Debating Public Administration Durant, Robert F; Durant, Jennifer R. S
2013, 20170925, 2012, 2017-09-25, 2012-10-26
eBook
Dialog between practitioners and academics has increasingly become the exception rather than the rule in contemporary public administration circles. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, ...Debating Public Administration: Management Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities tackles some of the major management challenges, choices, and opportunities of the twenty-first century facing public managers across various subfields of public administration.
Informed by contemporary pressures on public managers to reconceptualize purpose, redefine administrative rationality, recapitalize human assets, reengage resources, and revitalize democratic constitutionalism, the book offers students, practitioners, and researchers an opportunity to take stock and ponder the future of practice and research in public administration. Organized by three sets of major management challenges facing the field-Rethinking Administrative Rationality in a Democratic Republic, Recapitalizing Organizational Capacity, and Reconceptualizing Institutions for New Policy Challenges-the book takes an uncommon approach to the study of these topics. In it, leading practitioners and academics comment on condensed versions of articles appearing in the Theory to Practice feature of Public Administration Review (PAR) from 2006 through 2011.
The authors and commentators focus on some of the best current research, draw lessons from that literature for practice, and identify gaps in research that need to be addressed. They expertly draw out themes, issues, problems, and prospects, providing bulleted lessons and practical takeaways. This makes the book a unique one-stop resource for cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral, and cross-professional exchanges on contemporary challenges.
By the Cold War's end, U.S. military bases harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites. All told, cleaning the approximately 27 million acres is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And ...yet while progress has been made, efforts to integrate environmental and national security concerns into the military's operations have proven a daunting and intrigue-filled task that has fallen short of professed goals in the post-Cold War era. InThe Greening of the U.S. Military, Robert F. Durant delves into this too-little understood world of defense environmental policy to uncover the epic and ongoing struggle to build an environmentally sensitive culture within the post-Cold War military. Through over 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, reports, and trade newsletter accounts, he offers a telling tale of political, bureaucratic, and intergovernmental combat over the pace, scope, and methods of applying environmental and natural resource laws while ensuring military readiness. He then discerns from these clashes over principle, competing values, and narrow self-interest a theoretical framework for studying and understanding organizational change in public organizations. From Dick Cheney's days as Defense Secretary under President George H. W. Bush to William Cohen's Clinton-era-tenure and on to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the battle over "greening" the military has been one with high-stakes consequences for both national defense and public health, safety, and the environment. Durant's polity-centered perspective and arguments will evoke needed scrutiny, debate, and dialogue over these issues in environmental, military, policymaking, and academic circles.
Norton Long's 1949 essay, "Power and Administration," has a complicated legacy. First, analysis reveals both support for and important refinements of Long's arguments since the article's publication. ...Second, Long's claim has proven problematic that competition among agencies for power would bring more coordination and a cross-agency sense of purpose to the federal government. Third, the bureaucratic pluralism that he explained and defended produced special interest biases that were off-putting to large segments of citizens and thus helped create an unsupportive political environment for needed capacity building in the federal government. Fourth, by not considering how institutions "coevolve," Long failed to warn that "horizontal power" building by individual agencies would provoke efforts by elected officials to enhance their control over bureaucracy in ways that, over time, diminished their collective sources of power. Finally, much remains to be done before what Long called a "realistic science of administration" incorporating the "budgeting of power" exists in public administration.
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Effectively linking public administration theory to practical relevance has proven a difficult task. We argue, however, that the theory–practice conundrum is but a symptom of a more fundamental ...problem in public administration: the hollowing out of the field. Despite research advances, hollowing occurs because of the field’s conceptually muddled and decontextualized normative pillars, problematic macrodynamic foundations, and imbalanced scaffolding for integrating its multiple research narratives and methodologies efficaciously for both scholars and practitioners. To illustrate our points, we first critique the logic and empirical basis of two major pillars of public administration: efficiency and social equity. We then show how and why the field also has problematic macrodynamic foundations due to its failure to incorporate important developments in cognate fields related to administrative history, contexts, and processes. We next offer a problem-centered organizational framework for the field to help address the scaffolding problem in public administration.
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The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy affords readers an uncommon overview and integration of the eclectic body of knowledge of American bureaucracy. One of the major dilemmas facing the ...administrative state in the United States today is discerning how best to harness for public purposes the dynamism of markets, the passion and commitment of non-profit and volunteer organizations, and the public-interest-oriented expertise of the career civil service. Researchers across a variety of disciplines, fields, and subfields have independently investigated aspects of the formidable challenges, choices, and opportunities this dilemma poses for governance, democratic constitutionalism, and theory building. This literature is vast, affords multiple and conflicting perspectives, is methodologically diverse, and is fragmented. Each of the articles in this text identifies major issues and trends, critically takes stock of the state of knowledge, and ponders where future research is most promising. The book is one of Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.
In his classic book, Reflections on Public Administration, John Gaus (1947) wrote about the factors that he saw interacting to either increase or reduce growth in government in the United States. “I ...put before you,” he wrote, “a list of the factors which I have found useful as explaining the ebb and flow of the functions of government.” His “ecology of government” included changes in “people, place, physical technology, social technology, wishes and ideas, catastrophe, and personality.” He continued, “Such are the ‘raw material of politics’ and hence of administration and are in themselves the raw material of a science of administration” (9).
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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.
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Prior research has leavened substantially our understanding of how, why, and with what consequences public organizations respond to pressures for administrative reforms. Left underdeveloped ...theoretically, however, is the hypothesis that agency actors may also assess the ability of administrative reforms both to advance their policy goals and to become "weapons" in battles within agencies for advancing them. To illustrate this possibility, this article analyzes how the Clinton administration's National Performance Review and related Defense Reform Initiative interacted with its efforts to "green" the U.S. military in the post-Cold War era. Analysis of this clash between defense and environmental values indicates that (1) agency actors did evaluate the potential impacts of administrative reforms on their policy goals before supporting or opposing them; (2) they tried to hijack those reforms as weapons for advancing their policy goals in intraorganizational battles; and (3) the "weaponizing" of these reforms produced policy complications and consequences that proponents neither anticipated nor welcomed. Thus, reform in the administrative domain created unanticipated consequences by spilling over into the policy domain and being hijacked, weaponized, or otherwise miscarried or used opportunistically in intraorganizational policy battles. The study concludes by arguing that these dynamics merit more attention than they have received from either administrative reform proponents or researchers seeking to develop theories of administrative reform.
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With polarization in Congress persistent, with staggering issues and international threats facing the nation, and with fiscal stress an enduring fact of life, presidents have for decades turned to ...the tools of the administrative presidency to advance and implement their policy agendas. As the Barack Obama administration completed its first six months in office amid great challenges and hopes, the president was no exception in counting on his appointees to wield the tools of the administrative presidency to advance his protean policy agenda for America. This essay offers 10 research-based lessons for new appointees charged with advancing presidential agendas administratively to ponder as they do so.
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