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The field of public administration writes and theorizes a good deal about institutional and structural racism, but as an applied field, we don’t address some of the potential intervention strategies for dismantling racist structures and institutions. This article examines some of the prospective strategies in areas such as reparations, criminal justice, health care, and housing which have been implemented seeking to upend institutional and structural racism in this nation. Policies or programs, unless implemented, create a revolving-door syndrome. However, even when policies are developed and implemented, their efficacy is not always guaranteed, as will be seen. This article discusses how public administration can move away from the “ready, aim, study more” conundrum, and offers suggestions for moving forward to the next frontier.

For careers in public service, meritocracy is espoused and idealized with formal structures for advancement. However, career development is also relational. Scholars have long discussed the benefits of mentoring both for psychosocial support and career advancement in organizations. While mentoring is recognized as important for career advancement, less is known about the nature of mentoring in male-dominated public sector organizations. In this paper we explore how mentoring functions in the U.S. Army—a male-dominated public service organization. Using data from a mixed method study, including survey data from approximately 1,200 Army personnel and analysis of 27 focus groups with 198 participants, we find that mentoring quality matters for all employees, but it matters more for women. We also find that mentoring is gendered, shaping the career trajectories of women and men in different ways.

Justice as a concept has permeated sociolegal scholarship in the U.S. since the founding of Law and Society as a field in the mid 1960s. Much of this scholarship has focused on theoretically driven areas of justice, and here we consider empirically how such concepts have been mobilized in prominent law and society journals from their inception through 2014. Based on a meta-analysis of 438 articles from Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Law & Policy, we present a typology of the forms of justice represented in sociolegal scholarship and describe how justice concepts are used and to what ends. We find that the justice ideas presented and how they are conceptualized and operationalized is highly contextualized and perspectival, and the perspectives represented are limited. We reflect on these findings and the first fifty years of sociolegal research in the U.S. and offer suggestions for the future.

Many criminal justice institutions implement evidence-based reforms. While most scholars are aware of implementation challenges, we still know relatively little about sustainability. Using longitudinal data from criminal legal staff implementing an evidence-based reform, this paper considers: What happens during the implementation of an organizational reform that affects continued use of these reforms? Guided by an organizational change framework, findings suggest sustainability aligns with key organizational goals including legitimacy, efficiency and effectiveness. While all sites saw the reformed practices as legitimate enough to initially consider adoption, two sites never adopted, four sites toyed with reform, and two sites continued to use the reform after the study was over. This paper explores sustainability and identifies legitimacy as an important factor that affects the routinization of new practices. Transformation of organizational change initiatives into routine practices should consider efforts to build legitimacy in lieu of primarily rationalizing on the values of efficiency and effectiveness.

Current debates about bathrooms and bathroom policy contribute to a long history of how space shapes norms and expectations about privacy and gender equity in the workplace. The military serves as a significant site of discussion, particularly as the Department of Defense moves forward with efforts to integrate women into combat positions. Relying on an analysis of 27 focus groups with a total of 198 participants we collected from Special Operations in the U.S. Army, we examine bathrooms as a site where male soldiers contest and resist female integration. Using Sasson-Levy and Katz’s concept of institutional de-gendering and re-gendering, we argue that men’s resistance to gender-neutral toilets is an effort to re-gender Special Forces and maintain the hegemonic masculine culture that acutely defines it.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) reforms correctional institutions via administrative mechanisms and represents a major shift in both correctional policy and workplace practice. Using qualitative data within six prisons in one U.S. state, finding suggest that staff view PREA as an administrative, safety, and cultural burden, which creates a misalignment of institutional logics. Rather than seeing themselves as central to eliminating prison sexual misconduct/violence, staff see PREA as interfering with their “real” custody/control work. This misalignment has major implications for the productive implementation and use of PREA and the broader shift to administrative rather than legal processes for institutional reform.

This article unpacks how voters of color continue to be disenfranchised by policy and administrative action. In 2013, the US Supreme Court issued a decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck...

Every day, community corrections staff make complex decisions in an uncertain environment, affecting their workload, supervisees, and public safety. These micro-level decisions have the cumulative ...

