THE DISCIPLINE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND THE STUDY OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

No doubt my colleagues in this venture will attest to the wide range of contributions which Robert Parker and Dick Spann have made to the field of public administration. I have benefited greatly from these contributions, as well as from discussions with both, in particular from those with Dick Spann during my period in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the University of Sydney. However, the breadth of their coverage has not been without some cost to the field, and in this paper I want to examine their influence on the area which I know best, that of local government.     

A PRACTITIONER'S VIEWPOINT

For over a quarter of a century the work and thought of Robert Parker and Dick Spann have profoundly influenced the study of public administration in Australia. Their contributions to the discipline have been so wide-ranging and so much part of an integrated whole that when dealing with matters of general principle their work is equally relevant to the Commonwealth, State and local levels of administration. However, as this appreciation of what their work meant for a practising administrator is written from the perspective of a former State public servant, I shall concentrate below on the field with which I am most familiar.     

PART SIX: RETROSPECT

In these concluding remarks we want to draw together some of the themes which emerge from the previous papers and to offer some general conclusions about where our field has been travelling over the period in which it has been so largely guided by Parker and Spann. We also offer a few predictions about where it may go in the future. First, however, the question whether or not we have omitted any significant areas in the field needs to be answered.     

Prospects for communication policy

At stake in communication policymaking is control and use of technologies central to the process of governance in society. Future policies must admit a broader range of social goals than present ones. Defining such goals will require shifting conceptual approaches from regulation to investment, from information goods to communication resources, and from consumerism to politics. Persons engaged in communication policy research and planning had best avoid traps of being blinded by the technology, underestimating the political process and making easy assumptions about goals and values.David Grey, Edwin Parker and Donald Dunn of the faculty of Stanford University were especially helpful in the preparation of this article.     

Brenda Bryant: There Is Nothing More Practical than a Good Theory

Public administration values the relationship between theory and practice. Regrettably, theory and practice are regarded more often than not as separate purviews of two different groups—academics and practitioners—resulting in a perceived gap between the two. The doctorate of public administration program at the University of Southern California's Washington Public Affairs Center sought to span both worlds. This article by Beryl A. Radin of American University profiles one of its graduates, Brenda L. Bryant. The author traces her career development, experience in the doctoral program, as well as subsequent professional activities, ultimately highlighting why “there is nothing more practical than a good theory.”     

PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION

In 1960 a newcomer to public personnel administration in Australia would have been presented with two treatises and told that these were the alpha and omega of the subject. The first edition of R. N. Spann's Public Administration in Australia appeared in 1959, while the Boyer Report, the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Public Service Recruitment , of which R. S. Parker was co-author, was also published in that year. The newcomer would have found in these works not only an introduction to the then generally accepted ideas about personnel management in Australian public services, but also a critical assessment of those prevailing ideas, a critique which reveals the authors' beliefs and which influenced the succeeding generation of practitioners.     

Information Sharing and Public Sector Knowledge Networks

As pressures to engage in cross-agency and cross-sectoral partnerships become more widespread, information sharing becomes an ever more critical and daunting aspect of public administration. In this edition's exchange among scholars and practitioners, Sharon S. Dawes, Anthony M. Cresswell, and Theresa A. Pardo of the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany, State University of New York, offer a "baker's dozen" of lessons they have culled from research and their own action research agenda studying the building of public sector knowledge networks in New York over the past 15 years. Grounded in a multidisciplinary, experientially based, and street-level view of the obstacles to and tactics for building successful public sector knowledge networks, the authors' warning to conceive collaborative information-sharing efforts as governance rather than information technology challenges is advice that practitioners ignore at their peril. Readers will find a more extensive eversion of this article on the PAR Web site (go to aspanet.org, click on PAR, then on the Theory to Practice icon). They also will find expert e-commentary on the article (plus the authors' response) from Lisa Bingham , Indiana University-Bloomington; Sharon Caudle , Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University; Louise K. Comfort , University of Pittsburgh; and Costis Toregas , American University.     

