Measuring New Public Management and Governance in Political Debate

New Public Management (NPM) recently has been compared and contrasted with public governance (PG) to illustrate shifts in conceptions of public administrations and in reform agendas. The authors develop measures to capture the relevance of NPM and PG in textual discourse and investigate the extent to which they have entered the political debate. Content analysis of electoral programs for the 2005 Italian regional elections reveals that even in this legalistic country, considerable attention was paid to both NPM and PG issues. An important explanatory variable in preference for NPM or PG is party ideology, highlighting often‐ignored within‐country dynamics. Furthermore, the authors show how a methodological approach adapted from mainly political science and business research can be exploited in the field of public administration.     

Assessing Qualitative Studies in Public Administration Research

Systematic reviews of research methods in the public administration field have assessed the progress of research practice and offered relevant recommendations to further develop research quality. But most recent reviews examine quantitative studies, and the few assessments of qualitative scholarship tend to focus on specific dimensions. This article calls attention to the overall practice of qualitative research in the field of public administration. The authors analyzed 129 qualitative studies published during a five‐year period (2010–14) in the six top public administration journals, combining bibliometric and qualitative analyses. Three findings are drawn from the analysis. First, qualitative work represents a very small percentage of the journal articles published in the field. Second, qualitative research practice uses a small range of methodologies, mainly case studies. Finally, there is inconsistency in reporting methodological decisions. The article discusses the implications of these findings and offers recommendations to ensure methodological rigor while considering the integrity of the logic of inquiry and reporting standards of qualitative research practice.     

Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the Public Sector: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

This article presents a systematic literature review of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the public sector. The findings show that although OCB is gaining more attention in the public sector, research often does not take specific public sector characteristics or concepts into account. Based on the available evidence, the authors develop a framework of antecedents, outcomes, mediators, and moderators of OCB. Three areas for future research are recommended: (1) regarding theory: link OCB to public sector concepts such as bureaucratic red tape, public leadership, and public service motivation; (2) regarding research designs: use stronger survey designs, experiments, and case studies and devote more attention to cross-sectoral and cross-country differences; and (3) regarding the consequences of OCB: address the gap in our knowledge of how OCB has an impact on public organizations, including negative impacts.     

Bridging the Public Service Motivation and Calling Literatures

Public administration research suggests there may be disparity in the extent to which public servants experience their work as a calling. The purpose of this article is to better illustrate and integrate calling research, which grows out of the positive organizational scholarship movement, into how we understand public service motives. The calling scholarship offers a productive way to view differences in public servants' orientations toward their work. Integrating calling into the public administration scholarship—particularly the public service motivation scholarship—provides insights to researchers and managers about how to help employees discover a deeper sense of meaningfulness in their work. In presenting the arguments and corresponding conceptual framework, the authors seek to supplement rather than replace the public service motivation construct. The authors articulate a research agenda that they believe will strengthen and enrich research on public servants' experience with their work.     

Survey Research in Public Administration: Assessing Mainstream Journals with a Total Survey Error Framework

Survey research is a common tool for assessing public opinions, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors for analyses in many social science disciplines. Yet there is little knowledge regarding how specific elements of survey research methodology are applied in practice in public administration. This article examines five mainstream public administration journals over an eight‐year period regarding current methodological practice, organized around the total survey error framework. The findings show that survey research in the field of public administration features mainly small‐scale studies, heavy reliance on a single data collection mode, questionable sample selection procedures, and suspect sample frame quality. Survey data largely are analyzed without careful consideration of assumptions or potential sources of error. An informed evaluation of the quality of survey data is made more difficult by the fact that many journal articles do not detail data collection procedures. This study concludes with suggestions for improving the quality and reporting of survey research in the field.     

Engage Them through Emotions: Exploring the Role of Emotional Intelligence in Public Sector Engagement

The public administration literature has demonstrated the valuable impact of employees' engagement on public service. However, studies conventionally deal with engagement as a unidimensional construct, with few explanations for its evolution. To promote knowledge in this arena, the authors propose public sector engagement (PSE) as a multidimensional construct, comprising social responsibility, work engagement, and organizational citizenship behaviors at the individual level. The authors develop and examine a set of hypotheses proposing that PSE may be augmented by enhancing civil servants' emotional intelligence (EI) as well as their supervisors' EI. Using a two‐study multimethod approach (i.e., an experiment and a survey), the authors identify employees' and managers' high EI as a critical resource in enhancing PSE. The article concludes by theoretically framing the findings using the job demands‐resources model and illuminating the practical value to public service of better selection and training of high‐EI employees and managers.     