As a field, we often relate merit and neutrality to the technical skills needed to be the “best” candidate for a job, but that was not necessarily what civil service reformers had in mind. The civil service system was meant to replace widespread political patronage, but the myth around the origins of the civil service system masked inequalities built into early testing requirements and institutionalized racial inequities in hiring practices. In this article, we argue the founding myth of bureaucratic neutrality was so powerful that it continues to reverberate in our field. We trace the current reverberations of the myth of neutrality through modern hiring practices and the contemporary legal landscape. By doing this, we present a systematic review of this rationalized myth in public employment, using an institutionalism framework. As the myth of bureaucratic neutrality continues to permeate decision-making, policy creation, and implementation, it will continue to institutionalize inequity within the field.

Interest in public values has grown considerably over the past two decades. Much of this attention reflects a growing awareness that public values hold considerable significance for citizens and public employees. Yet, despite the rapid expansion of research on public values, we still know little about the role of race in shaping and determining public employees’ values preferences. To begin remedying this gap, this article examines whether minority and white public managers in large US local governments exhibit the same value preferences when making departmental decisions. Results from a multiple group confirmatory factor analysis indicate that minority and white managers express similar preferences for traditional public administration values; however, minority managers report a stronger preference for both traditional public administration (e.g., efficiency and effectiveness) and social equity-oriented (e.g., equity, representation) values.

Frontline supervisors serve as a “critical interpretive nexus between policy creators and policy implementers” (Rudes 2012, 4). However, we still know relatively little about how subordinates view their own power in relation to their supervisors and how frontline supervisors understand and exercise their power. Focusing on street-level workers and frontline supervisors across a statewide community corrections agency, we explore perceptions, experiences, and assertions of power in the workplace. Using focus groups with thirty-two street-level probation and parole officers and focus groups and field observations of seventy-five frontline supervisors, we find that officers and frontline supervisors have widely differing views on the power of the frontline supervisory position, some of which are influenced by gender. While street-level workers align frontline supervisors with policy creators, frontline supervisors view their own role as disempowered go-betweens. Frontline supervisors compensate for their perceived lack of power in policymaking and implementation by using micro power strategies to assert their power. This study extends street-level bureaucrat theory to the role of the frontline supervisor, who in practice is distant from the upper management roles with which they are typically categorized. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Although peer navigators have gained traction within health care, they are still a relatively new feature of criminal justice–involved organizations. Based on data gathered from interviews, nonparticipant observations, and focus groups from a nonprofit that employs peer navigators to assist clients returning from prison with diagnosed mental illnesses, we argue that peer navigators play multiple roles that extend beyond the client level by influencing the organization and its interaction with the community. Importantly, we discuss these implications for the organization and suggest structure and socialization issues for the integration of criminal justice–involved peer navigators.

Exploring efforts to integrate women into combat forces in the military, we investigate how resistance to equity becomes entrenched, ultimately excluding women from being full participants in the workplace. Based on focus groups and surveys with members of Special Operations, we found most of the resistance is rooted in traditional gender stereotypes that are often bolstered through organizational policies and practices. The subtlety of these practices often renders them invisible. We refer to this invisibility as organizational obliviousness. Obliviousness exists at the individual level, it becomes reinforced at the cultural level, and, in turn, cultural practices are entrenched institutionally by policies. Organizational obliviousness may not be malicious or done to actively exclude or harm, but the end result is that it does both. Throughout this Element we trace the ways that organizational obliviousness shapes individuals, culture, and institutional practices throughout the organization.

Recent debate over integrating women into U.S. military combat units presents an opportunity to examine the gender identities and experiences of women in the military. Here, we examine the context-dependent prominence of intersecting identities including work role and gender ascribed to female soldiers in Special Operations. Using a mixed methods approach, based on 28 focus groups with 198 soldiers and a survey conducted with 1701 men and 214 women, we argue that female soldiers’ experiences refute their male colleagues’ assumptions regarding their ability to serve in combat units. The experience of identity in the workplace is different for men and women because women experience fluidity in their identity depending on with whom they are interacting and where interactions occur, whereas men experience and understand gender identity as a fixed, static trait. Although women experience the fluidity of their gender identity based on context, their male colleagues remain oblivious to the contextual nature of gender identity while also maintaining their authority in policing the boundaries of gender in the military context. Our research adds nuance to literature on identity, demonstrating the fluctuating nature of ascribed identity, which shines light on the socially constructed, artificial barriers to women’s ascension in the workplace.

