Search

Although theories of public policy and theories of governance both seek to establish relationships between policymaking and its consequences, they do not complement each other very well. Public policy models tend to de-emphasize that which governance theories tend to emphasize: the influence on government performance of implementation, broadly described as the actions taken by those engaged in administration (including managers at all levels, those engaged in service delivery, and third-party agents) after a policy has been lawfully promulgated by elected officials and interpreted by the courts. A comparison of a recently developed theory of public sector performance with several prominent theories of policymaking suggests that multilevel governance theories can supply what continues to be the missing link in public policy theories. At the same time, governance theories might be enriched by the process modeling of public policy theories., Introduction The increasing use of 'governance' as a conceptual frame for research on the determinants of government performance has produced valuable insights into causal relationships among public choice processes, public [...]

What factors--political, cultural, historical--influence a jurisdiction's choice of governance structures? How do these structures influence managerial behavior? To what extent do the designs and the management of public policies and [...]

The 'congressional dominance' literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill., The provision of human services--services that protect, maintain, or enhance the welfare or social functioning of individuals, families, and social groups--presents difficult political and management issues. Human service provision is [...]

We expected our book to generate controversy, and Professor Lowery has not disappointed us. He takes us to task, moreover, for exactly what we propose: a systematic logic for framing [...]

Institutional reform litigation confronts public administrators with troubling dilemmas. Plaintiffs routinely accuse public officials of violating their constitutional rights. (1) Federal judges order officials to make sweeping changes to their [...]

If its academic admirers can avoid the trap of becoming a cult of programmed believers, the New Public Management (NPM) can have three constructive legacies for the field of public administration: (1) a stronger emphasis on performance-motivated administration and inclusion in the administrative canon of performance-oriented institutional arrangements, structural forms, and managerial doctrines fitted to particular contexts, in other words, advances in the state of the public management art; (2) an international dialogue on and a stronger comparative dimension to the study of state design and administrative reform; and (3) the integrated use of economic, sociological, social-psychological, and other advanced conceptual models and heuristics in the study of public institutions and management, with the potential to strengthen the field's scholarship and the possibilities for theory-grounded practice. While discussing each of these legacies, this article concentrates on the third and most controversial. The kinds of conceptual thinking that can strengthen the intellectual foundations of the field are illustrated by comparing the logic of management within the framework of competitive markets, a logic which has inspired many of New Public Management's reforms, with the logic of management within the framework of constitutional governance. While substantively different, these two styles of inquiry are surprisingly similar in their interdisciplinary use of theory to create subtle and sophisticated models of structure and strategy, with important implications for the study of bureaucracy and public management., Two Parables A traveler returns from a three-day stopover in India and entertains his friends with stories he heard there. 'Aha!' cries one of them, a publisher. 'Your stories will [...]

The article presents an editorial about public sector management, arguing that though businessmen can be effective managers of government agencies, looking into the business sector cannot provide solutions to improving governmental performance. The author argues that the main problem with public management is that the executive branch and legislative branch of government compete with each other.

By Joel F. Handler, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996. 269 pp. $29.95. In a richly-textured analysis, Joel F. Handler, Richard C. Maxwell Professor of Law at the University of [...]

