Is American Public Administration Detached From Historical Context?: On the Nature of Time and the Need to Understand It in Government and Its Study

The study of public administration pays little attention to history. Most publications are focused on current problems (the present) and desired solutions (the future) and are concerned mainly with organizational structure (a substantive issue) and output targets (an aggregative issue that involves measures of both individual performance and organizational productivity/services). There is much less consideration of how public administration (i.e., organization, policy, the study, etc.) unfolds over time. History, and so administrative history, is regarded as a “past” that can be recorded for its own sake but has little relevance to contemporary challenges. This view of history is the product of a diminished and anemic sense of time, resulting from organizing the past as a series of events that inexorably lead up to the present in a linear fashion. To improve the understanding of government’s role and position in society, public administration scholarship needs to reacquaint itself with the nature of time.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Habitat-Related Benthic Macrofaunal Assemblages of Bays and Estuaries of the Western United States

Data from 7 coastwide and regional benthic surveys were combined and used to assess the number and distribution of estuarine benthic macrofaunal assemblages of the western United States. Q-mode cluster analysis was applied to 714 samples and site groupings were tested for differences in 4 habitat factors (latitude, salinity, sediment grain size, and depth). Eight macrofaunal assemblages, structured primarily by latitude, salinity, and sediment grain size, were identified: (A) Puget Sound fine sediment, (B) Puget Sound coarse sediment, (C) southern California marine bays, (D) polyhaline central San Francisco Bay, (E) shallow estuaries and wetlands, (F) saline very coarse sediment, (G) mesohaline San Francisco Bay, and (H) limnetic and oligohaline. The Puget Sound, southern California, and San Francisco Bay assemblages were geographically distinct, while Assemblages E, F and H were distributed widely along the entire coast. A second Q-mode cluster analysis was conducted after adding replicate samples that were available from some of the sites and temporal replicates that were available for sites that were sampled in successive years. Variabilities due to small spatial scale habitat heterogeneity and temporal change were both low in Puget Sound, but temporal variability was high in the San Francisco estuary where large fluctuations in freshwater inputs and salinity among years leads to spatial relocation of the assemblages