NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE ADMINISTRATOR

Abstract: It is important to distinguish between the possible and the probable when speculating about developments in technology. It is difficult to foresee the uses which will be made of an invention, and often they are not the uses first proposed. With new technological developments almost anything is technically possible, although practical development of a possibility can be slower and more difficult than expected. Moreover, successful technical development does not guarantee acceptance by the public. Technology impinges on public administration in three ways. It is a tool, it creates new tasks, and new technology can change the expectations within society of the role and function of government and hence the role of public administration. Examples of the use of technology as a tool in public administration are evident in the areas of travel, telecommunications and data processing. Changes in technology create new administrative tasks related to increased public awareness of the dangers of many forms of technology, leading, for example, to consideration of problems of pollution, personal privacy and computer-related crime. New expectations created by the increased information available through technological advances in communication will prompt increasing calls for open planning and public participation in decision making which will in turn lead to increased visibility of administrators and a greater measure of real accountability.     

"I SPEAK FOR THE TREES…"

This article concentrates on the need for greater information resources management (IRM) education in public administration programs. The author argues that current management information systems training is much too limited in its approach, concentrating only on the technology of information transfers. A more comprehensive technique, emphasizing all of the issues of data handling from collection to distribution, is put forward. Because policy decisions are affected by critical information, public administrators must be keenly aware of their information resources. In concluding the article, the author offers a possible IRM curriculum that would prepare students of the discipline to be lucid practitioners.     

Pursuing Consilience: Using Behavioral Public Administration to Connect Research on Bureaucratic Red Tape,Administrative Burden,and Regulation

Behavioral public administration (BPA) research aspires not only to draw on developments in behavioral science but also, importantly, to address central themes in public administration. By focusing a symposium on bureaucratic red tape, administrative burden, and regulation, we encouraged BPA scholarship to engage with fundamental public administration topics that are also relevant for the broader literature on organizations and management. Indeed, the symposium contributions demonstrate how BPA can better meld the behavioral science and public administration literatures. They expand on existing conceptions of BPA, with respect to both methodology and topical focus, and provide a basis for demarcating what might and might not be usefully described as BPA. The symposium contributions provide a blueprint for how BPA research might usefully evolve and the introduction offers a philosophical reflection on the future development of BPA and behavioral science.     

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. This “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well‐known problems with public sector performance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. The latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. The author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data‐rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.     

What Is Patronage? A Critical Reexamination

Despite a long and storied history, patronage and the functions it plays in American politics and public administration are still very much a mystery. This paper examines how patronage has been used and understood in American political science and public administration. The author calls for a reexamination of the concept based on developments found in the field of anthropology. In an effort to generate future scholarship, the author introduces a typology of patronage styles based on this reexamination.     

Political Pressure,Conformity Pressure,and Performance Information as Drivers of Public Sector Innovation Adoption

Why public organizations adopt and abandon organizational innovations is a key question for any endeavor to explain large-scale developments in the public sector. Supplementing research within public administration on innovation with the related literature on policy diffusion, this article examines how external factors such as conformity pressure from institutionalized models, performance information from other organizations, and political pressure affect innovation adoption. By the use of two survey experiments in very different political contexts—Texas and Denmark—and a difference-in-differences analysis exploiting a reform of the political governance of public schools in Denmark, we find that public managers respond to political pressure. We find no indications that they emulate institutionalized models or learn from performance information from other organizations when they adopt organizational innovations. The results thereby point to political pressure as an important factor behind large-scale adoptions of organizational innovations in the public sector.     

Charity,Philanthropy, Public Service,or Enterprise: What Are the Big Questions of Nonprofit Management Today?

"Nonprofit sector" issues, both in public discourse and pedagogy, are too narrowly cast as problems confronting public-serving nonprofits and grant-making foundations. Consisting also of membership organizations, educational institutions, and political pressure groups, the sector constitutes a major force in society which, in its interactive entirety, might better be termed a "social economy." This social economy both influences and is shaped by public administration, and it is now very much under public scrutiny. The author raises seminal questions that challenge the mission, management, and resources of this critical sector of society.     

One‐way,Two‐way,or Dead‐end Street: British Influence on the Study of Public Administration in America Since 1945

What intellectual influence, if any, have British public administration scholars had on their American counterparts since World War II? In this article, the author briefly reviews the major areas of theory and research in the British study of publication administration, further identifying important contributions by British scholars in the areas of modernist‐empiricism, the new public management, regulation, policy networks and governance, and interpretive theory. Although there is a discernible American influence on British public administration, there is little British impact on U.S. public administration; nowadays it is a one‐way street. Increasingly, British scholars are involved in a growing community of European public administration scholars with whom they share active, two‐way connections. Recent European developments suggest that American and European public administration academics are growing further apart. Due to the immense strength of modernist‐empiricism throughout American universities, plus the interpretive turn to a European epistemology of “blurred genres,” these twin, traditionally self‐referential, communities seem to be parting company with an attendant danger that future intellectual engagement may be a dead end.     