As chief executive officer of the U.S. Government, President Barack Obama, in order to fulfill a promise of fiscal responsibility, has set out to achieve unprecedented transparency and efficiency of government. In effect, in Paul Light's terms, Obama has initiated a fully mobilized “war on waste” under the “watchful eye” of legislators, auditors, whistleblowers, and citizens who will be provided with unprecedented amounts of information on government operations. He had promised as much during his campaign for the presidency, but the urgency of these priorities was greatly increased by the speed and depth of the financial and economic crisis, which has necessitated mind-boggling levels of government spending and indebtedness. The unqualified commitments to efficiency and transparency have about them an aroma of inexperience and naivete, however. Public managers across the executive branches of every level of government confront the challenge of spending unprecedented increases in their budgets rapidly but wisely, crafting long-term investments that have high short-term economic impact, often with organizational capacity that was already inadequate and cannot be augmented rapidly. And they must document what they are doing and why in unprecedented detail. Whether a more effective infrastructure of administrative structures, technologies, and practices, and a government that works, materialize from a crisis-dominated, private-sector inspired, and still uncoordinated blitz of reforms, remains to be seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding Excellence in Public Administration, the report of the Task Force on Educating for Excellence in the Master of Public Administration Degree of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), has been received both well and controversially. Practitioners have responded warmly and positively to its serialization in PA Times. Most academics like it, although some have reservations, as they expressed during well-attended panels devoted to the report, which were held during the national conferences of NASPAA in 2008 and ASPA in 2009. Some of the report's recommended actions, such as those that touch on accreditation, honest advertising, programmatic clarity, and core curricula, have spurred some debate. It is worth noting, therefore, that the Task Force members, though just five in number, are broadly representative of pertinent intellectual currents. The report reveals strands of thinking that are held by constitutionalists and communalists; by technocrats and philosophers; by management scientists and political scientists; by public administrationists and public policy analysts; by those who push the hard-nosed techniques of the New Public Management and those who favor the soft-schnozzed values of the New Public Administration. This report is a first step. It is up to the professionals and professors, who are 'public administration,' to take the next steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews a report titled "Deconstructing Public Administration Empiricism," by Larry Luton from a previous issue of the journal. An overview of Luton's position on empirical methods of inquiry is offered and the authors express a general skepticism regarding the claims of objectivity made by empiricists in general. The lack of scholarly justification for Luton's arguments is also criticized. Several public administration theorists are cited in context including W. J. Bradley, K. C. Schaefer, W. R. Shadish, T. D. Cook, and D. T. Campbell.

An unresolved issue in American constitutional governance is the role of public officials in a Madisonian scheme of separated institutions sharing power Proposed answers range from broad delegation with reliance on expertise and professionalism to minimal delegation with formal checks on official discretion. In between are various pragmatic or realist views that accept discretion as both necessary and inevitable and offer normative principles of administrative conduct to guard against official abuse of power None of these answers, however satisfies criteria of constitutional legitimacy. The authors argue that such criteria can be derived by combining insights from traditional, normative literatures of public administration and from positive political theory and political economics. If the role of public managers is defined as maintaining a credible commitment to performing their duties pursuant to a precept of managerial responsibility that incorporates accountability, judgment, balance, and rationality, then, the authors argue, the Madisonian scheme of government embraced in the Constitution is complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this symposium, each paper addresses different strata in the governance framework, yet each explicitly links its findings to the larger issue of governance. Moreover, each of these papers incites curiosity as to how its findings relate to the larger literature on the specific governance concepts it considers. Specifically, it is shown that administrative structures affect resources and productivity in higher education. The papers illustrate how theory-based empirical research on the public governance and management that consistently references a broader framework can contribute to the accumulation of knowledge about public governance, management and the performances.

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]

Comments on Camilla Stivers' article 'Administration Versus Management: A Reading From Beyond the Boundaries.' Impact of the concepts, models and methods of political economics in the strengthening of the intellectual foundations of public management; Concepts, models, methods of other professional disciplines; Femininity which inhabit the human side of public management.

Belief in the resource-saving and service-enhancing potential of inter-organizational collaboration has become virtually an article of faith among resource providers, client advocates and service planners. Yet collaboration in practice encounters myriad difficulties, and successful collaborations seem to be relatively rare. In this article, we focus on providers' incentives to collaborate: why might a provider decide to reallocate effort away from independent service provision toward collaboration in service provision? We argue that careful consideration of these incentives, framed by theory, can help sponsors of collaboration to avoid choosing governance mechanisms that are likely to fail, and select instead those mechanisms with the best chances of success under the circumstances they confront. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the promotion of democratic ethos in public management. Citizen participation within public organizations; Creation of liberal institutions; Factor influencing an undemocratic public management.

The article discusses various topics on the fundamentals of terrorism published within the issue including the fundamentals of civilization, the prevention of terrorism made by the public administration and the theories to facilitate counterterrorism.

Governments everywhere are engaged in self-conscious projects of administrative and managerial improvement. Scholars of public management thus confront a fascinating array of talk, conjectures, and facts on administrative and managerial change that can be assembled from myriad sources. There are as well stylized facts, stories, conjectures, and ideological glosses – these might be termed 'theory substitutes' – that may or may not be consistent with actual developments worldwide and which are provocative in their implications. Our goal as scholars of governance and management must be to penetrate appearances to ascertain whatever lessons and meanings might lie beneath. A variety of theoretical frameworks ranging from conceptual classifications to synoptic speculations to causal accounts of state building are available for this intellectual work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on public policy programs in the United States. Assessment of the effectiveness of public policy programs; Role of policy sciences in making public policy programs effective and relevant; Observations and concerns that should define and affect any public policy program.

