Thirty Years of Public Management Scholarship: Plenty of “How” Not Enough “Why”

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the overarching lessons to be gleaned from 30 years of public management literature. Design/methodology/approach The methodology was simple: review the professional literature generated during that time period. Findings Despite important contributions to our understanding of everything from bureaucratic motivation, public budgeting processes, the promises and pitfalls of contracting out and identification of the skills needed to be an effective public manager, to the scientific arcana of sustainability and the respective responsibilities of public administrators and elected officials, the profession would benefit greatly from more sustained emphasis upon the history and philosophy of the constitutional choices made by those who framed America’s original approach to governance. Originality/value The lack of a common understanding of America’s legal culture, or even a common vocabulary for exploring our differences poses immense challenges to public administrators, whose effectiveness requires a widely shared, if necessarily superficial, agreement on the purposes of America’s governing institutions and an ability to recognize the bases of government legitimacy. In the past 30 years, however, literature that addresses the important connections between constitutional theory and management practice, between the rule of law and the exercise of public power and discretion, has been all too rare. Let us hope that the next 30 years corrects that deficiency

Electoral Integrity: How Gerrymandering Matters

Gerrymandering (partisan redistricting) is widely believed to deprive citizens of meaningful participation in the democratic process. It is seen as an obvious conflict of interest because there is ample evidence that lawmakers use redistricting to protect both their personal electoral prospects and their party’s legislative advantages. The impression that an inherent conflict of interest occurs when legislators determine the composition of the population that will vote for them has revived efforts to reform the ways states handle redistricting and reignited scholarly disputes over the degree to which the ills ascribed to partisan redistricting are accurate. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to revisit its redistricting jurisprudence, making it timely to revisit the contending academic arguments about the political effects of gerrymandering and the existing constitutional jurisprudence

Kontekst je važan: pedagogija i komparativna javna uprava

Those who teach public management increasingly encourage students to consult resources from countries other than their own, and to look around the globe as well as around the corner for answers to local problems of service delivery and agency administration. While the reference to »best practices« has much to recommend it, it should not be allowed to obscure important differences in national legal and constitutional cultures – differences that reflect the specific value criteria and political framework within which each country’s citizens evaluate their government’s performance. The challenge for public administrators and those who teach them is to distinguish between the areas that can benefit from best practices, and those where a nation’s distinctive history and culture make importation of a practice problematic.Pedagogija javne uprave u značajnom se dijelu bavi mjerenjem legitimiteta i odgovornosti. Takve su ocjene, međutim, nužno kontekstualne naravi. Oni u javnoj upravi koji su prije svega usredotočeni na uvoz »najbolje prakse« moraju prije no što učine takvo što razmotriti o kakvoj se praksi radi te u kojoj mjeri njezin uspjeh ili propast ovisi o upravnom kontekstu u okviru kojega ista ima smisla. Nažalost, ne postoji jednostavan test primjerenosti; svaki se slučaj mora razmatrati i ocjenjivati ponaosob. Ono što možemo učiniti jest skrenuti pozornost na problem i njegovu važnost. Svi pravni i upravni sustavi počivaju na promišljenim normativnim prosudbama o tome kako pravilno voditi javne poslove, prosudbama koje se temelje na povijesnoj i iskustvenoj posebnosti neke zemlje. Pokušati podučavati javnu upravu bez stalnog referiranja na spomenute temeljne prosudbe isto je kao da pokušavamo podučavati čitanje bez referiranja na abecedu

The Civic Dimension of School Voucher Programs

America’s public schools have not been exempt from the movement to privatization and contracting out that has characterized government innovations over at least the past quarter century. A number of the issues raised by school voucher programs mirror the management and efficacy questions raised by privatization generally; however, because public education is often said to be “constitutive of the public,” using tax dollars to send the nation’s children to private schools implicates the distinctive role of public education in a democratic society in ways that more traditional contracting arrangements do not. Using a content analysis, the authors explore the extent to which school choice voucher programs are mandated by state statutes to integrate civics education into their curriculum. Findings reveal that across the fourteen states (and the District of Columbia) that have enacted school choice voucher programs, statutes exempt these programs from curriculum oversight, including civics requirements, and grant them considerable autonomy in designing their curricula. This study concludes by discussing the implications for ethical and accountable governance when primary and secondary schools fail to cultivate civic competence and civic literacy

The Cost of Saving Money: Public Service Motivation, Private Security Contracting, and the Salience of Employment Status

The growth of government outsourcing has triggered significant legal and social science research. That research has focused primarily on issues of cost, accountability, and management. A thus far understudied question concerns the relevance and importance of public service motivations (PSM), especially when a government agency is proposing to outsource services that are considered inherently governmental. This exploratory study centers on the use of private security guards to augment government-provided public safety, and investigates the public service motivations of part-time and full-time employees of private security firms that regularly partner with—or seek to protect the public independent of—local police. Findings reveal that the presence or absence of motivations consistent with PSM was not attributable to private sector employment, but to whether informants were part-time or full-time employees

NEWS AND CIVIC LITERACY;WHAT’S THE CONNECTION?

poster abstractThe Center for Civic Literacy (CCL) at IUPUI is a Signature Center Grant recipient. CCL is a multi-disciplinary research center established to examine the causes and dimensions of Americans’ low levels of civic knowledge, and to investigate the consequences of personal, social, and political civic ignorance. CCL takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the causes and effects of deficits in civic literacy, while also examining best practices that combat civic deficits across sectors of society, including public affairs, science, education, business, and healthcare. The latest project from the center investigates how low levels of civic and news literacy intersect; what’s the connection and why does it matter? A study from America University states, “news habits tend to be formed early; if young people turn away from the news, it may lead to a less informed citizenry and make it less likely that there will be a critical mass of news consumers to sustain the high-quality journalism and information production crucial to a healthy democracy” (Hayes, 2014, p.222). The center is currently gathering such research to make the case for an IPS program in high schools which would teach both news and civic literacy

WE ALL HAVE TO DO IT: PURPOSE AND PROCESS OF LITERATURE REVIEW

The Center for Civic Literacy (CCL) at IUPUI is a Signature Center Grant recipient. CCL is a multi-disciplinary research center established to examine the causes and dimensions of Americans’ low levels of civic knowledge, and to investigate the consequences of personal, social, and political civic ignorance. CCL takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the causes and effects of deficits in civic literacy, while also examining best practices that combat civic deficits across sectors of society, including public affairs, science, education, business, and healthcare. To further understand the nature of civic deficits, CCL must first define ‘civic literacy’ across these varied disciplinary contexts. This process requires thorough review and assessment of existing research that addresses various aspects of civic knowledge. CCL’s poster will showcase the purpose, challenges, and lessons learned from engaging in an iterative process of a multi-disciplinary literature review. An additional goal of presenting CCL’s literature review approach is to encourage attendees to consider how researchers frame, refine, and rework their understanding of a particular topic to strengthen their research objectives

Representation through Lived Experience: Expanding Representative Bureaucracy Theory

This study draws on the insights of managers in the behavioral health treatment system to explore the value of persons who bring lived experience to their organizational positions. Within these organizations, persons with relevant lived experience occupy various nonclinical and clinical positions. When facilities incorporate workers with lived experience, managers observe increased levels of trust between clients and service providers, an enhanced client-centered perspective among service providers, and higher quality in the services provided. This study may guide managers in considering how (or whether) human service organizations might institutionalize lived experience as a mechanism to help create a representative bureaucracy