We study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under correlate with the quantity of public services delivered, using data from the Nigerian Civil Service. We have hand-coded independent ...engineering assessments of 4,700 project completion rates. We supplement this with a management survey in the bureaucracies responsible for these projects, building on Bloom and Van Reenen (2007). Management practices matter: increasing bureaucrats' autonomy is positively associated with completion rates, yet practices related to incentives/monitoring of bureaucrats are negatively associated with completion rates. Our evidence provides new insights on the importance of management in public bureaucracies in a developing country setting.
•This article discusses the safety contribution of a public administration scholar specialised in space policy, Howard McCurdy.•First, it contends that McCurdy’s research on NASA and (post) ...bureaucracy has been overlooked in the field whereas it provides a valuable lens to the understanding of reliability, safety and performance of safety–critical systems.•Second, the article argues that McCurdy’s research brings novel and valuable insights to important safety debates.•The relevance of McCurdy’s lens is then illustrated using SpaceX as a case study, an example of the new developments in organising space exploration with their safety related challenges, moving from public to private initiatives.•In “Reinterrogating the past”, it is argued that McCurdy’s research provides a bridge between what was once framed as two opposite theses, normal accident versus high-reliability organisation.•In “challenging the present” it is argued that more recent debates and controversies triggered by the “new view” might not be as new as currently thought and advocated.
This article discusses the safety contribution of a public administration scholar specialised in space policy, Howard McCurdy. Its aim is twofold. First, it contends that McCurdy’s research on NASA and (post) bureaucracy has been overlooked in the field whereas it provides a valuable lens to the understanding of reliability, safety and performance of safety–critical systems. This contention requires bringing to the fore McCurdy’ extensive study of NASA and his rationale over several decades. Second, the article argues that McCurdy’s research brings novel and valuable insights to important safety debates. Following a methodological section, the article explains his analysis of the engineering, organisational, and political complexities and challenges experienced by NASA’s employees over more than sixty years of the agency’s lifetime, developing a unique longitudinal and multilevel study of reliability, safety and performance. The relevance of McCurdy’s lens is then illustrated using SpaceX as a case study, an example of the new developments in organising space exploration with their safety related challenges, moving from public to private initiatives. In the discussion, the article explores the value of this author for past and contemporary debates on reliability, safety and performance of safety–critical systems. In “Reinterrogating the past”, it is argued that McCurdy’s research provides a bridge between what was once framed as two opposite theses, normal accident versus high-reliability organisation. In “challenging the present” it is argued that more recent debates and controversies triggered by the “new view” might not be as new as currently thought and advocated.
Representative bureaucracy research has examined the influence of race and ethnicity on policing outcomes, yet little is known about police use of force specifically at the individual-level. To ...address this topic more meticulously, we utilize individual-level data (from Indianapolis and Dallas police departments) to explore differences in the amount of force used by officers in ethnic, racial, and gender matches in police–civilian dyads. Findings suggest that there are heightened levels of force used when there is racial and gender incongruenc between the officer and the civilian, particularly White officers interacting with Black civilians. We discuss how this finding may impact police departments moving forward.
Editorial Peci, Alketa
Revista de administração pública (Rio de Janeiro),
07/2019, Volume:
53, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
O quarto número da RAP de 2019 reúne um conjunto de artigos que discutem a burocracia brasileira por vários olhares, recortes e perspectivas. O setor público e as várias organizações, carreiras e ...redes que a configuram têm sido objeto de maior escrutínio político e público, particularmente em contexto de crise econômica e fiscal. Boa parte das propostas de reforma, entretanto, não se baseia num diagnóstico adequado, até porque a burocracia pública não é um ator monolítico, mas um conjunto de instituições e atores com capacidades e interesses díspares. Vários artigos publicados neste número da revista podem ajudar a diagnosticar mais corretamente gargalos burocráticos, desconstruindo o senso comum que prevalece sobre aspectos como o grau de profissionalização ou a captura política da burocracia.
