Government-Sponsored Enterprises: Reality Catches Up to Public Administration Theory

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are insolvent and in government hands. Political forces led many lawmakers to neglect warnings from public administration academics and practitioners about the vulnerabilities of government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Private ownership combined with government backing let the two companies dominate their markets and the political process. GSEs successfully resisted bank-type regulation and capital requirements. The options now include restoring the two GSEs in some form, transforming them into temporary or longer-term wholly owned government corporations, or simply ending them. This article discusses the advantages and drawbacks of each option. Again, the public administration literature provides useful suggestions about organizational alternatives.     

Equity at the Intersection: Public Administration and the Study of Gender

While gender has emerged as an important research subject, the development of a feminist theory has been slow. This paper calls for a commitment to the development of a feminist theory of public administration. As part of this development, the author argues that the field also must embrace research focused on the intersection of multiple identity categories such as race and class.     

Behavioral Public Administration: Combining Insights from Public Administration and Psychology

Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro‐level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, add nuance to, or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two‐way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political‐administrative setting. Finally, four principles are proposed to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology.     

Behavioral Public Administration: Past,Present, and Future

The last decade has seen remarkable growth in the field of behavioral public administration, both in practice and in academia. In both domains, applications of behavioral science to policy problems have moved forward at breakneck speed; researchers are increasingly pursuing randomized behavioral interventions in public administration contexts, editors of peer-reviewed academic journals are showing greater interest in publishing this work, and policy makers at all levels are creating new initiatives to bring behavioral science into the public sector. However, because the expansion of the field has been so rapid, there has been relatively little time to step back and reflect on the work that has been done and to assess where the field is going in the future. It is high time for such reflection: where is the field currently on track, and where might it need course correction?     

多视角的公共行政观——评《公共行政学：管理、政治和法律途径》一书

《公共行政学:管理、政治和法律途径》一书是美国著名行政学家戴维·H·罗森布鲁姆和罗伯特·S·克拉夫丘克的力作,是一部在国际公共行政学领域中享有盛誉的经典著作.首先总结了该书提出的三种不同视角的公共行政观、公共行政未来发展九大趋势及坚持传统公共行政范式,力图将(新)公共管理纳入其框架之中的主要观点.其次,分析了该书将法律途径纳入研究视角、多视角地研究公共行政的多元公共行政观及重视公共行政中民主宪政的重要性三方面的贡献及创新之处.再次,指出本书中的三点不足之处:其一是并未达到作者所预期的"合各种途径"的目的;其二是结构略显庞杂,论述不够深入、细致;其三是视角较为狭隘,仅局限于美国.最后,对于该书对我国的借鉴与启示作用,认为:一方面由于中、美国情差异很大,应该慎重对待该书中的相关理论;另一方面应借鉴该书中适用中国的经验、方法,推进中国公共行政理论与实践的发展.     

A Matter of Fairness: The Equity of Urban General Assistance

General assistance is the "safety net" of the welfare system, γet, most general assistance programs reflect the goals of cost containment more clearly than the goal of equity. Data from a 1982 survey of general assistance programs provide the basis for a causal analysis. The substantial variation across states seems based on willingness to provide services, rather than need. State welfare commitment is the most influential explanation on general assistance coverage, although per capita income, percent metropolitan, political culture, and percent unemployment also have some effect. Perhaps centralization at the federal level will provide equitable coverage; however, the current political environment makes such an outcome unlikely without major changes in public opinion.     

Religion, Spirituality, and the Workplace: Challenges for Public Administration

The relationship between religion and politics in the United States is a much-studied academic area, particularly evident in political institutional and behavioral venues such as interest groups, electoral behavior, and political culture. One academic area that has not received much attention is the influence of religion on public administration. Recently, however, public administration scholars have begun to mimic their counterparts in the business world by examining the role of religion and spirituality in the public workplace, especially with regard to organizational performance, ethical behavior patterns, decision making, and the personal spiritual health of employees. This article examines the role and impact of religion and spirituality in the workplace, reviews court cases and political measures regarding religious expression in the public sector, explores a private sector model to explain the interrelationship between religion and spirituality in the public workplace, and challenges public administrators to consider the positive role that religion and spirituality can play in the public workplace.     

