An Administrative Manifesto for Survival in the Twenty-First Century

Professor Ali Farazmand has written a manifesto for administrative action in an effort to improve public governance and administration capacity not only for today but also for tomorrow, which is highly volatile and uncertain. Farazmand's earlier works, especially his essay "Globalization and Public Administration" (PAR, November/December 1999), are familiar to many students and scholars in public administration around the world.     

Major Players: Bureaucracies In American Government

For more than 50 years, Herbert Kaufman has been an astute observer of public bureaucracies. In this essay, Kaufman draws on his extensive experience in explaining the role of public bureaucracies in the American political system. Kaufman was motivated to write the essay because of his concern that public bureaucracies are not given adequate attention in American government textbooks. We hope that PAR readers will use the essay to educate students and others about the important role of public bureaucracies in American government.—LDT     

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.     

Useful to whom? Public management research,social science,and the standpoint problem

Answering “Big Questions” in public management will require close connections to social science, in particular political science. Yet connections are impeded by the difference in standpoint from which these questions are regarded by public management researchers and political scientists. Changing to a citizen standpoint changes the Big Questions and pushes political science and PM research toward unification. It also makes research more useful—at least to citizens.     

Publishing while editor: Transparency and behaviour in public administration journals

Journal editors serve as gatekeepers of knowledge, a role critical to preserving the quality and standards of good research. Some scholars have questioned whether editors have taken advantage of their position to publish their own work. To understand the extent to which editors of public administration journals self-publish, we examined publishing patterns over a 20-year period. We collected the names of editors from the mastheads of 13 generalist public administration journals from 1997 to 2016 and used data indexed from Web of Science to look at articles published in those journals during the same time. We found that while self-publishing behaviour is not common across the entire field, it is a trend for certain journals and individuals. We also found the practice of self-publishing is influenced by whether an individual served in a primary editorial role (e.g., editor-in-chief), length of editorial service, and overall scholarly productivity. We discuss appropriateness and ethical implications of the practice.     

The Role of IPAA: Public Presentation — Key Issues in Governance

In the December 1997 issue of this journal our editors expressed concern about the decline in teaching of public administration. This does not reflect any decline in the overall level of involvement by government in the economy or society. Rather it seems to reflect changing perceptions of what is needed to succeed in public administration.
This in turn raises the very important issue of what we as a society expect from our future public administrators. While many management skills are common to both business and the public sector, public administration needs to extend beyond the limits of business management to comprehend issues such as accountability, probity and policy processes. Indeed it is increasingly being recognised that what is at stake is not just management per se, but rather the broader array of relationships involved in good governance.
The Institute of Public Administration Australia has over the years played an important role in bringing practitioners and teachers together to help foster a better appreciation of these issues. Now more than ever, when the public sector is experiencing considerable change, there needs to be a lively forum where these broader issues of public administration can be debated and new approaches can be tested.
The National Council of the Institute has accordingly been considering how the Institute might encourage a wider public appreciation of good governance. In order to assist in this process and to provide some guidance to spokepersons, the Council has agreed the following Statement. We hope that all members of the Institute will find this Statement helpful and will be encouraged to promote the ideals it seeks to uphold.     

PAR’s Social Equity Footprint

During the 75th anniversary of Public Administration Review (PAR), this article examines the social equity scholarship published in PAR from 1940 to 2013. Less than 5 percent of all articles published in PAR since its inception focus on social equity. The articles published in PAR are primarily concentrated within the areas of personnel and public policy. Very few articles were published in the areas of budgeting or ethics. While social equity scholarship published in PAR has made a valuable contribution to understanding the career inequities of women and minorities in the public sector, scholars and professionals need to more thoroughly examine the black box of agency practice and structural inequities to examine why they persist. The challenge for future social equity research in public administration is to examine broader dimensions of equity and to understand how social inequities in administration can be mitigated.     

PUSEY ON THE CANBERRA BUREAUCRACY: TWO PERSPECTIVES

Michael Pusey's book titled Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation Building State Changes its Mind (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1991, 310 pp) was launched in Australia in August 1991. In view of the great interest shown in it, unprecedented for a book on a public administration topic in recent times, AJPA has sought reviews from both a practitioner and an academic.     

Big Data,intelligence, and analyst privacy: investigating information dissemination at an NSA-funded research lab

The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS) at North Carolina State University, funded by the National Security Agency, is a collaborative, long-term research enterprise focused on improving intelligence analysis using Big Data. In its work, LAS has recently begun dealing with the trade-off between the collection, storage, and use of large unclassified data-sets and analyst privacy. We discuss particular privacy challenges at LAS, analyze privacy principles in the life cycle of LAS unclassified data-sets, what intelligence analysts themselves think about these privacy concerns, and recommend possible best practices potentially applicable to LAS, as well as future Big Data laboratories and research centers that collaborate with intelligence communities.     

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.     

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 .     