Although administrative hearings are not formal litigation, the process often resembles traditional adversarial adjudication. There are two parties, one has the burden of proof, both present evidence, and there is a ruling on the legal merits. Substantively, the hearing focuses on eligibility for benefits. Procedurally, the hearing runs like traditional courtroom litigation. Based on direct observation of 45 unemployment insurance claims and interviews with administrative law judges (ALJs), I find ALJs behave differently when there is no legal counsel present. Whereas the law that governs the hearing remains the same, the process for pro se claimants is substantively different.

For careers in public service, meritocracy is espoused and idealized with formal structures for advancement – civil service laws, the general schedule classification, and the senior executive servi...

By conceptualizing street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) as the ultimate policy makers, Michael Lipsky (1980) focused attention on the interaction between citizens and the state at the organizational front lines. In subsequent years, research on SLBs provided significant insight into the interactions of SLBs and citizens. In particular, scholarship has focused on the inherently autonomous nature of street-level work and the discretion these agents of the state possess. Work in this area has traditionally relied on teachers, social workers, and police officers as sources for empirical study of how formal and informal social structures influence the use of discretion by SLBs. Recent scholarship, and coverage of New York City's stop and frisk policy, has renewed interest in the role that SLBs play in constructing justice for the citizens they encounter. In this review, we consider the street-level-bureaucracy scholarship and articulate how insights from this literature inform our current understanding of investigatory police stops, such as those stemming from the stop and frisk policy in place in New York.

Problem-solving (PS) courts continue to proliferate throughout the country, providing an ideal setting for understanding the factors affecting the use of rewards, a key part of one evidence-based practice (EBP), contingency management (CM). This study uses the concept of transportability to explore how justice practitioners implement CM. Based on roughly 400 h of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted over 34 months in six PS courts, we examine the implementation and adaptation of CM. While decisions to adopt and implement practices are concentrated at the managerial level of organizations, the implementation processes used by frontline workers provide key insight into how EBP may become an everyday workplace practice. This study finds frontline workers adapting CM principles to their environments. While it might appear as though CM implementation strays from the original evidence-based construct, local adaptations provide a foundation for understanding the factors that affect the transportability of CM into r...

This paper presents an innovative approach for engaging and assessing undergraduate students in the writing process. Through an iterative, intensive course design that includes both in-classroom and online teaching, our Capstone course integrates writing instruction as students learn a new topic, gather and analyze data, and write a research paper complete with an introduction, literature review, findings section, and discussion/conclusion. Based on five semesters of observations, survey data, content analysis, and student reflective writing, we discuss the processes students undergo while learning to research and write as social science scholars. We find student outcomes beyond what we initially expected.

Undergraduate programs across the country are working to develop students as scholars, integrating independent scholarly experiences into traditional undergraduate classroom environments (see, e.g. George Mason University's Students as Scholars Quality Enhancement Plan; Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program; University of Houston’s Learning through Discovery; University of Michigan’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program; etc.). Scholars and universities have touted the benefits of engaging students in research experiences for students as well as faculty. However, there is little empirical work exploring how undergraduate students adapt to their new role as scholars. In this paper, we explore the process of students integrating research into their undergraduate classroom experience. Based on participant observation and pre and postsemester survey data, we discuss the process of students learning as scholars in a capstone Criminology, Law & Society course. We focus on how st...

In problem-solving courts judges are no longer neutral arbitrators in adversarial justice processes. Instead, judges directly engage with court participants. The movement towards problem-solving court models emerges from a collaborative therapeutic jurisprudence framework. While most scholars argue judges are the central courtroom actors within problem-solving courts, we find judges are the stars front-stage, but play a more supporting role backstage. We use Goffman's front-stage-backstage framework to analyze 350 hours of ethnographic fieldwork within five problem-solving courts. Problem-solving courts are collaborative organizations with shifting leadership, based on forum. Understanding how the roles of courtroom workgroup actors adapt under the new court model is foundational for effective implementation of these justice processes.