Public Administration Scholarship and the Politics of Coproducing Academic–Practitioner Research

Developing greater cooperation between researchers and practitioners is a long‐standing concern in social science. Academics and practitioners working together to coproduce research offers a number of potential gains for public administration scholarship, but it also raises some dilemmas. The benefits include bringing local knowledge to bear on the field, making better informed policy, and putting research to better use. However, coproduction of research also involves managing ambiguous loyalties, reconciling different interests, and negotiating competing goals. The authors reflect on their experience of coproducing a research project in the United Kingdom and discuss the challenges that coproducers of research confront. They situate the discussion within a consideration of traditions of public administration scholarship and debates about the role of the academy to understand better the politics of their joint practice. Thinking about the politics of coproduction is timely and enables the authors to become more attuned to the benefits and constraints of this mode of research..     

Cumulating the Intellectual Gold of Case Study Research

Two criticisms of public administration research have been leveled. First, knowledge in the field is not being cumulated. Second, the research has low quality. A preference for case studies as a form of scientific inquiry is behind both criticisms. The authors propose a solution to the first problem by showing how meta-analysis can be used to cumulate knowledge using case study evidence. Viewed cumulatively, case studies comprise an intellectual goldmine awaiting discovery. The authors challenge the second criticism, proposing that quality judgments should be based on the important principle of knowledge cumulation, which acknowledges the value of all research methods.     

Coproduction and Equity in Public Service Delivery

Public managers and researchers devote much attention to the benefits of coproduction, or the mixing of the productive efforts of public employees and citizens in public service design and delivery. One concern, however, is the distributional consequences of coproduction. This article proposes that disadvantaged citizens may be constrained by a lack of knowledge or other resources necessary to contribute to and benefit from the coproduction process. From this assumption, the authors develop the theoretical argument that if coproduction programs were designed to lift constraints on disadvantaged citizens, they might increase both efficiency and equity. This claim is tested using a field experiment on educational services. A coproduction program providing immigrant parents with knowledge and materials useful to their children's early educational development had a substantial positive impact on the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children, thereby diminishing inequity. Economically, the program was more efficient than later compensation of low‐performing children.     

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.     

Why Public Employees Rebel: Guerrilla Government in the Public Sector

Employee recalcitrance and employer reprisal are ever-present conditions in public service. Yet we have limited knowledge of the forces that move administrators away from acquiescence and toward antagonism. The authors follow the theoretical thrust of behavioral public administration to better understand administrative behavior by targeting the determinants of guerrilla government actions. They do so by presenting the results of a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey of federal bureaucrats. Findings show that decisions to pursue guerrilla activities are conditional on a multitude of factors—namely, the bureaucrat's personal views of the directive as a policy solution, the compatibility of the directive with the bureaucrat's ethical framework, the status of the person issuing the directive, and the probability that the directive might cause harm to others. Notably, these decisions generally are not affected by the probability of retribution or the expected type thereof. However, they are affected by the magnitude of harm that may ensue if orders are obeyed and not resisted.     

The Behavioral Public Administration Movement: A Critical Reflection

Proponents of the behavioral public administration movement call for greater use of theories from psychology and experimental research designs to improve the rigor of public administration research. We agree that the use of such theories and methods will provide much-needed reinforcements to public administration research, but the approach taken so far might be too narrow and might unnecessarily alienate scholars using other perspectives and research approaches. Reflecting on our own training and experiences, we suggest that adopting a more inclusive approach that employs insights and research tools not only from psychology but also from other disciplines will provide public administration scholars with a stronger footing in their efforts to generate actionable knowledge for public managers and policy makers. We also identify some key methodological issues that behavioral public administration scholars need to consider and address as the use of experiments becomes more common in public administration research. Finally, we encourage public administration scholars interested in behavioral research questions to do more to contribute to broader management and organizational behavior research.     

