The Unbureaucratic Personality

This paper has been accepted for publication in Public Administration Review.After sixty years of scholarship on the rule-bound bureaucratic personality, this article turns attention to the unbureaucratic personality. Identified by a willingness to bend rules, the unbureaucratic personality is thought to be influenced by individual and workplace attributes, each which shed light on the nature of rule-bending. Individual attributes investigated include nonconformity, risk propensity, and public service commitment, all expected to stimulate the unbureaucratic personality. Workplace attributes include formalization and centralization, which are expected to suppress the unbureaucratic personality, and red tape, which is expected to trigger it. These hypotheses are tested using mail survey data collected from employees of four cities in a Midwestern state. The results of ordered probit modeling of the data suggest that nonconformity and risk taking increase the unbureaucratic personality, as do red tape and centralized workplaces. By contrast, the unbureaucratic personality appears to be lowered by public service commitment and workplace formalization. The implications of these results for the normative aspects of rule-bending are discussed.Data used in this paper were collected and analyzed with the support of a fellowship from the American Association of University Women; a new faculty grant from the University of Kansas; and research assistant support from the Institute for Policy and Social Research at University of Kansas. This support does not imply endorsement of the paper’s analyses or opinions

Employers as Mediating Institutions for Public Policy: The Case of Commute Options Programs

The definitive version of this text is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.Scholars have recently noted the role that employers can play -as "mediating institutions" for public policy. Mediating institutions connect the private lives of individuals with public policy concerns by communicating societal norms to members and providing social contexts that encourage a commitment to these norms. Despite the potential importance of employers as mediating institutions for public policy, little scholarly attention has been devoted to employer mediation behavior. Accordingly, this study examines two research questions. What factors influence an employer's willingness to mediate policy problems? And how effective are employers as mediating institutions? The mediation behaviors of interest relate to employer efforts to mitigate traffic congestion and air quality problems by enabling employee "commute options," which are alternatives to single-occupancy vehicle commuting to work. Drawing on theories of organization behavior, the study hypothesizes that self-interest, organizational control, and association membership will affect willingness to provide commute options. The study also hypothesizes that employers providing commute options will have lower percentages of employees that drive to work alone. Both sets of hypotheses are supported by statistical analyses of data from a cross-sectional mail survey of metropolitan Atlanta organizations

Managerial Perceptions of Privatization: Evidence from a State Department of Transportation

Mid-level managers have largely been ignored in studies of privatization’s stakeholders, despite their significant role in implementing privatization processes. This paper examines seeks to remedy that gap by examining managerial perceptions of privatization within a state department of transportation. Based on various theories of bureaucratic behavior, we hypothesize that professional identity will correlate with negative privatization perceptions and that stronger contractor-manager relationships and beliefs about privatization’s professional benefits will correlate with favorable perceptions. These hypotheses are tested with mail survey data from mid-level agency managers. Statistical modeling indicates that relationship quality is positively correlated with privatization perceptions; professional identity, when measured as a preference for technical work, is negatively correlated with privatization perceptions; and beliefs in privatization’s benefits do not correlate with privatization perceptions.Georgia Department of Transportatio

Regulatory compliance and air quality permitting: Why do firms overcomply?

U.S. Environmental Protection Agenc

A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of High Emitter Non-Compliance and its Impact on Vehicular Tailpipe Emissions in Atlanta, 1997-2001

A quasi-experimental evaluation is employed to assess the compliance behavior of high emitters in response to Atlanta’s Inspection and Maintenance program between 1997 and 2001 and to predict the impact of compliance behavior on vehicular tailpipe emissions of ozone precursors, such as carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide. Remote sensing data of a sample of approximately 0.8 million observations of on-road vehicles are matched with IM program data and vehicle registration data to identify the compliant and non-compliant high emitters. A mixed-pool time-series regression analysis is carried out to predict changes in the vehicular tailpipe emissions due to the compliance and non-compliance of the high emitters in the Atlanta airshed

Environmental permit application costs : the role of red tape, subcontracting, experience and communications

Ph.D.Barry Bozema

Applying Environmental Ethics to the Wetlands Delineation Process

Proceedings of the 1993 Georgia Water Resources Conference, April 20-21, 1993, Athens, Georgia.The nation's ongoing battle over defining wetlands has been portrayed as a tense political conflict between environmental protection advocates and economic development forces. A more accurate interpretation of the situation, I assert, is this: in our struggle to identify a diverse, complex and vast body of water systems in one definition, we have created a situation of extremes. Too vague a definition includes lands not worthy of protection by environmentalist standards. An overly-specific definition leaves wild systems open to commercial development. The search for an appropriate wetlands definition is particularly relevant for Georgia. With 5.3 million wetland acres, Georgia ranks eighth among the contiguous states in total wetlands area. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that between the 1780s and 1980s nearly twenty-three percent of Georgia's wetlands were converted to other uses. This translates to an annual conversion rate of 7,700 acres. (Dahl, 1990). In Georgia or at the national level, ethics can assist the wetlands delineation conflict to resolution. An ethical approach does not prove one side right and the other side wrong, nor does it provide a theoretical resolution removed from the real world. Instead, it redefines the issue so that the values in each position that are worthwhile, yet which are perceived to be in opposition, may be seen as potentially reinforcing and achievable in concert.Sponsored and Organized by: U.S. Geological Survey, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of TechnologyThis book was published by the Institute of Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602 with partial funding provided by the U.S. Department of Interior, Geological Survey, through the Georgia Water Research Institute as authorized by the Water Resources Research Act of 1984 (P.L. 98-242). The views and statements advanced in this publication are solely those of the authors and do not represent official views or policies of the University of Georgia or the U.S. Geological Survey or the conference sponsors

More than pathological formalization:Understanding organizational structure and red tape

Most research has conceptualized red tape as being a pathological subset of organizational formalization. This article argues that focusing on a single dimension of organizational structure as a red tape driver is unrealistically narrow. Specifically, the article advances hypotheses as to how organizational centralization and hierarchy affect perceived red tape, in addition to formalization. This reasoning is tested using survey data from employees of three local government organizations in the southeastern United States. All three hypotheses are supported: higher levels of organizational formalization, centralization, and hierarchy are associated with more red tape. Open-ended comments also indicate that red tape is not solely perceived as related to formalization. The findings imply that red tape is a multifaceted perception of organizational structure rather than perceived pathological formalization

Bureaucracy and Public Employee Behavior A Case of Local Government

Government reinvention advocates assert that less bureaucratic work environments will spark higher creativity, more risk-taking, and greater productivity in public employees. While government reinvention remains a topic of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, these particular arguments lack empirical support. In response, this article tests the relationship between different forms of bureaucratic control (formalization, red tape, and centralization) and reported employee perceptions and behavior in local governments. Analyzing mail survey data from a study of the employees of four cities in a midwestern state, this article finds that employee responses to bureaucratic control are not as straightforward as reinventionists expect. Different types of bureaucratic control are related to distinct employee responses and sometimes these responses are the very behaviors that reinventionists seek to trigger by reducing bureaucracy