Looking for Meaning in the Alabama Lectures' Book Series: An Epitaph for an Old Friend of Public Administration after 57 Years

This essay analyzes and reviews the significance of the Alabama Public Administration Lecture Series, one of the most distinguished and long‐lasting platforms in public administration. Based on guest lectures that were delivered annually to University of Alabama graduate students in public administration, the series began in 1944 and concluded in 2000. During those 57 years, most of the lectures were published as books, usually by the University of Alabama Press. The last book of the series will be published in 2009. This article examines the series as a whole and asks, what does the series tell us about public administration? What does it tell us about how our field got to where it is now? These questions are important because the books present a running conversation on the important subjects of public administration. The article shows that the lecture series offers a history of the field, reflecting the topics that were considered important by leading thinkers in their times.     

Big Questions for a Significant Public Administration

During the 1999 "Building Bridges Tour" (see Stivers 2000), PAR readers encouraged the editors to focus more attention on the so-called "Big Questions/Big Issues" of the field of public administration. In response to this suggestion, we created a new forum for scholarly discourse simply called "Big Questions/Big Issues." This inaugural forum begins with a context setting essay by John Kirlin,a leading proponent of the Big Questions/Big Issues perspective. Kirlin' essay is immediately followed by Laurence E. Lynn Jr.'s thought provoking piece, "The Myth of the Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood For." Lynn' essay is important for it takes to task those who carelessly attack "traditional public administration." We asked J. Patrick Dobel (University of Washington), David Rosenbloom (American University), Norma Riccucci (State University of New York at Albany), and James Svara (North Carolina State) to respond to Lynn' essay. We invite PAR readers to join the conversation using PAR' message board online at ASPA's Online Community (http://www.memberconnections.com/aspa/) or by writing directly to theauthors and/or editors.—LDT     

UNDERSTANDING PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: REFLECTIONS ON AN ACADEMIC OBITUARY —"ALAS, POOR YORICK"

It seemed that "Alas, Poor Yorick" was an appropriate subtitle for this attempt to respond to Understanding Public Administration. Yorick, you will remember, was the deceased royal jester, whose skull Hamlet inspected in the churchyard in Elsinore, causing him to meditate on the vanity of human life. "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come." Though not a professional jester, I am keenly aware of the ephemeral character of the work of Professors of Government and Public Administration, or at least of this particular one; though Festsehriften may be said to "lay it on thick", they cannot altogether disguise the rather plain face beneath. I am glad to be fortified by having the more distinguished countenance of Robert Parker alongside me, and I mean that.     

Paradigm Shift in Public Administration: Implications for Teaching in Professional Training Programs

The decline in popularity of New Public Management worldwide reinvigorated the search for a new paradigm in the field of public administration. Several alternatives to New Public Management, such as the New Governance and Public Value paradigms, have gained prominence in recent years. Despite tensions among these paradigms, exceptional challenges for public administration teaching programs exist. Xun Wu and Jingwei He of the National University of Singapore compiled data on public administration and management courses from 48 top master of public administration degree programs in China and the United States. This essay analyzes how competing paradigms influenced the selection of course content and pedagogical foci in professional training curricula. The authors conclude that in order to take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity provided by the rapid, global expansion of professional education in public administration, there is an urgent need to find a synthesized theoretical framework .     

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.     

URWICK ON THE PIONEERS OF MANAGEMENT

Colonel Lyndall Fownes Urwick is one of the major theoreticians and historians of the management movement of the twentieth century. For this he has been recognized internationally, holding most of the major awards for excellence in contributions to management. He is now 87 years old and lives in Australia. In this paper the authors report an edited version of Urwick's verbal responses to questions about Taylor, the Gilbreths, Gant, Fayol, Mayo, Mooney, Reiley, Mary Parker Follett, Barnard, Drucker and Koontz. Questions were designed to elicit Urwick's experiences with the individuals rather than just their ideas. Anecdotal recollections have been included where they give insights into the pioneer's personality and writings.     

Dillon's Rule Under the Burger Court: The Municipal Liability Cases

Under the Burger Court, the constitutional relationship betweenstates and their municipalities has been examined primarilyin cases involving private suits initiated against municipalitiesunder federal antitrust and civil rights statutes. Since theCourt's 1943 Parker v. Brown decision, it had been presumedthat municipalities as political subdivisions of states wereas immune as their states from tort liability under the ShermanAntitrust Act. The Burger Court, however, ruled that municipalitiesare not automatically immunized from tort liability simply becauseof their status as political subdivisions unless they can demonstratethat their actions were undertaken pursuant to an expressedstate policy. After 1980, the Court continued to uphold thevulnerability of municipalities to private suits authorizedby federal statutes, but moved to narrow the types of remedyappropriate under common law. The Burger Court did not, therefore,address the more fundamental question of whether municipalitiesas public actors should be liable to private damages in thecourse of their public functions.     