Public Administration as Pragmatic, Democratic, and Objective

In the foregoing essay, Patricia M. Shields argues that public administration and administrators should support a much greater incorporation of classical pragmatism than has been the case to date. This paper supports that conclusion by focusing on classical pragmatism's central benefit to public administration: its ability to provide the field with a claim to objectivity that it badly needs, but which Shields barely mentions. It shows how objectivity is closely connected to a pragmatic conception of democracy, and how this conception of democracy is diametrically opposed to one built on a fact/value (or administration/politics) dichotomy.     

Reputation and Public Administration

This article examines the application of organizational reputation to public administration. Organizational reputation is defined as a set of beliefs about an organization’s capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences. The authors assert that the way in which organizational reputations are formed and subsequently cultivated is fundamental to understanding the role of public administration in a democracy. A review of the basic assumptions and empirical work on organizational reputation in the public sector identifies a series of stylized facts that extends our understanding of the functioning of public agencies. In particular, the authors examine the relationship between organizational reputation and bureaucratic autonomy.     

公共服务、公共管理与法国公共行政的现代化

本文基于胡德(Hood)的新公共管理思想和霍尔(Hall)与赖特(Wright)的新历史制度主义观点,分析了法国最近的几次改革及其相关理念,认为如果不同的政府都采用私营部门的管理方法来解决相似的问题,那么,改革的具体内容则依每个国家自身的环境,或先天条件而定.     

It's About Time: Catching Method Up to Meaning—The Usefulness of Narrative Inquiry in Public Administration Research

As a form of interpretive research, narrative inquiry contributes to the pursuit of high-quality public administration scholarship, along with other forms of explanatory research that have dominated the field. In this article we discuss the unique features of narrative inquiry, review how this research orientation has been used in public administration, and use our experience with a national, multimodal, multiyear research project on social-change leadership in the United States to identify and illustrate the contributions of narrative inquiry to address two key issues in the field: the concern with good research and the aspiration to cultivate a meaningful connection between researchers and practitioners in the field.     

The Science of Public Administration: Problems,Presumptions, Progress,and Possibilities

Nearly 70 years ago, Dahl noted the difficulty of constructing a science of public administration that was plagued by three interrelated problems: values, behavior, and culture. Underlying all three problems was the presumption that public administration could establish a set of universal principles independent of moral or political ends, individual human differences, or social influences. In discussing these three broad and easily accessible themes, Dahl did more than identify and critique the field's problems and presumptions. He also provided a road map to move the field forward and establish a science of public administration. Drawing on the framework provided by Dahl, this article argues that the field has made considerable progress in recognizing, if not addressing, each problem raised by Dahl. Even so, several current presumptions or omissions are also identified that, if challenged, can provide additional possibilities to advance the science of public administration.     

Designing Public Participation: Managing Problem Settings and Social Equity

Researchers suggest that inequity and disparities in public participation in the policy‐making process will go hand in hand unless public managers and community leaders are attentive to these concerns when they are designing participation opportunities. Previous research has considered how the design of participatory opportunities can address inequity, but it has provided few insights into what is behind design choices. This article provides a theoretical framework that links public managers' and community leaders' perspectives on their own political efficacy and sources of their efficacy, yielding four types of “designers.” The research hypothesizes that these types have different narratives of social equity in participation that affect their design choices. Data from more than 100 public managers and community leaders provide preliminary support for these relationships. Findings suggest that inequitable public participation will persist unless designers consider what is behind their choices, focusing first on understanding the problem setting, or their narrative of equity in public participation.     

Trends in the Study of Public Administration: Empirical and Qualitative Observations from Public Administration Review, 2000–2009

What are the apparent research and methodological trends in PAR’s content over the past decade? From the perspective of the journal’s 70‐year history, with its aim to “mesh” practitioner and academic knowledge creation, topical coverage since 2000 reflects striking continuity, emphasizing many of the “bread and butter” administrative issues such as planning, human resources, budgeting, and public management. A marked increase in coverage is apparent in the application of more sophisticated quantitative statistical methodology, as well as in the number of female authors, while the number of practitioner authors declined sharply. Throughout the first turbulent decade of the twenty‐first century, three intellectual themes stood out: evaluations of New Public Management, connections between practitioners and academicians, and responsiveness to immediate social, economic, and political challenges. Given the constant demand for usable knowledge, scholars seem to have marginalized attention to the historical context and epistemological foundations of the study. The central challenge in the years ahead will be to effectively use research methods in response to the big questions of government and society that defy measurement. Since many [empiricists], especially the younger, do not know very much about epistemology, they tend to be quite dogmatic about the one set of canons that dominate them. —C. Wright Mills, 1959