A Place at the Table: Organization Theory and Public Management

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-82
Author(s):  
Andrew B Whitford ◽  
H Brinton Milward ◽  
Joseph Galaskiewicz ◽  
Anne M Khademian

Abstract In November 2018, the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy hosted an international workshop on the role of organization theory in public management. The intention was to renew interest in organization theory in public management research. Scholars such as Herbert Simon, Herbert Kaufman, and Richard Selznick made seminal contributions to organization theory through the study of public organizations from the 1940s through the 1960s. In our estimation, organization theory is underrepresented in public administration scholarship for the last several decades. There are natural reasons for this trend, including the discipline’s turn towards organizational behavior and the ascendancy of techniques that advance the study of large datasets and those that allow for experimental control. The recent emergence of “behavioral public administration” is a prominent example of this evolution. This symposium is an attempt to make a place at the table of public management for organization theory. The articles in this symposium contain articles from scholars who operate in the tradition of classic organization theory in new and innovative ways to lend intellectual purchase to studies of public organizations and public organizational networks.

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 1687-1690
Author(s):  
Redon Koleci

Leadership is a mutual relationship between people, not imposed on one person to another person. Leadership is when people believe that a leader is capable of meeting their needs. The American School of Leadership at the University of Columbia surveyed 1500 people from different sectors found in leading positions in their own firms. Answers from 20 countries have been received, including America, Japan, European countries, Latin America, etc. Answers were given to what are the most important features It is important that people who in the near future can be entrusted with the role of the leader in any enterprise or system. Do these people have the people who decide on the fate of these leading companies?To be truly effective, leaders of large bureaucracies (large in number) should bring time to many activities within an agency. For many scholars, the key to leadership lies in the features or features that lead to this task, while other scholars describe what features feature theory has. According to them is the belief or the assumption that leadership is based on unique characteristics, qualities or characteristics that have the leaders and that enable them to assume responsibilities. Trust in the theory of features assumes that there is the quality of "born leadership", an assumption that led to the emergence of research on leadership skills and something else of a tradition within the public administration. The authors of this theory try to differentiate and describe the essential features and characteristics of all good leaders.For some time and mostly before the Second World War, public administration scholars interested in leadership aspects of those who handle large bureaucracies assumed that leaders had the gift or the attribute that separated them from the others who followed them. They believed leaders were born like that. Leaders had charisma, and their leadership was based more on their personality than on formal leadership positions or on any rational or legal authority.Any agreement which features were exactly essential to a good leadership did not exist. All of these features are useful to a leader, but no set of features could be demonstrated theoretically as essential. Since the 1960s, the importance of features has been increasingly seen as obsolete. Other factors have been seen to be at least as important or even more important than any other personal qualities of the leader. Some of the qualities suggested above as essential can be seen as counterproductive in some contexts.


China Report ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Au Chi Kin

For many people, ‘Hong Kong is a cultural desert’. However, we find that Hong Kong plays an important academic role and acts as a cultural bridge between China and Western countries, especially when China experiences unstable political, economic, social and cultural situations. The People’s Republic of China was established in 1949. During this time, numerous scholars fled China and selected Hong Kong as a ‘shelter’. Some decided to stay for good, whereas others viewed the territory as a stepping stone. Regardless of their reasons, their academic performance has significantly influenced Hong Kong. Two of the most famous scholars in this period were Luo Xianglin (羅香林 Lo Shan Lin) and Qian Mu (錢穆). Luo taught at the Department of Chinese of the University of Hong Kong. Qian was a faculty member at the New Asia College, which was one of the founding members of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This study will examine the following issues: (i) why these two scholars selected Hong Kong, (ii) what role they played in the development of tertiary education with regard to Chinese studies in Hong Kong, (iii) how they developed the role of Hong Kong as a haven for the protection of Chinese culture and (iv) how Qian Mu developed New Asia College as a vehicle for spreading the ‘New’ Asian culture in the 1960s.


