This book is designed to be the definitive statement on social equity theory and practice in public administration. Social equity is often referred to as the "third pillar" in PA, after efficiency ...and economy. It concerns itself with the fairness of the organization, its management, and its delivery of public services. H. George Frederickson is widely recognized as the originator of the concept and the person most associated with its development and application. The book's introduction and chapters 1-4 offer general descriptions of social equity in terms of its arguments and claims in changing political, economic, and social circumstances, and trace the development of the concept over the past forty years. Chapters 5-9 provide applications of social equity theory to particular policy arenas such as education, or to specific public administration issues such as the range of administrative discretion, the legal context, the research challenges, and social equity in the context of time and generations. Chapters 10 and 11 describe the current state of social equity and look towards the future.
In this article, the reinventing government movement is compared with the new public administration along six dimensions. A strongly felt need to change bureaucracy informed each movement, although ...each would change bureaucracy differently. Both movements seek relevance and responsiveness, but in different ways. Issues of rationality, methodology, and epistemology are more important in the new public administration than in the reinventing government movement. Both movements conceptualize organization similarly. The reinventing government movement has a stronger commitment to market approaches for the provision of public services and to mechanisms for individual choice. Reinventing government is popular electoral politics for executives (presidents, governors, mayors) and is more radical than new public administration. The new public administration prompted subtle, incremental shifts toward democratic management practices and social equity. The results of reinventing government, so far, are short-run increases in efficiency purchased at a likely long-range cost in administrative capacity and social equity.
Ordinarily research articles on public sector third-party governance, or the state of agents, turn to the subject of accountability in their conclusions. Rather than leaving it to the conclusions, ...this article takes up the subject of public sector third-party governance as a problem of accountability. To consider accountability, we studied contemporary performance measurement practices in the federal government, particularly as they are applied in five agencies of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Our findings are presented using a six-part "promises of accountability" heuristic which captured the many and varied uses of accountability in contemporary policy and administration discourse. We found that the characteristics of third parties and the nature of their principal-agent relations are a key determinant of accountability; bureaucratic and hierarchical controls enhance agency and program accountability; building rules and program policies into grants and contracts enhance accountability; agencies that practice lateral trust-based forms of "relational contracting" foster cultures of accountability; auditing and reporting requirements enhance program accountability; federal performance measurement regimes tend to be "top down" and "one size fits all;" federal performance measurement regimes are primarily executive branch forms of accountability; performance measurement often represents attempts to superimpose managerial logic and managerial process on inherently political processes embedded in the separation of powers; there is little evidence that performance-based accountability results in enhancing democratic outcomes or greater justice or equity.
The first edition of this work, published in 1993, refuted the notion that administrative ethics could not be studied empirically. In this second edition, Frederickson (public administration, ...University of Kansas) and Ghere (political science, University of Dayton) expand their scope to include both the managerial and individual/moral dimensions of ethical behavior, and add a new section on administrative ethics and globalization. Other sections cover organizational designs that support ethical behavior, market forces that compromise administrative ethics, and unintended outcomes of anticorruption reforms. The book is appropriate for a graduate course in public sector ethics.
Public administration in its modern form has been a key element in the effectiveness of American government in the 20th century. Frederickson discusses the repositioning of public administration and ...describes the primary applied and conceptual elements of that repositioning.
Measuring the Performance of the Hollow Stateis the first in-depth look at the influence of performance measurement on the effectiveness of the federal government. To do this, the authors examine the ...influence of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (with consideration of the later Program Assessment Rating Tool of 2002) on federal performance measurement, agency performance, and program outcomes. They focus a systematic examination on five agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services-the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Indian Health Service. Besides representing a wide range of federal government organizational structures and program formats, these agencies offer a diverse array of third-party arrangements including states, native American tribes, scientists, medical schools, and commercial and nonprofit health care intermediaries and carriers. Exploring the development of performance measures in light of widely varying program mandates, the authors look at issues that affect the quality of this measurement and particularly the influence of program performance by third parties. They consider factors such as goal conflict and ambiguity, politics, and the critical role of intergovernmental relations in federal program performance and performance measurement. Through their findings, they offer illumination to two major questions in public management today-what are the uses and limitations of performance measurement as a policy and management tool and how does performance measurement work when applied to the management of third-party government? While scholars and students in public administration and governmental reform will find this book of particular interest, it will also be of use to anyone working in the public sector who would like to have a better understanding of performance measurement.
The Adapted City Frederickson, H. George; Johnson, Gary A.; Wood, Curtis H.
2001, 20160916, 2016, 2003, 2016-09-16, 20040101
eBook
Selected Contents: 1. Introduction2. Theories of Institutional Dynamics3. Political and Administrative Cities4. The Evolution of Political Cities5. The Evolution of Administrative Cities6. The ...Evolution of the Model City Charter7. The Discovery of Adapted Cities8. Probing the Complexities of Adapted Cities9. The Conciliated City10. Conclusions
The moral justification for bureaucracy in systems of democratic self-government is stronger in Eastern thought than in Western philosophy and practice. In East Asia, moral justification for ...bureaucracy is broadly understood to be based on the work of Confucius and his followers. Modern scholars confirm that the primary countries of East Asia have distinctive bureaucratic cultures tracing to Confucian ideology. Distinctive elements of Confucian ideology include rule of man versus rule of law, distinctive characteristics of good public officials, the nature of moral conventions and practices in governing, the importance of education and merit for public officials, how good officials should deal with those in political power, the logic of civil reciprocity, and the nature of order in society. Following descriptions of each of these elements of Confucian moral justification for bureaucracy, the article closes with a comparison of Western and East Asian approaches to the moral justification for bureaucracy.
The events of September 11, 2001, have raised troubling questions regarding the reliability and security of American commercial air travel. This article applies the concepts and logic of ...high-reliability organizations to airport security operations. Contemporary decision theory is built on the logic of limited or buffered rationability and is based on the study of error-tolerant organizations. The concept of high-reliability organizations is based on the study of nearly error-free operations. For commercial air travel to be highly secure, there must be very high levels of technical competence and sustained performance; regular training; structure redundancy; collegial, decentralized authority patterns; processes that reward error discovery and correction; adequate and reliable funding; high mission valence; reliable and timely information; and protection from external interference in operations. These concepts are used to inform early-stage issues being faced by both local airports and the newly established Transportation Security Administration.
PDF