A systems view of the measurement of the performance of public enterprises in India

This article presents systems approach to the measurement of the performance of public enterprises in India. Thus it is a movement from a narrow concept of efficiency to a broader approach wherein measurement of performance is linked to the achievement of objectives. The need for such an approach is based on the theoretical developments and set against the problems currently experienced by public enterprises in India. As an alternative a three-tier objective framework, with standards, and a set of agencies for evaluation is recommended. Finally the problems of application of the three-tier objectives are discussed.The author acknowledges the useful suggestions and comments given by his colleagues Dilip K. Lahiri and J. K. Sen Gupta, and John D. Montgomery of Harvard University.     

改革开放以来的中国公共行政学

改革开放以后,中国公共行政学得以恢复与重建,并逐渐确立了其应有的学科地位,从而获得了更大的发展空间,取得了辉煌的成就:高等院校公共行政学科学院化,建立了完整的专业教育体系,专业性学术组织蓬勃发展,创办了一批专业学术期刊,积极开展国际学术交流;研究领域不断拓展,研究范式不断转换,研究方法不断改进,话语体系不断构建等。公共行政学的发展在推动我国行政体制改革、构建服务型政府、转变政府职能、培育公共精神、提升政府治理能力等方面都起到了重要作用,但在没有形成完备的本土化理论体系、研究方法的结构性失衡、公共行政的合法性危机等方面,仍面临较大的挑战。不过,全面深化改革的进一步推进、国家治理体系与治理能力现代化水平的逐步提高、互联网与大数据技术的广泛应用,也为公共行政学的发展创造了巨大的发展机遇。未来中国公共行政学的发展要立足现实,及时回应和满足社会变革的需要,创新公共行政学的研究范式与方法,构建具有中国特色的公共行政学话语体系和本土化的公共行政学理论。     

Comparative Public Administration Is Back In, Prudently

Comparative public administration, in method and in content, has not successfully integrated with the main field of public administration, to the detriment of both. With globalization and changes in information technology, the current separation impairs public administration education. This assessment is based on a literature review and an appraisal of the contributions of comparative scholarship. Suggestions for future research strategies promote viable, integrative, and relevant cross-cultural studies. They emphasize (1) the utilization of cooperative teams of researchers instead of individual efforts; (2) the use of multi-case analysis instead of the traditional single-case approach; (3) improvement of the definition and verification of cultural influences on administration; and (4) expansion of middle-range analysis to examine specific administrative practices across national boundaries as a strategy for enhancing relevance.     

Introducing administrative reform through the application of computer-based information systems: A case study in India

Administrative reform in a number of developing countries has recently been directed at achieving decentralization through the diffusion of information technology to local areas. However, despite these efforts, the main objective of improving the effectiveness of development planning and monitoring systems remains unfulfilled because of poor integration between the process of technology adoption and the context within which the technology is implemented. There is a paucity of literature that aims to make explicit the nature of this integration. This paper aims to offer a contribution in this direction by describing the case of the computerized rural information systems project (CRISP) in India. The results show that during the first few years of implementation information technology served to reinforce existing inefficiencies within the bureaucracy. Information technology was later used as a vehicle for promoting change within the administration as local administrators acquired the flexibility to direct the technology towards their own requirements.     

Making Every Vote Count: The Important Role of Managerial Capacity in Achieving Better Election Administration Outcomes

A public agency's capacity to implement policy and achieve valued public outcomes has been a long-running area of research in public administration. Many articles provide theory and empirics regarding the capacity to implement policy, but relatively few examine multiple types of agency capacity within the same analysis. This article develops a model based on the election administration literature in political science and public administration to examine the effects of managerial capacity, financial capacity, and technology on the election management outcome of the residual vote rate in North Carolina election jurisdictions. The results indicate that higher levels of management capacity and technology significantly reduce problems with voting as measured by the residual vote rate. Financial capacity shows a negative association with the residual vote rate but is not significant. The article concludes by discussing how studying election administration provides an important and uniquely good administrative context for developing administrative theory.     

American Indian Tribal Governance and Management: Public Administration Promise or Pretense?

Research on tribal governance in the United States is scarce within modern public administration scholarship. Nonetheless, tribal governance is a pre‐Columbian practice that predates the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Drawing from several disciplines, John C. Ronquillo of the University of Georgia demonstrates that interdisciplinary sources offer rich information for present‐day public administration research about Native American tribes. Tribal governance literature is definitely not “missing,” but instead is moderately “unassembled” as a subfield of public administration. Building on what is available, the author suggests several key issues within tribal governance in need of urgent academic attention.     