Defining the Boundaries of Public Administration: Undisciplined Mongrels versus Disciplined Purists

"Undisciplined mongrels" are faculty from public administration programs who publish in a wide variety of journals. We expected that undisciplined mongrels would have more successful publishing records than their counterparts—"disciplined purists" who publish exclusively in public administration journals. This expectation is supported through an analysis of journal publications by a panel of 91 junior faculty members. We also expected that the methods that are currently used to rank public administration programs would discard a massive body of publication activity by public administration faculty. This expectation is also soundly supported. Findings indicate that from 1990 through 1997, a scant 18 percent of the articles published by the faculty panel were published in the highly selective set of 11 journals that are currently used to rank public administration programs.     

The Governance of Networks: Heuristic or Formal Analysis? A Reply to Rachel Parker

Rachel Parker, in her article 'Networked Governance or Just Networks?' in this journal, has dealt with a very challenging question on the relevance of network interaction to governance outcomes. Her use of network concepts, however, appears to employ networks as a heuristic device. Her article employs terms that describe social network properties that are best contextualised with reference to the theoretical insights offered by formal Social Network Analysis (SNA). My suggestion in this brief review is that some of the theoretical assumptions made about concepts such as fluidity, density or trust imply specific network properties that cannot be ignored when attempting an analysis of policy outcomes.     

The Obama Administration and PBB: Building on the Legacy of Federal Performance‐Informed Budgeting?

The administration of President Barack Obama, like those of his immediate predecessors, is focused on trying to improve the quality of, and use of, performance data. The federal government has been pursuing performance‐informed budget reforms for more than 50 years. Most recently, the Bush administration reforms included the President’s Management Agenda and the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). The Obama administration reforms include: measuring the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; reducing or eliminating poorly‐performing programs; setting a limited number of short‐term, high‐priority performance goals; and funding detailed program evaluations. The administration is taking a more agency‐driven approach than the Bush administration, but continues to find it challenging to move beyond production of performance data to its use. There should be opportunities to show how performance information can be used for decision making, given the change in the political climate and the needs to reduce spending and the deficit. Historically, there has been little appetite in the Congress for evidence‐based decision making. The administration, however, can continue to demonstrate how federal agencies can use performance information to more effectively manage programs.     

The Big Questions of Public Administration Education

Following Behn's observation that scientists in other fields understand the big questions of their disciplines and focus attention and their discussions on those questions, public administration scholars have attempted to identify the “big questions” in public management and public administration. In this article, I suggest that scholars in public administration should also be attentive to the big questions of public administration education, those timeless and enduring concerns that speak to the basic perspectives that we bring to the educational process. Specifically, I identify four big questions: Do we seek to educate our students with respect to theory or to practice? Do we prepare students for their first jobs or for those to which they might aspire later? What are the appropriate delivery mechanisms for MPA courses and curricula? What personal commitments do we make as public administration educators? I argue that these big questions in public administration education are far more connected than we usually think, and by posing these questions in terms of processes of human development we can at least provide a framework through which we might develop more coherent answers to these big questions, answers that recognize and build on the diversity of our students and our faculty.     

需求溢出理论与公共管理学基础理论的构建

需求溢出理论的提出,意在弥补公共管理学基础理论薄弱的问题,尤其是弥补当前公共管理的流行理论在政府职能定位方面的不足。需求溢出理论主张:个人需求超出其本人及家庭的满足能力即为需求溢出,个人的需求溢出生成社会的公共事务,解决个人的需求溢出问题是公共管理的终极使命;当合法的个人需求之间发生冲突,具有压倒性正义优势因而需要由公共权力来维护的一方的需求溢出,即为公共利益。由此,需求溢出理论以个人的需求溢出为标尺,对政府的职能定位提出了比其他理论更为明确的方向性指导,因而更宜作为公共管理学的基础理论。