Problem solving (PS) courts (e.g., drug, family, gang, prostitution, reentry) are becoming more commonplace. Today, PS courts exist or are planned in nearly all of the ninety-four U.S. federal districts. These courts focus on integrating therapeutic jurisprudence into the courtroom environment while emphasizing group decision-making processes among courtroom workgroup members. In this legal setting, courtroom workgroup teams, regularly consisting of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers (POs), and treatment providers engage a collective, case management approach to decision making with shared power among team members. However, despite the court’s therapeutic and collaborative design, we find that POs wield powerful influence in decision making. Informed by sixteen months of qualitative fieldwork, including semistructured interviews, observation of courtroom workgroup meetings, and court observations in five federal PS courts in three federal districts, we find that POs exert undetected informational, technical, and relational power within the PS courtroom workgroup. This role and its accompanying power transforms POs into key decision makers, regardless of PS court type, workgroup dynamics, and decision-making style. The POs’ role makes them critical contributors to the outcomes in federal PS courts with important implications for punishment decisions in the federal justice system. With an increasing number of PS courts currently in the planning stages at the federal level, our study has implications for the structure and decision outcomes in these growing courtroom workgroups.

Sociolegal scholars refer to the invocation of law or rules during a dispute as the mobilization of law. Most studies of the mobilization of law focus on the mobilization of law by people in non-official capacities, particularly by persons of relatively low social status or in positions of social disadvantage. Early studies debated the effectiveness of court-centered strategies for social justice, examining whether real social change could be achieved through formal judicial means. Scholars now largely agree that law can be effectively mobilized for social change through both direct formal legal action and the indirect radiating effects of legal mobilization. This is because the influence of law goes beyond the courtroom; rights consciousness and legal mobilization help to transform culture and understandings of social status and power. Currently scholars are turning their attention to the mobilization of law within organizations such as schools and workplaces and the mobilization of rights talk and justice talk in unofficial arenas domestically and internationally.

There is limited scholarship considering how social status factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and age frame rules in public organizations. Using data collected from semistructured interviews with 49 local government officials, the author argues that there is a paradox of rules. Women and people of color are increasingly entering the ranks of local bureaucracies, but they experience their authority differently than white men. Their claim to authority is challenged more often. Unable to rely on implicit rank and social status as a defense, they must rely instead on official rights and rules. The very meaning of their authority is therefore different: It is more rule and rights based, more formal than informal, more explicit than implicit. Yet, because it is more rule based, formal, and explicit, their authority is also more open to question and challenge, and more resented as an artifice. People of color and women in positions of authority thus face the paradox of rules: They must rely on formal rules as a key basis for their authority, but relying on rules makes their authority seem more artificial than real.

The goals of valuing social equity and using it as a guide in managing public programs are firmly rooted in the Minnowbrook tradition. Although civil rights activists have long fought for equality, attendees at the Minnowbrook I conference in 1968 were among the first in the field of public administration to directly confront societal inequities by asserting that public administrators should, in addition to valuing efficiency and effectiveness, stress the value social equity in the management and distribution of public services. The field's emphasis on social equity continued on through Minnowbrook II and was identified as a key concern during the most recent Minnowbrook III conference. After briefly summarizing discussion on this topic during Minnowbrook III, this article provides an agenda for advancing the field's commitment to social equity. This agenda centers upon clarifying the conceptual parameters of social equity, transforming the place of social equity in academic instruction, and building upon existing themes and methodologies in social equity research. Last, predictions for the role of social equity at a future Minnowbrook IV conference are presented for further consideration.

Thanks to the civil rights movement, women and racial and ethnic minorities increasingly hold positions of public authority—but they experience and exercise this authority differently from white men. Based on 162 narratives collected from 49 US local government officials (city administrators and police), I find that women, minorities, and younger officials in positions of authority face a paradox of rules. Because they have lower social status with the public and within their organizations, they must rely on formal and explicit rules as a key basis for their authority, but such reliance causes their very authority to be questioned. Social status based on implicit assumptions about social identities, including race or ethnicity, sex, and age, originates outside of organizations and has effects society wide. This study shows that social status continues to permeate US local government organizations in both subtle and explicit ways, even in bureaucratic settings that are formally committed to merit and professional norms.