The phenomenology of sharing: social media networking,asserting, and telling

This article takes up the current promise of computer‐aided social networks as mechanisms for sharing in experiences. The author examines social networks phenomenologically, not merely as a tool for providing information and shaping what we think but as a social construct for what can be shared, how we think, and what can be known. The analysis identifies a connection between social networks and artificial intelligence systems, while also suggesting that significant experiential gaps built into the systems can lead to distortions in the ontology of shared experiences. The author argues, by applying concepts from Kant, Arendt, Schutz, and Heidegger, that computerized social networks offer an unparalleled opportunity for public administrators to discover and learn about social conditions, but these networks are not without significant limitations. An appreciation for the limits to sharing implicit in computerized social networks and artificial intelligence systems can be made explicit by applying concepts from phenomenology. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Making government a ‘model user’ of the Information Highway—Canada's progress to date

This account of recent developments in the information technology policies of Canada's federal government describes how the government, acting as a “model user” of IT, contributes to the effectiveness of strategies designed to achieve policy goals related to the development of an information society. Government initiatives have applied information technology in re-engineering processes and procedures, which result in greatly improved performance, both of internal “housekeeping” operations, and service delivery to the public. In devising these and similar initiatives, it is necessary to select technologies that are appropriate to local capabilities, rather than adopting “technology-driven” approaches to problem solving. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

Poor Nations, Rich Nations: A Theory of Governance

This article argues that the difference between poor countries and rich countries has to do with governance rather than resources. In emphasizing the importance of public administration in explaining economic success and failure, the author examines three general theories of governance (organizational, cultural, and structural‐functional) presented in Ferrel Heady's textbook in comparative administration. Political elasticity theory is introduced as a way to reconcile and overcome the weaknesses of these theories and to explain a number of unresolved questions in the literature having to do with decentralization, corruption, democracy, culture, and globalization, using comparative case studies (the Netherlands and Ghana, Singapore and Jamaica, and Japan and Nigeria). The implications of political elasticity theory for foreign aid are suggested at the conclusion, illustrated by a comparison of Spain and Mexico. What ties these case studies together is the heretofore unnoticed and/or unexplained fact that as countries prosper, political power takes on “rubber‐band” and “balloon” characteristics.     

Managerial Responsibility

The concept of managerial responsibility is a shining thread in the literature of public administration, but its definition within our constitutional scheme remains elusive. How will we know responsible public management when we see it? We propose one answer: Public administration should be conducted according to what we term a “precept of managerial responsibility,” which involves four interrelated elements derived from the classical literature of public administration: judgment, accountability, balance, and rationality. We apply this precept to one of the most vexing problems of public administration theory and practice, institutional reform litigation. This application illustrates how the precept solves a major theoretical problem of American public administration by defining a role for administrative officers that fully comports with the Madisonian scheme of separated institutions—legislative, executive, and judicial—sharing power.     

The Public Administration Review and Ongoing Struggles for Connectedness

Facilitation of connectedness has been a fundamental role of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the Public Administration Review (PAR) throughout their six decades of professional service. Together, they have sought to link practitioners and academicians across subfields and varied levels of activities. As a foremost refereed journal, PAR has sought to encourage the linking of practice and theory through timely publication of methodologically disciplined research, informed analyses and commentaries, and constructive literature reviews and correspondence. These responsibilities have been persistently challenging. ASPA and PAR have served a dynamic field that has made some wrong turns and had others forced on it, resulting in failed autonomy, followed by increasing partisan politicization of governments and reduced reliance on professionally expert administration. For ASPA, it has created leadership and membership problems. For PAR, it has sometimes exacerbated difficulties in connecting practitioners and academicians, but it has also created more shared concerns as important subjects of inquiry. Challenges now are to serve both enduring and new spheres of the field that are afforded by international and domestic developments. Both ASPA and PAR are striving to do that. Globalization of public administration opens a world of opportunities today. Localization, as a fundamental of constitutional democracy, is a priority internationally, presenting an engaging paradox of global attention to both place and planet. That is linked in this commentary to the classic democracy-bureaucracy quandary that has constructively challenged public administration. While arrays of other important subjects, old and new, need to command attention in PAR, these are linked in this analysis to today's theory and practice of interdependent facilitative states to assess how the journal serves its responsibilities.     

The approach of senior public officials to information technology‐related reform: lessons from India

A review of global experience suggests that information technology (IT) has great potential to contribute to public sector reform. However, the Indian reality — like that for many countries — has been more problematic, with many failures of IT‐related reform; failures that can be described as total, partial or failures of sustainability and replication. Many factors help explain such failure, but a key component is the approach to IT and reform adopted by senior public officials. A ‘four Is’ model of approaches is described: the non‐IT approach of ‘ignore’ and the IT‐related approaches of ‘isolate’, ‘idolize’ and ‘integrate’. Analysis of Indian cases suggests that it is the last approach that is most likely to deliver reform objectives; yet it remains the least commonly adopted. Changes are therefore required in current strategies for public administration training and in the planning and management of change. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.