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。     

Understanding Employee Turnover in the Public Sector: Insights from Research on Teacher Mobility

Employee turnover is a key area for public administration research, but one about which there is much still to be learned. Insights from an extensive body of research on employee turnover in a specific area of the public sector—public education—contributes to the understanding of employee mobility in public organizations more generally. The authors present a conceptual framework for understanding employee turnover that is grounded in economic theories of labor supply and demand, which have formed the foundation of many studies of teacher turnover. The main findings of this body of work are documented, noting connections to the literature on public employee turnover, lessons that can be learned, and potential new areas for empirical inquiry for scholars of turnover in the public sector.     

Resilience in Public Administration: The Work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom from a Public Administration Perspective

This essay examines the remarkable careers of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, exploring polycentricity and human management of common property resources from the “no‐name fields” of public administration in the late 1950s, through the metropolitan public service industries and public choice approach to democratic administration in the 1960s and 1970s and the institutional analysis of common pool resource management of the 1980s and 1990s. It continues with the diagnosis of the self‐governing capabilities of socio‐ecological systems in the 2000s. Many continuities underlie focal shifts in attention. Their work will be related to developments in the public administration field along with illustrations of their pioneer example for public administration on research as a collaborative enterprise. The 2009 Nobel Laureate in economics, Elinor Ostrom has been working from an academic background and intellectual tradition that, particularly through her long‐term collaboration with Vincent Ostrom, is strongly rooted in the classical and prevailing institutional concerns that may be seen as core to public administration as an academic field of education and research.

相似文献   

Some Evidence of a Pluralistic Discipline: A Narrative Analysis of Public Administration Symposia

This article investigates the discipline of public administration as it is manifested in symposium articles published during the period 1985–99. What was the field trying to accomplish? The method of investigation is narrative analysis. Using specific discourse markers (method, substantive contents, and authorial intentions), the authors found a wide variety of purposes and projects in the symposia investigated. The condition of public administration, they conclude, is distinguished by a radical pluralism—a striking absence of any singular conception of public administration scholarship.     

RNICE Model: Evaluating the Contribution of Replication Studies in Public Administration and Management Research

Replication studies relate to the scientific principle of replicability and serve the significant purpose of providing supporting (or contradicting) evidence regarding the existence of a phenomenon. However, replication has never been an integral part of public administration and management research. Recently, scholars have called for more replication, but academic reflections on when replication adds substantive value to public administration and management research are needed. This article presents the RNICE conceptual model, for assessing when and how a replication study contributes knowledge about a social phenomenon and advances knowledge in the public administration and management literatures. The RNICE model provides a vehicle for researchers who seek to evaluate or demonstrate the value of a replication study systematically. The practical application of the model is illustrated using two published replication studies.     

A Systematic Review of Field Experiments in Public Administration

Field experiments have become popular in public administration. By allowing for the identification of causal effects in realistic settings, field experiments may become central in several research agendas of relevance to the field. Conducting field experiments is difficult and problems often occur along the way. However, researchers new to the method have few resources in public administration to consider the problems that arise when conducting field experiments. This systematic review identifies 42 field experiments in public administration and serves as an introduction to field experiments in public administration. The article discusses how field experiments developed over time and highlights trends in field experimentation in public administration. It then discusses issues to consider when designing field experiments. Among these are costs, practicality, ethics, and validity. Finally, the authors suggest a future research agenda for public administration field experiments.     

Repositioning American Public Administration? Citizen Estrangement,Administrative Reform,and the Disarticulated State

Levels of citizen estrangement from government in the United States have risen rather consistently since the late 1960s and have reached all‐time highs in recent years. Evidence is accumulating in political science research to suggest that public administrative theory may have contributed to this trend since the Progressive Era in the early 1900s. The authors develop this thesis by arguing that administrative theory in the United States has persistently portrayed public managers as “bridge builders” who link an expertise‐challenged citizenry to government in ways that emphasize bureaucratic over democratic administration. Moreover, despite claims of yet another “new” paradigmatic shift for the field, collaborative governance scholarship to date exhibits similar tendencies. To support this argument, the authors assess the common citizen‐marginalizing tendencies of three sets of administrative reforms in American public administration: the progressive, associationalist, and polycentric heritages. They offer counterarguments to this thesis and call for critical self‐reflection by the field and a more empirically robust research agenda on this topic.