Federalism appears to foreshadow a reduced federal social programming role and an administrative model stressing economy, efficiency, productivity, and executive control. Yet just as the Administration is taking stock of the federal social program inventory and administrative apparatus, so it is important for those committed to a different conception of the rate of federal intervention in promoting social change to look back and assess the federal experience during the last decade in an attempt to help define new and more viable strategies for change.

The article focuses on the administrative decentralization and political power. By mid-50s it was possible to discern emerging conflicts of doctrine and practice among those who previously applauded and defended bureaucrats. A major shift of outlook and values in governmental design seemed to be taking place. By the middle of the 19th century, however, legislative supremacy, the long ballot and the spoils system resulted in widespread disillusionment, which in turn gave impetus to efforts to take administration out of politics by lodging it in independent boards and commissions and by introducing the merit system to break the hold of parties on the bureaucracies. Different segments of the population feel differentially disadvantaged by the governmental machinery in operation at any given moment and agitate for structural changes to improve their position. It has long been recognized that much public policy is shaped largely by clusters of bureaus, their organized clienteles and legislative committees and legislators specializing in each public function.

The bulk of public technical, administrative, and staff employees are recruited from university campuses. The attitudes of American college students toward public employment vary widely on the basis of the level of government under con- sideration, with all public employment viewed less favorably than private work. These attitudes toward civil service careers are influenced by a variety of determinants such as sex, socioeconomic condition, perceptions of "success," the motivation to "get ahead or take a top job," or assumptions about the "monotony" of public employment. A predictive model is presented which attempts to account for these determinants of attitudes toward government work and to demonstrate the relationship between student attitudes and the ultimate characteristics of our civil services, and hence the quality of public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a response to criticisms to the authors' article entitled "Asian Americans in the Public Service: Success, Diversity, and Discrimination," published in one of the 1994 issues of the periodical "Public Administration Review." Christopher Daniel claims that "statistical disparities... shed little light on this issue [job discrimination] because plausible alternatives to the discrimination hypothesis can be formulated." He asserts that differences in linguistic abilities, cultural backgrounds and occupational choices between Asian immigrants and white civil servants probably explain many of the disparities we described in our previous article. In this reply, we argue that these differences, while real, are inadequate to explain why Asian Americans remain in lower grades that similarly educated and experienced whites in the federal civil service. We conclude that discrimination provides a more persuasive explanation for the disparities that the plausible alternatives be proposes. Daniel argues that "education's contribution to productivity is often contingent upon linguistic and cultural contexts, so immigration can devalue human capital." His hypothetical Vietnamese attorney's legal education does not transfer well to the United States and his hypothetical Chinese computer programmer's spoken English and interpersonal style limit his advancement possibilities.

This article comments on the article "Asian Americans in the Public Service: Success, Diversity, and Discrimination," by Pan Suk Kim and Gregory Lewis, published in one of the 1994 issue of the periodical "Public Administration Review," where in the authors noted that Asian Americans experience discrimination within the federal service, suggested that the problem is pervasive and serious and proposed remedies. This writer has personally witnessed at least two incidents of employment discrimination against Asian Americans. Neither of these episodes involved federal personnel, but it seems reasonable that the federal service is not totally immune to prejudices evident elsewhere in society. However, Kim and Lewis's statistics shed little light on such discrimination's pervasiveness. Anti-Asian discrimination may not be as important a federal phenomena as their article concludes. Kim and Lewis's lucidly presented statistics can be interpreted in varying ways. Thee alternative interpretation which follows may also have implications for identification of discrimination against other groups, such as women, Hispanics and African Americans. Using 1990 and 1992 statistics, Kim and Lewis describe differences between Asian Americans and nonminority whites. Asian Americans make up 2.6 percent of the civilian work force but constitute less than 1 percent of municipal officials.

The article discusses ubiquitous anomie, that is, bureaucrat bashing that throughout the federal service. Civil servants by themselves cannot do much to improve the situation because their situation is the effect not the cause. The cause lies in ideological dissensus within the political stratum, profound disagreements over equality, democracy and hence the role of government, disagreements that create conflicting expectations that no conceivable cadre of civil servants can meet. What is possible is to approach better understanding of why there is and will continue to be this ubiquitous anomie and to encourage members of the public service to ameliorate what they alone cannot change. When Max Weber provided the classical definition of bureaucracy, scholar Irving Spitzberg emphasized two features: security of tenure and monopoly of expertise. In the U.S., this monopoly, though it never existed entirely in a system of checks and balances, has been shattered by the rise of policy analysis. All around the country, in think-tanks, consulting firms, universities, state and local governments, congressional staffs and elsewhere, there are rival teams of analysts who have recently been or expect soon to be in government. They know as much as those in the bureaucracy.