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

Producing Evaluations in a Large Bureaucracy

The field of program evaluation has expanded rapidly over the past three decades so that evaluation of programs is standard practice in many government agencies. One development is that evaluation activities have moved inside large government agencies with the establishment of internal evaluation staffs, procedures and policies. This study examined empirically the development of evaluation issues and processes in one branch of the National Science Foundation in the USA. The study, which involved 3 years of intermittent participant-observation and 44 interviews, indicates that evaluations (in this office) are heavily influenced by the way the work is organized and produced, as well as by the usual considerations that shape evaluations elsewhere. In particular, this paper addresses two primary issues identified in the study as critical to the successful establishment of an evaluation office: (I) the evolution of an evaluation culture within the organization, and (2) the management of a semi-internal, semi-external evaluation production process