1986 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick G. O'Hara

This article considers the ways in which teachers of public administration can address biopolitical issues within an established professional curriculum. The author distinguishes between the teleological and instrumental aspects of a belief system, holding that biobehavioral explanation can be pedagogically useful and can provide public administrators with a model for assessing and responding to workplace phenomena. The article proposes that undergraduate and graduate teaching impose different standards on an instructor seeking to introduce biobehavioral and biostructural concepts. The different standards arise out of the explicit and focused career instrumentality of graduate study in public administration, as well as age graded differences in receptivity to particular propositions about human nature. Finally, this article details some ways in which biobehavioral explanation can be introduced in organizational behavior classes and in classes that consider the structure of public organizations and their decision-making processes.


2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (03) ◽  
pp. 698-699

Based on a generous future bequest by the 2013 APSA Gaus Lecturer Beryl A. Radin, APSA announced the creation of the APSA Pracademic Program supported by the Beryl Radin Fund. Professor Radin described herself as a “pracademic” because she has moved back and forth between the world of the practitioner and that of the academic. Beryl A. Radin's government service included an assignment as a special advisor to the assistant secretary for management and budget of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as well as other experiences in the Office of Management and Budget and HHS. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, editor of the book series “Public Management and Change” at Georgetown University Press, past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, former head of the APSA public administration section, and has held faculty positions at the University of Southern California, the University of Albany, and American and Georgetown universities. As the title suggests, this will be a fellowship aimed at providing APSA member academics in the fields of public policy and public administration with practical, hands-on experience that the recipients can take back to their institutions and classrooms to help build bridges between the worlds of academe and applied politics.


Author(s):  
Sarah Feldman

Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a produção recente no campo da história da legislação urbanística no Brasil, procurando detectar avanços e limites para a reflexão sobre desenvolvimento urbano e práticas urbanísticas. O texto organiza-se em três eixos analíticos. Em primeiro lugar, procura-se situar os trabalhos no processo de disseminação de estudos da história urbana no Brasil, vinculando-os ao movimento de ampliação do território da história que ocorre na Europa e nos Estados Unidos, a partir dos anos 60, com a chamada História Nova. Em segundo, baseado em um panorama da produção recente, são detectadas as vertentes dominantes e emergentes nos trabalhos sobre legislação. Em terceiro, são discutidos dois aspectos que se configuram como lacunas na historiografia da legislação: o lugar ocupado pelas normas, a partir do momento em que idéias e práticas urbanísticas têm um espaço institucionalizado na administração pública; e o lugar dos pressupostos modernistas na legislação brasileira, visto que o movimento modernista formula a proposta de um novo sistema legal para o urbanismo.Palavras-chave: legislação urbanística; história; movimento moderno. Abstract: This paper analyses recent developments in the history of Brazilian urban legislation, pointing out the progress made and limits faced, as a basis for reflection in the debate on urban development and planning practice. The analysis is divided into three parts. The first relates the dissemination of urban historical research in Brazil to the expansion of the field of history which began in the 1960s with the "New History" movement in Europe and the United States. The second part sets out the dominant and emerging approaches to urban legislation. Finally, there is a discussion of two aspects that are seen as gaps in the history of urban legislation: the role of norms, as the ideas and practices of urban planning become institutionalised within public administration, and the influences of modernist ideas on Brazilian urban legislation, taking into account that the modern movement proposes a new legal system for urban planning.Keywords: urban legislation; history; modernist movement.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-186
Author(s):  
Polonca Kovač ◽  
Tina Jukić

In April 2018, the Faculty of Administration of the University of Ljubljana organised a two-day international workshop on the role of public administration in public policies' design. The workshop consisted of four parts: three sessions and one round table. In the first session, discussion was about evaluating public administration and public governance. The second session focused on the identification of the key success factors for effective public policies in Slovenia. These sessions were initiated based on the research project “Development of the model for monitoring and evaluation of development programmes and projects in public sector”, known as the ATENA project. The project is co-funded by the Slovenian Research Agency for the period 2016–2019 (no. J5-7557) and led by prof. dr. Mirko Vintar (cf. Mencinger et al., 2017). The third session was motivated by the European research project EUPACK (European Public Administration Country Knowledge), focused on the analysis of public administration characteristics and performance in EU Member States (see Thijs, Hammerschmid & Palaric 2018). A special part of the workshop was devoted to the 15th anniversary of the Central European Public Administration Review. Here, a round table was conducted with the editors-in-chief of established public administration journals from the region, followed by an editors and reviewers recognition awards ceremony. The discussions were all very fruitful, also thanks to the participation of several internationally recognised scholars from the Netherlands, Croatia, Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovenia, as well as around twenty representatives of Slovenian ministries, other administrative authorities and non-governmental organisations. In a dynamic debate that comprehensively covered the evaluation in public policy cycle and the role of public administration and university therein, numerous issues were discussed. Below is a report on the main topics discussed in the workshop.