Comparative studies of corruption focus on the selection and incentives of policymakers. With few exceptions, actors who are in charge of implementing policies have been neglected. This article ...analyzes an original data set on the bureaucratic features and its effects on corruption in fifty-two countries. Two empirical findings challenge the conventional wisdom in literature. First, certain bureaucratic factors, particularly meritocratic recruitment, reduce corruption, even when controlling for a large set of alternative explanations. Second, the analysis shows that other allegedly relevant bureaucratic factors, such as public employees' competitive salaries, career stability, or internal promotion, do not have a significant impact.
This book describes ten different government archives of cuneiform tablets from Assyria, using them to analyze the social and economic character of the Middle Assyrian state, as well as the roles and ...practices of writing. The tablets, many of which have not been edited or translated, were excavated at the capital, Assur, and in the provinces, and they give vivid details to illuminate issues such as offerings to the national shrine, the economy and political role of elite households, palace etiquette, and state-run agriculture. This book concentrates particularly on how the Assyrian use of written documentation affected the nature and ethos of government, and compares this to contemporary practices in other palatial administrations at Nuzi, Alalah, Ugarit, and in Greece.
Drawing on the theory of representative bureaucracy, specifically the theory of symbolic representation, we examine whether or not gender representativeness in a police department's domestic violence ...unit influences how citizens judge the agency's performance, trustworthiness, and fairness. To examine this question, we use an online survey experiment in which we vary the representation of female police officers in a hypothetical domestic violence unit as well as the agency's performance. Results suggest that gender representation does indeed influence the perceived job performance, trustworthiness, and fairness of the agency, as does the agency's performance. Thus, this study suggests that the symbolic representativeness of the police does causally influence how citizens view and judge a law enforcement agency, and thus in turn perhaps their willingness to cooperate in the coproduction of public safety outcomes.
This article offers a street‐level perspective on welfare conditionality as it was practiced in contracted‐out UK activation programs between 2008 and 2015. Drawing on observation and in‐depth ...interviews, the article illustrates the ways that behavioral conditionality provided street‐level workers with the means to intensify or moderate activation for particular claimants. Responding to arguments about the curtailment of street‐level discretion, the article argues that in the particular context of target‐driven, work‐first, and otherwise highly constrained services, discretion resided in the ability to intensify or moderate conditionality and its coercive potential—in decisions about how, on whom, and to what extent it would be applied. The article argues that attending to this form of discretion provides an alternative frame through which to view the differentiated treatment typically understood as “creaming” and “parking.” In so doing, the article problematizes accounts that draw clear lines between calculative, normative, and dispositional forms of street‐level reason and practice. It shows how advisors' responses to the “street‐level calculus of choice” were articulated in terms of expectation, where attempts at future‐oriented calculation necessarily entailed making other forms of speculative and normative judgement about claimants and their situations. The article thus contributes to an understanding of both the causes and meaning of differentiated treatment in conditional welfare services.
Drawing inspiration from bureaucracy and information security literature, we develop the theory of security bureaucracy—an evolutionary framework that describes how organizations arrive at their ...information-securing approaches. Within this framework, we describe three general bureaucratic archetypes (i.e., Security Prototype, Security Structure, and Security Superstructure) that emerge from the interplay between control and expertise. We also expound on the phenomenon of security bureaucracy and delineate how organizations can transition from coercive “iron cages” to enabling “iron shields” in information securing. We also use our security establish-enforce-enculturate (3E) evolutionary framework to inform a proposed variance model of security bureaucracy. Our efforts offer significant insights and implications for organizational information security research and practice.
•Organizations' approaches to securing information are not standardized.•The Theory of Security Bureaucracy describes how these approaches are reached.•Organizations evolve in aspects of control and expertise in information securing.•‘Iron cages’ rely on coercion; ‘iron shields’ focus on enablement.•Negative aspects of coercion can be mitigated by knowledge and value dissemination.
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