Desperately Seeking Selznick: Cooptation and the Dark Side of Public Management in Networks

Most literature on public-sector networks focuses on how to build and manage systems and ignores the political problems that networks can create for organizations. This article argues that individual network nodes can work to bias the organization's actions in ways that benefit the organization's more advantaged clientele. The argument is supported by an analysis of performance data from 500 organizations over a five-year period. A classic theoretical point is supported in a systematic empirical investigation. While networks can greatly benefit the organization, they have a dark side that managers and scholars need to consider more seriously

Isopraxis leadership: leader confidence, managerial strategy and organizational performance

Attention has been given to the notion that organizational leaders’ expressed confidence and optimism regarding their organizations’ performance can affect that performance by increasing the motivation and/or selfefficacy of subordinates. This idea, a part of various leadership theories, we call “isopraxis leadership.” This paper examines the logic of the claim, reviews and critiques extant evidence, develops a measure of leader confidence (the starting point for isopraxis leadership), undertakes initial validation of the measure, and then tests for the link between leader confidence and performance among several hundred public organizations. Leader confidence is found to be largely unrelated to performance; some evidence indicates that it can help only for those organizations that are already doing well or have more resources than average – that is, where it is least needed

In majority Democratic school districts, African Americans gain significantly more representation in at-large elections

Research on electoral structure has often touted single member districts to be beneficial for achieving minority representation. In a study of a national sample of school board elections between 2002 and 2008, Kenneth J. Meier and Amanda Rutherford find an unanticipated trend—African Americans are now over-represented on school boards with at-large elections when they are a minority of the population. They argue that partisanship changes the relationship between electoral structure and race so that African American may benefit in counties with a majority Democrat constituency. The traditional pattern of African-American under representation occurs only in school districts with a Republican voting majority

Chapter 1 The Common Denominator: Persistent Racial Gaps in the Administration of Policy

Issues of race permeate virtually every corner of policy creation and implementation in the United States, yet theoretically driven research on interactions of policy, race, and ethnicity rarely offers practical tools that can be readily applied by current and future civil servants, private contractors, or nonprofit boards. Arguing that scholarship can and should inform practice to address issues of equity in public affairs, rather than overlook, ignore, or deny them, Race and Public Administration offers a much-needed and accessible exploration of current and cutting-edge research on race and policy. This book evaluates what contradictions, unanswered questions, and best (or worst) practices exist in conducting and understanding research that can provide evidence-based policy and management guidance to practitioners in the field.　 Individual chapters are written by established and emerging scholars and explore a wide range of policy areas, including public education, policing, health and access to healthcare, digital governance, nonprofit diversity, and international contexts. Together, the chapters serve as a link between theoretically informed research in public administration and those students and professionals trained to work in the trenches of public administration. This book is ideally suited as a text for courses in schools of public administration, public policy, or nonprofit management, and is required reading for those actively involved in policy analysis, creation, or evaluation

Business-targeted tax cuts do not improve state economies

On the surface, cutting business taxes would appear to be an obvious way for states to attract new business investment, and therefore growth and jobs. Soledad Artiz Prillaman and Kenneth J. Meier have studied business tax incentives across the 50 states over the past 30 years, and find that this is largely not the case, and that tax reductions can actually be harmful to state economies by reducing tax revenues and thus their ability to provide public services. They argue that given the already low tax burden on many companies, businesses are much more likely to decide on their location based on factors such as workforce education, land prices and public service levels

Organizational Performance: Measurement Theory and an Application:Or, Common Source Bias, the Achilles Heel of Public Management Research

The measurement of public organizations’ performance is a central issue in public administration both in the U.S. (Moynihan 2008) and numerous other countries (Pollitt and Bourckaert 2000). Missing in the rush to performance appraisal and performance management is any effort to tie empirical efforts to the extensive literature on measurement theory (Ghiselli et al. 1981; Shultz 2005; Hand 2004). This paper uses measurement theory to assess the potential problems in measuring organizational performance. It deals with both subjective and data-based measures as well as measures internal to the organization and those imposed by external stakeholders. Because organizations can be evaluated on multiple dimensions of performance (Boyne 2002), the paper also illustrates how adding dimensions multiplies the number of technical issues that need to be resolved. The paper also provides an illustration of the insights of measurement theory by an analysis of performance indicators for several hundred public organizations based on an original survey conducted in 2009. The empirical illustration shows three internal perceptive measures relate to three external data-based measures of performance and the factors that lead to greater divergence of the measures from each other. These empirical results along with the theoretical discussion will then be used to provide guidelines for the assessment of organizational performance for both scholars and practitioners

Sector bias in public programs: US nonprofit hospitals

This letter investigates whether the public perceives nonprofit organizations different from private and public organizations and whether introducing new performance management systems would provide positive credits to organizations. Using two randomized survey experiments on US hospitals (one with adult sample and the other with student sample), we replicate the study of Hvidman and Andersen (2016) in Denmark with an extension of adding a nonprofit organization cue. The results show no sectoral differences among the hospitals and no positive feedback for adopting a new performance management system

Pass the Biscuits, Pappy

This article examines the congressional allocation of federal grant funds. Reflecting the decision processes and norms of Congress, federal grant funds are allocated almost completely on the basis of population (or equal share). None of the other factors used to allocate specific federal funds (e.g., income, poverty, unemployment) have a great deal of impact. As a result, most congressional battles are at the margin with only marginal impact on the overall distribution.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Chapter 1 The Common Denominator: Persistent Racial Gaps in the Administration of Policy

Issues of race permeate virtually every corner of policy creation and implementation in the United States, yet theoretically driven research on interactions of policy, race, and ethnicity rarely offers practical tools that can be readily applied by current and future civil servants, private contractors, or nonprofit boards. Arguing that scholarship can and should inform practice to address issues of equity in public affairs, rather than overlook, ignore, or deny them, Race and Public Administration offers a much-needed and accessible exploration of current and cutting-edge research on race and policy. This book evaluates what contradictions, unanswered questions, and best (or worst) practices exist in conducting and understanding research that can provide evidence-based policy and management guidance to practitioners in the field.　 Individual chapters are written by established and emerging scholars and explore a wide range of policy areas, including public education, policing, health and access to healthcare, digital governance, nonprofit diversity, and international contexts. Together, the chapters serve as a link between theoretically informed research in public administration and those students and professionals trained to work in the trenches of public administration. This book is ideally suited as a text for courses in schools of public administration, public policy, or nonprofit management, and is required reading for those actively involved in policy analysis, creation, or evaluation

The Politics of Gay and Lesbian Rights: Expanding the Scope of the Conflict

This is the published version also available here http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2960229Morality politics theory predicts that gay rights policy will reflect the influence of religious groups, party competition, and partisanship while interest group theory suggests that these policies will correspond with interest group resources, elite values, and past policy actions. Using multiple regression on a 50-state data set and a county-level data set for gay rights initiatives in Oregon and Colorado, we found gay and lesbian politics are no different from those for other policy issues. When gay and lesbian rights are not salient, the pattern of politics resembles that of interest group politics. If individuals opposed to gay and lesbian rights are able to expand the scope of the conflict, the pattern of politics conforms to morality politics