Author(s):  
Sergiu-Vlad Stan ◽  
◽  
Marius-Anton Stupar ◽  

Romania's accession to the EU depended largely on the ability of Romanian public authorities to implement reforms among public organizations in the country. Globally, however, a successful public administration has become a key factor in determining a nation's competitive advantage. The purpose of this article is to emphasize the efforts of the Romanian public administration to submit to the process of administrative reform and as a consequence to contribute to the creation of an administrative reform strategy based on which Romanian public organizations can be reformed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Olga González-Morales ◽  
Lidia E. Santana Vega

Competency-based learning allows students to acquire knowledge, learn procedures and develop attitudes necessary for their employability. The aim of this article is to reflect on the current role of the University and its relations with its environment (government, business and society) and present an action plan to promote the employability of university students as an essential instrument of university policy. A qualitative methodology is used to explore, investigate and analyze the structure of the university and obtain information about the perception of the heads of the different units of government in terms of employability. Based on the information collected, the employability plan is drawn up, grouped into four programs that involve teaching, research, management and public administration, with their respective instruments of action; these programs must be managed by the different actors and their respective areas of government.


Author(s):  
Yassine BOUSSENNA

In a knowledge-based economy, and a context of fierce international competition that spares no field. universities as organizations highly dependent on knowledge should pay special attention to it and its management, in such a way that the effective management of this asset is a key factor in building a competitive advantage and became the cornerstone of efforts to improve the performance of the university. In addition, it has long been demonstrated that better knowledge management has a positive impact on organizational performance. However, it is not yet clear how this process is to be achieved in academia and particularly in developing countries such as Morocco. On the other hand, and throughout the literature, several factors affect positively KM initiatives in public organizations and more specifically in universities are discussed. Some of these are the same as those found for private organizations and others are specific to public organizations. Most authors cite the organizational structure. This work has the main objective to verify the moderating role of organizational structure on the intensity of the relationship between the application of knowledge management and organizational performance of Abdelmalek Essaadi University. by collecting the views of the Abdelmalek Essaadi University teacher-researchers, through a hypothetico-deductive reasoning approach and a quantitative working method. Our questionnaire was administered to a representative sample of 88 teacher-researchers from the different institutions of the university under study. The results obtained prove the moderating and positive role of organizational structure, on the intensity of the relationship between the application of the K.M and (Training, research, publication, and governance) as indicators of organizational performance with a degree of impact of 1.1%.


Author(s):  
MOROZ S.,

За результатами аналізу відповідей студентів з Європейськогопростору вищої освіти було з’ясовано думку респондентів щодо місця таролі держави у забезпеченні контролю за якістю надання освітніх послугзакладом вищої освіти. Розглянуто особливості взаємовідносинінституту держави та інституції університету в контекстізабезпечення якості вищої освіти. Крім того, в статті обґрунтованонапрями вдосконалення змісту та практики використання механізмівдержавного управління якістю вищої освіти, а також визначенопріоритети використання суб’єктами державного управління окремихметодів впливу на систему забезпечення якості вищої освіти в Україні. Basing on the results of survey of answers of students from the Europeanhigher education space, there was determined an opinion of respondents as fora place and role of state in provision quality control of educational services ofhigher educational institutes. The features of the relationship between theInstitute of state and the institutes of the University in the context of provisionof higher education quality. In addition, the article substantiates the directionsof improving the content and practice of usage of mechanisms of statemanagement of the higher education quality, as well as determined thepriorities for the subjects of public administration to use certain methods ofinfluence on the system of quality assurance of higher education in Ukraine.


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