Significant amounts of research have suggested how important mentoring is to success in academic careers. Studies have also explored the unique issues that arise for women and minorities in mentori...

The literature on citizen engagement in budgeting suggests local governments can improve how they collect, interpret, and incorporate citizen input about resource allocation issues. However, at the moment, it is unclear whether that input, particularly from a more diverse citizenry, is more or less useful to managers. We address this question by examining how a variety of demographic and institutional factors affect manager perceptions of citizen engagement among a sample of 221 local governments in Michigan and Minnesota. The results suggest that the input managers perceive as useful tends to focus on community concerns rather than parochial concerns. We also find that community diversity associates with a clear trade-off, as managers in more diverse communities are more likely to perceive citizen input as focused on community-wide rather than parochial interests but less likely to view that input as useful in making budget decisions.

Although contingency management (CM) approaches are among the most promising methods for initiating drug abstinence (S. T. Higgins, S. M. Alessi, & R. L. Dantona, 2002; S. T. Higgins, S. H. Heil, & J. P. Lussier, 2004), adoption and implementation of CM protocols into treatment programs are both challenging and infrequent. In criminal justice agencies, where roughly 70% of clients report substance abuse issues (F. S. Taxman, K. L. Cropsey, D. W. Young, & H. Wexler, 2007), CM interventions are virtually nonexistent. The Justice Steps (JSTEPS) study uses a longitudinal, mixed-method design to examine the implementation of a CM-based protocol in five justice settings. This article presents qualitative data collected during Phase 1 of the JSTEPS project regarding the acceptability and feasibility of CM in these justice settings. The study finds a level of acceptability (find CM tolerable) and feasibility (find CM suitable) within justice agencies, but with some challenges. These challenges are reflected in the following: (a) incorporating too many desired target behaviors into CM models; (b) facing intraorganizational challenges when designing CM systems; and (c) emphasizing sanctions over rewards despite the evidence-base for positive reinforcers. These findings have implications for advancing the dissemination, adoption, and implementation of evidence-based treatments (and CM in particular) in criminal justice settings.

Forward by John Bruel and John Lainhart: On behalf of the IBM Center for The Business of Government, we are pleased to present this report, 'Cybersecurity Management in the States: The Emerging Role of Chief Information Security Officers,' by Marilu Goodyear, Holly T. Goerdel, Shannon Portillo, and Linda Williams. The importance of safeguarding information created and shared on computers and the internet has increased significantly in recent years, as society has become increasingly dependent on information technology in government, business, and in their personal lives. Both corporations and government have responded by creating a new role in their organizations to lead the safeguarding efforts - chief information security officers. The role of these officers is still under development. Do they safeguard best by using law enforcement techniques and technological tools? Or are they more effective if they serve as educators and try to influence the behaviors of technology users? This report is a significant contribution to the discussion of the roles and responsibilities of chief information security officers (CISOs) in state governments across the United States. It identifies both strategies and activities used by successful state CISOs, and thereby provides a good road map to success for all state CISOs.The report cites the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), which has been championed since its inception by the New York state chief cybersecurity officer as one key cybersecurity collaboration success. The MS-ISAC initiative has yielded measurable results and provided a means of consistent communication across sectors in society. The report also emphasizes that while a technical education remains important for CISOs, state cybersecurity officials need to be proficient in nontechnical skills as well, including collaboration, communication, managerial, organizational, policy alignment, and political skills. Finally, the report emphasizes the need for state cybersecurity officials to devote increased attention to data management as the defined system/network perimeter has dissolved and the future success of cybersecurity relies on the CISOs, chief information officers, data owners, records managers and archivists to jointly focus on data management to achieve effective business processes. This report also emphasizes the importance of effective IT governance - We hope that you find this report both timely and informative. We believe its insights and recommendations are relevant to CISOs at all levels of government.

three time periods. Results indicate that organizational support predicts subsequent turnover intentions (I2=−.39, pb .001) and affective professional commitment partially mediates this relationship (I2=−.32, pb .001). The model held for counselors but not clinical supervisors. Counselor recovery statusmoderated the perceived support–commitment link. Findings suggest that increasing organizational support reduces turnover intentions via professional commitment, particularly for counselors not in recovery.