Reflections on Leadership: An Interview with Sean O'Keefe

This interview with Sean O'Keefe by PAR Associate Editor W. Henry Lambright is a departure from traditional Administrative Profiles. It represents an opportunity to elicit from a man who has held executive positions in government, industry, and the university lessons he has learned about leadership from those experiences. It is his perspective, in his own words, about a host of questions of interest to scholars and practitioners of public administration. These include commonalities and differences in leading organizations in various sectors. O'Keefe discusses how executives can deal with people and get the most from them, how executives use administrative power in achieving organizational goals, and why executives sometimes make the wrong calls in key decisions. He comments on what he learned about leadership from mentors during his formative years. He explains the limits he faced in making controversial decisions, such as his termination of a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.     

Rethinking Political Science: An Interview with Mark Kesselman

Abstract

While numerous studies show the corporatist style of governance to be on the decline in many western European democracies, Austria, for most analysts, continues to be governed by relatively harmonious practices of institutionalized corporatist concertation. In contrast to the currently popular mainstream assumption that the stability of Austrian corporatism can be traced in large part to Austria's unique and historically well‐established “culture of consensus,” this essay argues that the persistence of corporatism in Austria is attributable largely to the fact that market forces have yet to assume corporatism's functional role of securing labor discipline and wage demand moderation. As such, Austrian capitalists, in contrast to their counterparts in Europe's other postwar corporatist societies, remain reluctant to disassociate themselves entirely from corporatist political structures and to move toward more market‐based forms of industrial relations and economic decisionmaking.     

Inside the Presidential Communications Machine: An Interview with Martha Joynt Kumar

Martha Joynt Kumar is a professor of political science at Towson University. Her book, Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), examines the media and communications operations of the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In March 2008, Professor Kumar was interviewed in the White House Press Briefing Room by Kevin R. Kosar on behalf of Public Administration Review. As this interview went to press, the American Political Science Association’s Presidency Research Group announced that it had awarded Managing the President’s Message the Richard E. Neustadt Award for best book on the U.S. presidency published in 2007.     

American Politics Today: An Interview with Frances Fox Piven

Readers of New Political Science know Frances Fox Piven as the author or co-author of a series of path-breaking articles and books on the development of American social policies, political mobilization and voter turnout, and the attack on the welfare state. She is also a supporter of long standing of this journal and its sponsor, the Caucus for a New Political Science. In the last year Piven has come under attack by FOX News host Glenn Beck and other right-wing activists for ideas she developed in the 1960s with the late Richard Cloward. Beck and others have been keen to link Piven and Cloward's analysis in far-fetched ways to the economic policies of the Obama administration. In this interview Piven interprets the meaning of the right-wing attacks and discusses the state of contemporary American politics more broadly. She comments on the Obama administration's major policies and the prospects for political mobilization and offers advice for progressive scholars in the early stages of their careers.     

Reflections on Politics and Academia: An Interview with Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti, the author of more than twenty books on a wide variety of topics, has taught political science and social science at several universities. He is a founder of the Caucus for a New Political Science. In recent years he has been devoted to writing and public speaking, lecturing across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in political science from Yale University. He currently lives in Berkeley, California. The following interview was conducted in early February 2012.1 ¹ Michael Parenti would like to thank Carl Boggs for his efforts in putting this interview together. He considers it a privilege to be interviewed by someone of Carl's caliber.      

"There Was No Plan": An Interview with Rajiv Chandrasekaran

The George W. Bush administration’s doctrines of preemption and democratization through military action have been much debated. Discussants have included former members of the military, students of international relations and diplomacy, philosophers, and legal theorists, to name a few. Not surprisingly, the focus of these expostulations has been on the utility of hard and soft power, the international ripple effects of military action and state toppling, and the legal and moral propriety of preemption. For the most part, public administrators have little participated in these debates. This is regrettable, for the central question nestled within any debate over public policy is the question of plausibility. Can this policy be executed successfully? The governance challenges in postconflict states are profound. Who should rule? How should the state be reconstructed? What administrative structures should be erected? Who should staff government offices and bureaucracies, and what principles should guide them? If preemption and democratization are to succeed, then these questions must be answered. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. His book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is an examination of the Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq from April 2003 through June 2004. Mr. Chandrasekaran has served as the journalist in residence for the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. In March 2007, Mr. Chandrasekaran was interviewed by Kevin Kosar on behalf of the Public Administration Review.     

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.