What Makes a State Advocacy Structure Effective? — Conflicts Between Bureaucratic and Social Movement Criteria

State "advocacy structures"—agencies nominally designated to advance the status of collective social movements in public policy and society—must operate under conflicting criteria for "effectiveness." While government actors likely measure effectiveness as the ability to manage a policyissue—advancing policy influence by prioritizing and packaging demands —collective movements additionally or primarily emphasize structures' performance as representatives of the priorities and diversity of movements. This consequently leads to differing evaluations of agency "effectiveness." A case study of the Ontario Women's Directorate (OWD) analyzes the inherent conflicts and tensions between these two roles, particularly under repeated changes in government. The experiences of the OWD and other advocacy structures suggest that conflicting criteria are inherent and unavoidable in such institutions.     

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.     

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.     

Welfare Reform and the "Platonic Master Science": An Interview with Lawrence Mead

Lawrence M. Mead is a professor of politics at New York University, where he teaches courses on public policy and American government. He is the author and editor of six books on welfare and social policy. His recent book Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin (Princeton University Press, 2004) was a co-recipient of the 2005 Louis Brownlow Book Award, which is given by the National Academy of Public Administration. In the spring of 2006, Professor Mead was interviewed by Kevin R. Kosar on behalf of PAR.     

Toward “Strong Democracy” in Global Cities? Social Capital Building,Theory‐Driven Reform,and the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Experience

With faith in government waning, cultural diversity spiraling, and fiscal stress straining the ability of policy makers to address the policy challenges accompanying these developments, the salience of (re)connecting citizens with government takes on renewed urgency today. Nowhere is this more the case than in urban America, where so‐called global cities teeming with ethnic diversity and controlling a disproportionate amount of global business in the world economy confront profound citizen participation challenges, choices, and opportunities. In this installment of Theory to Practice, the authors cull lessons from their 10‐year action theory–based assessment and participation in the city of Los Angeles’ neighborhood council experience. Comparing and contrasting their findings in this global city with those from related studies on participatory mechanisms and deliberative processes more generally, they offer six lessons for those seeking to build stronger democracy in urban areas, argue that further advances require a greater research focus on the longitudinal implementation of these efforts rather than just on their design, and contend that university researchers have a role to play in these efforts as long as they appreciate the paradoxical nature of their participation. Expert e‐commentary by Brian Cook of Virginia Tech, Tina Nabatchi of Syracuse University, and John Thomas of Georgia State University on the perspectives and arguments culled from Los Angeles’ theory‐based participatory efforts can be found on the PAR website (go to aspanet.org, click on the link to PAR, and then on the Theory to Practice link). These e‐commentaries are accompanied by the authors’ response and instructions on how PAR readers can join the exchange.     

Administrative Reforms and Their Impact on Training the Public Bureaucracy in Bangladesh

Bangladesh has recently experienced a number of administrative, institutional, structural and policy reforms which have attempted to recast the modalities of the public delivery system and address the perennial issues of "efficiency, effectiveness and productivity" in the public administration system. A number of these reform packages have called for drastic changes in the mode of governmental operations/processes as well as in institutional arrangements.
In this article, the author has reviewed such reform efforts and their impact on the overall public administration training curriculum and academic programs of the training institutions as well as with the universities in Bangladesh. The entry–level training packages have not adequately covered the critical areas that have been highlighted by the different reforms. The article concludes with a suggestion to review all entry–level training programs and identify some thematic areas to make the training programs "practical, pro–active and action–oriented." A close collaboration between the universities and the public administration training institutions is also strongly recommended.     

The pits and the core: Simple collective decision problems with concave preferences

This essay extends the theory of simple collective decision problems to spatial games in which (contrary to the traditional assumption) each agent's preferences are concave, in the sense that the alternatives that the agent does not prefer to any particular reference alternative together constitute a convex set. Such concave preferences might characterize decision problems in which, say, a site must be selected for some obnoxious facility, such as a prison, garbage dump, or facility for managing hazardous materials. The results indicate that, under these conditions, the (weak -)core can be structurally unstable, changing discontinuously with apparently minor perturbations of the decision problem. The main theorem identifies a curious property of the core when the set of feasible alternatives is compact and convex and each agent's preferences are strictly concave. Namely, a point in the feasible set's interior can belong to the core only if there is no feasible alternative that makes every member of any winning coalition strictly worse off. In this sense, an interior point belongs to the core only if it lies in the pits.A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the West Coast Conference on Small Groups Research, Stanford University, 17 April 1985, and the Experimental Social Choice Workshop, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, 20–21 June 1985. This material is based on work supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (Grants SES 83-12123 and SES 84-10094), the Real Estate Center and Department of Decision Sciences of The Wharton School, and the Research Fund of the University of Pennsylvania.     

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.”     

Poll Driven Government: A Review of Public Administration in 2001

The approach of the Howard Coalition government to public administration in 2001 was consistent with the conventional wisdom that governments typically 'play it safe' in an election year. The government's preoccupation with winning a third term in office was a significant determinant of the policy responses of the government on a number of key issues. The events of 2001 serve as a vivid reminder that policy considerations are ultimately subject to the dictates of the electoral cycle. This is the sixth administrative essay publsihed in the journal since the editors resumed the administrative chronicles in 1996. Earlier administrative essays include J Stewart 55(1) 196; S Prasser 56(1) 1997; J Homeshaw 57(3) 1998; J Moon 58(2) 1999; C Broughton and J Chalmers 60(1) 2000.