How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This question, of fundamental importance in the fields of politics, policy implementation, public administration, and public management, motivates the systematic study of governance. In this article, we present a logic of governance, based in political economy literatures, that might be used as a first step toward framing theory-based governance research. We also describe a methodological approach that is more likely to appropriately identify and explain relationships in governance regimes that involve activities and interactions that span more than one level of an organization or systemic structure. In addition, we explore the potential of various sources of data for governance research, recognizing that governance researchers will inevitably have to make simplifying assumptions or measure crudely things that we know are much more complex. We argue that when appropriately framed and interpreted through a logic of governance that acknowledges limitations attributable to the models, methods, and data employed, governance research is more likely to produce enduring knowledge about how, why, and with what consequences public-sector activity is structured and managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although recent public management reforms In Canada, Mexico and the USA are characterized by similar themes and vocabularies - privatization, customer service, devolution - the nature and extent of actual change reflects the national politics and administrative histories of the three countries, in brief, Canadian public management has been heavily influenced by the need for fiscal retrenchment at both national and provincial levels, Mexican public management has been influenced by the transition from oligarchic to democratic governance at federal, state and local levels, and USA public management has been preocuppied at the federal level with implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act and with the miscellaneous initiatives organized under the 'Reinventing Government' theme as it has been popularized Clinton administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructs an observation-based interpretation of policy analysis practice that is criticized by adherents of postpositivism. Shift from public law to public policy making of administrators; Critiques of policy analysis; Ethos of policy analysis; Postpositivist criticism of policy analysis; Future of policy analysis; Background on Q-methodology.

There are nearly 4 million children in the U.S. who were counted as receiving some kind of special education service from public schools in 1975, the year The Education for All Handicapped Children Act was signed into law. The purpose of this article is to assess the extent to which the system of American public education seems to be moving in the direction envisioned by the Act, that is, in the direction of increasing both educational opportunities for handicapped children and the extent to which these opportunities are provided in regular classrooms.

Focuses on the reform program for mental health services in Illinois. Features of the efforts by Jess McDonald, director of the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities; Features of the program; Definition of the state's role in mental health services; Features of the state financing of mental health services in Illinois; Use of local area networks in the program.

Provides a brief history of China's growing interest in case teaching to train managers for private and state enterprises. Signs of progress being made by Chinese training institutions in adapting methods of instruction to the demands of economic reform; Publication of the book `Case Studies of Chinese Economic Reform,' by World Bank's Economic Development Institute (EDI).

Argues in favor of restoring balance and creative tension between art and science in public policy research. Art and science in public management literature; Divergence of art and science; Public management as theology; Role of science in a new public management.

Comments on the study of policy analysis in the U.S. Lessons learned from decision makers including Winston Chruchill; Institutionalization of the policy planning in the U.S.; Judicial review of the policy planning process; Incorporation of policy analysis and policy analysts into government organizations.

Reflects on whether work programs should be voluntary or mandatory for welfare recipients in the United States. Theorists' preference for voluntary work programs; Importance of innovation in implementing work programs; Perception of mandatory work programs as a form of punishment; Status of welfare administration as a line operation.

Compares and contrasts mandatory and voluntary work programs for welfare recipients in the United States. Economic and social costs of mandatory work programs; Conditions to gaining access to welfare; Role of voluntary work programs in transforming the relationship of client to agency by confronting a client with a decision between alternative programs.

Discusses the reasons why some voluntary and mandatory work programs may or may not be successfully implemented in the United States. Policy innovations in welfare programs; Government's role in preparing the welfare recipient for self-sufficiency; Needed change in culture within the welfare agency; Importance of power in implementing innovation.

Discusses the controversy over the question of whether participation in employment and training programs should be mandatory or voluntary for various categories of welfare recipients in the United States. Background on welfare reform legislation passed by Congress; Emphasis of welfare programs on the provision of education, employment and job training services; Description of the U.S. welfare system.

Explores ways of advancing expert knowledge in the field of public administration into systematic inquiry. Current level of understanding of public management; Keys to the development of public administration as a field of inquiry; Illustration of disciplined, theory-based inquiry.

Presents a fictitious dinner conversation with a senior advisor to the United States president and a policymaker. Policy recommendations for the American family; Prospects for growth in family income; Role of income support programs in helping families facing disruptions.