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Much recent work in the study of public administration has emphasized new challenges and relatively unusual aspects of management. However, it is likely that the core features of traditional public administration play a crucial role, particularly regarding the delivery of performance. The most venerable of these aspects of public management have to do with "internal" management. We focus here on a cluster of key, intertwined management practices: setting challenging but feasible goals, building trust through credible commitments, encouraging employee participation, and providing feedback. We examine the relationship between such internal management at the mid-level, as perceived by subordinates rather than the managers themselves, and educational performance for more than 1,100 schools in the New York City school system over a 3-year period. The results indicate that internal management matters, often sizably, for delivering educational outcomes. The findings are robust to autoregressive specifications and the purging of halo effects, and they hold across multiple performance measures. Managers' setting challenging goals appears to be especially important in generating educational results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factors influencing managerial goals and decision-making processes have been debated for decades among public administration scholars. Previous literature has explained goal setting through theories of performance gaps, bureaucratic control, and isomorphic rationality. However, there exists no direct empirical test of these theories to determine which theoretical expectation may have more or less weight with managers when setting organizational goals. Using an original survey of university presidents, this study tests how public managers prioritize competing performance goals. Findings suggest that the goal setting decisions of these public managers is primarily driven by political control mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a substantial growth in the large-N quantitative study of public management and performance. Much of the progress can be attributed to a small number of data sets on local governments in a few countries. The range of data sets suggests the validity of the overall hypothesis of management affecting performance, but the precise findings also vary across these and other contexts. These various and sometimes conflicting findings suggest that additional gains might be made through developing a theory of context and how context affects the management-performance linkage. This article seeks to take some initial steps in providing such a theory by incorporating such contextual variables as political context (unitary versus shared powers, single- or multiple-level, corporatist versus adversarial, with or without a formal performance appraisal system), environmental context (extent of complexity, turbulence, and also munificence; presence versus absence of social capital), and internal context (extent of goal clarity and consistency, organizational centralization versus decentralization, and degree of professionalism). The theory presents context as a set of variables that condition the impact of management in an interactive model. The theory seeks to unify the existing findings and present a series of hypotheses for further empirical testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including bureaucratic politics, managerial choices and organizational performance, and public sector accountability.

Herbert Simon, in his 1946 essay 'The Proverbs of Administration,' indicted public administration as having conflicting and contradictory theories and an absence of a knowledge base that could provide a guide to practice. Simon proposed that public administration define concepts, adopt efficiency as its objective, focus on the study of decision making, and construct models that could predict efficient results. This 75th-anniversary article revisits Simon's essay in light of contemporary public administration. It examines the progress that has been made and what still needs to be accomplished, and it ends with a list of barriers to further progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]