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Public management involves leading, coordinating, and stimulating public agencies and programs to deliver excellent performance. Research and practice of public management have developed rapidly in recent years, drawing on the fields of public policy, public administration, and business management. In carrying out their crucial roles in shaping what government delivers, public managers today must confront daunting challenges imposed by shifting policy agendas, constrained financial resources combined with with constant public demands for a rich array of public services, and increasing interdependence among public, private, and third-sector institutions and actors. At the same time, these challenges and other developments offer exciting opportunities for improving knowledge and practice in public management, for the benefit of everyone. In this volume, leading scholars contribute advances in the theory, methods, and practice in this burgeoning field.
The selections address four key topics:-The nature and impact of public management;-Creative new methods for public management research;-Reform, reinvention, innovation, and change;-New models and frameworks for understanding and improving public management
Since the expansion of public programs in the 1960s, charges of bureaucratic inefficiency, unresponsiveness, and “red tape” have been rampant. The response has often been extensive reorganization in an effort to change the source of control, carry out specific missions, and to achieve greater inter-agency cooperation. Karen M. Hult examines why these restructurings often fail, through three case studies: the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Design (HUD); the Minnesota Department of Energy, Planning, and Development; and the Minneapolis Community Development Agency. Hult's study assesses the usefulness of mergers and reorganizations as a policy tool, and offers a valuable contribution to the study of public management and organization design.
Why does Alabama rank so low on many of the indicators of quality of life? Why did some of the most dramatic developments in the civil rights revolution of the 1960s take place in Alabama? Why is it that a few interest groups seem to have the most political power in Alabama? William H. Stewart’s Alabama Politics in the Twenty-First Century explores these questions and more, illuminating many of the often misunderstood details of contemporary Alabama politics in this cohesive and comprehensive publication.
The Alabama state government, especially as a specimen of Deep South politics, is a topic of frequent discussion by its general public—second only to college football. However, there remains a surprising lack of literature focusing on the workings of the state’s bureaucracy in an extensive and systematic way. Bearing in mind the Yellowhammer State’s long and rich political history, Stewart concentrates on Alabama’s statecraft from the first decade of the twenty-first century through the November 2010 elections and considers what the widespread Republican victories mean for their constituents. He also studies several different themes prominent during the 2010 elections, including the growing number and influence of special interest groups, the respective polarization of whites and blacks into the Republican and Democratic parties, and the increasingly unwieldy state constitution.
This fascinating and revealing text provides a wealth of information about an extremely complex state government. Featuring detailed descriptions of important concepts and events presented in a thorough and intelligible manner, Alabama Politics in the Twenty-First Century is perfect for scholars, students, everyday Alabamians, or anyone who wants the inside scoop on the subtle inner workings of the Cotton State’s politics.
American public administration inherited from Alexander Hamilton a distinct republican framework through which we derive many of our modern governing standards and practices. His administrative theory flowed from his republican vision, prescribing not only the how of administration but also what should be done and why. Administration and policy merged seamlessly in his mind, each conditioning the other. His Anti-Federalist detractors clearly saw this and fought his vision tooth and nail.
That conflict endures to this day because Americans still have not settled on just one vision of the American republic. That is why, Richard Green argues, Hamilton is a pivotal figure in our current reckoning. If we want to more fully understand ourselves and our ways of governing today, we must start by understanding Hamilton, and we cannot do that without exploring his administrative theory and practice in depth.
Alexander Hamilton’s Public Administration considers Hamilton both as a founder of the American republic, steeped in the currents of political philosophy and science of his day, and as its chief administrative theorist and craftsman, deeply involved in establishing the early institutions and policies that would bring his interpretation of the written Constitution to life. Accordingly, this book addresses the complex mix of classical and modern ideas that informed his vision of a modern commercial and administrative republic; the administrative ideas, institutions, and practices that flowed from that vision; and the substantive policies he deemed essential to its realization. Green’s analysis grows out of an immersion in Hamilton’s extant papers, including reports, letters, pamphlets, and essays. Readers will find a comprehensive explanation of his theoretical contributions and a richly detailed account of his ideas and practices in historical context.
This collection of essays highlights the “peculiarly American” issues of public administration ranging from 1870 to 1974, when they were first published. Every contributor was assigned a period of American history and given the opportunity to write on what he or she deemed the most important or relevant concern of that period. This method, employed for this book and the connected National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration conference, resulted in a wide-reaching, if eclectic, collection. Supplanted by Mosher’s impressive summarization of the field throughout the years, the book still holds prominence as a source for scholars, workers, and students alike in public administration.
The essays raise such issues as the education of civil servants, the changes necessitated by crises, the growth of social sciences in governmental concerns, and primarily, the role of public administrators in America. Each author is a distinguished expert in his own right, and each essay can stand alone as a remarkable insight into the changing world of public administration within American society. Frederick Mosher’s expertise and supervision shapes this work into a remarkable and holistic perspective on public administration over time.
An updated classic of public administration
This fresh publication of James W. Fesler’s classic, Area and Administration is a powerful work of intellectual history. Richly illustrating how the Great Depression and World War II shaped the thinking of scholars who helped build modern American government.
It is also an authoritative work of powerful insight. The challenges of linking the center with the front lines, or securing vertical and horizonal coordination, and of connecting area and function, have only become more important in twenty-first century government. Fesler’s path-breaking book provides an extraordinarily useful foundation for grappling with issues that have become even more important for governance.
How do civilians control the military? In the wake of September 11, the renewed presence of national security in everyday life has made this question all the more pressing. In this book, Peter Feaver proposes an ambitious new theory that treats civil-military relations as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive monitoring the actions of military agents, the "armed servants" of the nation-state. Military obedience is not automatic but depends on strategic calculations of whether civilians will catch and punish misbehavior.
This model challenges Samuel Huntington's professionalism-based model of civil-military relations, and provides an innovative way of making sense of the U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War experience--especially the distinctively stormy civil-military relations of the Clinton era. In the decade after the Cold War ended, civilians and the military had a variety of run-ins over whether and how to use military force. These episodes, as interpreted by agency theory, contradict the conventional wisdom that civil-military relations matter only if there is risk of a coup. On the contrary, military professionalism does not by itself ensure unchallenged civilian authority. As Feaver argues, agency theory offers the best foundation for thinking about relations between military and civilian leaders, now and in the future.
Public administration has evolved into an extraordinarily complex form of governance employing traditional bureaucracy, quasi-government public organizations, and collaborative networks of nongovernmental organizations. Analyzing and improving government performance—a matter of increasing concern to citizens, elected officials, and managers of the organizations themselves—has in turn become a much more fraught undertaking. Understanding the new complexities calls for new research approaches.
The Art of Governance presents a fresh palette of research based on a new framework of governance that was first developed by coeditor Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., with Carolyn J. Heinrich, and Carolyn J. Hill in their book, Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research. That book identified how the relationships among citizens, legislatures, executive and organizational structures, and stakeholders interact, in order to better diagnose and solve problems in public management.
This volume takes that relational concept into new realms of conceptualization and application as it links alternative institutional and administrative structures to program performance in different policy areas and levels of government. Collectively, the contributors begin to paint a new picture of how management matters throughout the policy process. They illuminate how, at different levels of an organization, leadership and management vary—and explore both the significance of structural systems and the importance of alternative organizational forms for the implementation of public policies.
The Art of Governance shows that effective governance is much more complex than paint-by-number. But if the variety of forms and models of governance are analyzed using advanced theories, models, methods, and data, important lessons can be applied that can lead us to more successful institutions.
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