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The article focuses on continuing evolution of managing behaviours and results (MBR) and related developments. MBR stands for managing behaviors and results and, in the operational sense, is basically a hybrid of management-by-objectives (MBO) and behavioral performance appraisal. Though the article is about MBR and related developments in the U.S. government on the topic, the MBR theory has no organizational boundaries. Moreover, the American public's disenchantment with government performance and the crisis of accountability are not limited to the federal government. There are various specific suggestions described in the article that can be offered for use by the federal government. Some of them are: Uniform rules straightjacket the natural process of managing performance. Secondly, agencies should find ways to make paper work, not paperwork, in managing performance. Thirdly, agencies should consider the long-term costs of merit-based salary progressions before implementing this form of pay-for-performance.

Scholars have engaged in an ongoing dialogue about the relationships among management, politics, and law in public administration. Collaborative governance presents new challenges to this dynamic. While scholars have made substantial contributions to our understanding of the design and practice of collaborative governance, others suggest that we lack theory for this emerging body of research. Law is often omitted as a variable. Scholarship generally does not explicitly include collaboration as a public value. This article addresses the dialogue on management, politics, and law with regard to collaborative governance. It provides an overview of the current legal framework for collaborative governance in the United States at the federal, state, and local levels of government and identifies gaps. The institutional analysis and development framework provides a body of theory that incorporates rules and law into research design. The article concludes that future research on collaborative governance should incorporate the legal framework as an important variable and collaboration as a public value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The article examines the effect of administrative law to lawyers and public administrators in the U.S. Lawyers and managers, with their common personality traits, can work more effectively together for the common good. The inevitable result of excessive rules and regulations is to kill personality at its source and substitute robotism for initiative, motivation, and creativity. Rules cause people to stop thinking: discretion requires them to think. The inevitable result of excessive legalism is stagnation and institutional decline. What the United States needs more than anything else at this juncture is an aggressive, self-confident, and balanced corps of administrative leadership at all three levels of government.

The article the article presents a study in public administration that discusses the implementation of interorganizational policy in a theoretical perspective in the U.S. Interorganizational problems are caused, in part, by the lack of attention to and incentives for coordination among organizations. If policies or organizations set up administrative coordinating units specifically to implement such policies, these problems might be reduced. But such units might further fragment structure and inhibit the organization's ability to implement its own tasks efficiently. Thus, the problem cuts both ways.