Wisdom in Public Administration: Looking for a Sociology of Wise Practice

This article explores a sociological account of practical wisdom in public administrations. Very little research on contemporary applications of wisdom exists, and what research there is has a cognitive bias, largely ignoring sociology. For public organizations to create the conditions for wise practice within themselves and within individual administrators, an understanding of the social relational structures and processes that build and sustain practical wisdom is crucial. Furthermore, given that there is an aesthetic dimension to practical wisdom, an aesthetics-based approach to sociology of organizational wisdom provides a useful starting point in this sociological project. Aesthetics raises important issues of communicative action and discourse that address social relations and their structures and processes. Finally, a research agenda that explores these structural and processual issues in public administration is canvassed.     

Budgetary Reform in Haiti from 1996-98: A Case Study of Issues and Obstacles in Implementing Change

With the restoration of democracy and new lending agreements with the international community, the Haitian government embarked upon an ambitious program of budgetary reforms in 1996. For the next two years, Haiti's Ministry of Economy and Finance pursued administrative and legislative changes intended to address significant problems with the country's budget preparation and execution. This article examines the types of problems the Ministry faced and how it chose to address them. The author concludes that though the Ministry made important progress, the ultimate success of the reforms was impeded by weakness in the administrative capacity of the government and a persistent lack of clear political consensus and direction in the country.     

Downtown malls and the city agenda

He is the author or editor of eight books and more than 50 articles on housing and city development. He has served as Chairman of the Faculty at M.I.T. and as director of the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. His most recent book, written with Lynne Sagalyn, is Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities,from which this article is extracted.     

The Borda count in n-dimensional issue space

We provide a natural extension of the Borda count to the n-dimensional spatial context, an algorithm to find the spatial Borda winner based on the notion of an inverse Borda count, the result that the Borda winner and the Condorcet winner coincide in unidimensional space when all alternatives on a line are feasible, results that show that in multi-dimensional space the Borda winner and the Condorcet winner (except under very implausible circumstances) will be distinct, and some results on the manipulability of outcomes under the Borda rule as a function of the domain of alternatives over which the Borda count is to be defined.The listing of authors is alphabetical. We are indebted to the staff of the Word Processing Center, School of Social Sciences, UCI, for typing, to Cheryl Larsson for preparation of figures, to Dorothy Gormick for bibliographic assistance, and to three anonymous referees for helpful suggestions. This research was supported by NSF Grant SES #85-06376, Decision and Management Sciences Program, to the second-named author.     

Majority rule outcomes and the structure of debate in one-issue-at-a-time decision-making

In many group decision-making situations, such as faculty hiring decisions, outcomes are often arrived at by deciding one issue at a time (e.g., first rank, then subfield). It is well known that procedures limiting votes to separate orthogonal dimensions always result in a unique outcome at the generalized median, the median of each separate issue dimension. Often, however, there is conflict within groups over what ought to be the relevant (orthogonal) dimensions within which choices will be made. We show that the way in which debate is structured (i.e., the way in which the dimensions of choice are specified) can have important consequences for what outcome gets chosen. However, we also show that the range of outcomes that could arise from alternative structurings of the decision process is bounded. These bounds are expressed relative to the yolk, a sphere located centrally in the Pareto set, whose existence was first noted by Tullock (1967: 262) and whose properties have recently been developed by McKelvey (1986) and Feld et al. (1987). We find that, in m orthogonal dimensions, the feasible outcomes must lie within % MathType!MTEF!2!1!+-% feaafiart1ev1aaatCvAUfeBSjuyZL2yd9gzLbvyNv2CaerbuLwBLn% hiov2DGi1BTfMBaeXatLxBI9gBaerbd9wDYLwzYbItLDharqqtubsr% 4rNCHbGeaGqiVu0Je9sqqrpepC0xbbL8F4rqqrFfpeea0xe9Lq-Jc9% vqaqpepm0xbba9pwe9Q8fs0-yqaqpepae9pg0FirpepeKkFr0xfr-x% fr-xb9adbaqaaeGaciGaaiaabeqaamaabaabaaGcbaWaaOaaaeaaca% qGTbaaleqaaaaa!36F8!\[\sqrt {\text{m}} \] radii of the center of the yolk