scholarly journals The Open Public Value Account and Comprehensive Social Development: An Assessment of China and the United States

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 852-881 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bing Wang ◽  
Tom Christensen

Human society can be roughly divided into three spheres and each has different public values. While public values should be at the heart of public administration and social development, they are often significantly weakened by their philosophical ambiguity and immeasurability. This article seeks to clarify the nature of public values, how they are created, and how they can be measured. An open public value account is constructed as a policy tool for assessing as many public values as possible. It is used to examine the public values creation in China and the United States.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis Ventriss ◽  
James L Perry ◽  
Tina Nabatchi ◽  
H Brinton Milward ◽  
Jocelyn M Johnston

Abstract This essay responds to the prevailing political environment of estrangement that can be seen in the growing distrust of public institutions, intensifying levels of political polarization, and rising support for populism, particularly in the United States. These trends have contributed to a diminished sense of publicness in public administration, including an erosion of public values and political legitimacy, and an increasingly cynical view of the value, role, and purpose of public service in the modern polity. We argue that public administration must respond actively to this estrangement and seek to repair and strengthen the links between democracy, public administration, and public values through scholarship, connections to practice and the public, and education.


2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-218
Author(s):  
John C. Pierce

Max Neiman provides a concise, well-written, and compre- hensive critical analysis of "the conservative attack on the public sector, especially its explanation for and evaluation of the size and growth of the public sector in the United States" (p. viii). In doing so, however, he only partially fulfills what is promised in the subtitle, namely, explaining why big govern- ment works. Rather than explicitly assess the reasons for goal achievement in a variety of policy areas, as the title implied to me, Neiman focuses on why we have big government and on the various critiques of that size. To be sure, the book is appropriate for upper division and graduate courses in political science, public policy, or public administration.


Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
John F. Brennan

This paper reports on activities undertaken by the National Municipal League (NML) and the Public Administration Service (PAS) during the 1950’s and 1960’s to counter libelous and slanderous actions taken by grass roots activists in opposition to efforts to reform metropolitan governance across the United States. I utilize records from the NML archives—and give special attention to their “Smear File”—to chronicle and analyze the key events and actors. Specifically, I focus on the ideas of opponents of metropolitan government reform from the South and West in the United States including Jo Hindman, Dan Smoot, and Don Bell. These individuals used right-wing idea distribution vehicles including magazines, small-town newspapers, and subscription newsletters to disseminate their arguments and rally support for their cause. I also analyze the actions of their foes at the NML and PAS—namely those of Alfred Willoughby, Executive Director of the National Municipal League; H.G. Pope, President of the Public Administration Service;Richard S. Childs, former President of the National Municipal League; and Karl Detzer,Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest and contributing writer for the National Municipal Review, the academic and professional journal of the National Municipal League. This study adds to the literature explaining the lack of metropolitan governmental frameworks at the local level in the United States, which has been built on the work of Charles Tiebout, Vincent Ostrom, Robert Bish, Ronald Oakerson, and Roger Parks. Although this analysis is idiographic and historical in perspective, it does not necessarily challenge the core empirical results of the nomothetic modeling of these scholars.


Author(s):  
Alasdair Roberts

This introductory chapter provides a background of public administration. In the United States, the field of public administration was launched almost a century ago by people with bold aspirations. They were not interested only in the efficiency of government offices; they wanted a thorough overhaul of the American state so that it could manage the pressures of modern-day life. Unfortunately, this expansive view of the field's purpose has been lost. Over the last four decades in particular, the focus within the field has been mainly on smaller problems of management within the public sector. This is sometimes called the “public management approach.” This narrowing of focus might have made sense in the United States and a few other advanced democracies in the waning decades of the twentieth century, but it does not make sense today. Many people have recently protested this shrinking of ambitions. Thus, there is a need for a change of direction and to recover an expansive view of the field. This book proposes a way to do so.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1 SI) ◽  
pp. 103-106
Author(s):  
Oleksii Onufriienko

The US Department of Defense Artificial Intelligence Strategy (2018) as a pilot project of promising e-modernization of the public sector of this country is analyzed, its place among other initiatives on digitalization of public administration of the current US Presidential Administration is determined, its specific public-administrative logic is clarified. the specifics of this project through the prism of the tasks of modernization of public governance in transforming societies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Montserrat Huguet

Criticism to the system is a core place in the US American culture.The self-criticism gets its roots in the permanent restlessness of the American People, in their fears, in their dissatisfaction, and even in their insane self-destructive behabiour. Many episodes in the American history have worked out from attitudes of paranoia, disgust or anger towards communities or the public administration. The natural rhythm of society in the United States is far from acceptance and calm. On the contrary, the US history is defined by restlessnees and doubious sentiments. Thus, one might think that the American dream is fundamentally a state of permanent crisis in which people, unable to deal with their present vital conditions, transmute these conditions into havoc and creation. In the pages of this article, a breaf tour into the historical and cultural trend of discouragement is offered. It also pays attention to the American ability to self-analyze its own historical experiences. The fictionated stories, that come from the imagination but also from people’s voices and memories, convey a sense of dissatisfaction and of struggle to improve the American way of behaving. Those citizens, especially uncomfortable with themselves or with the administration, may not be aware that they are precisely those who constitute the best US image abroad. In the ostentation of a self- criticism, of a subversive thought, these Americans, opposed to the official positions,feature the virtue of the relentless self-purge.Therefore,looking at past and present times, this paper is composed by six related arguments that rely on both historical events and fictionated stories, with the titles of: “Under the paranoid style”; “The angry nation”, “Hate: Public Limited Company”, “Images of anger”, “Guilty, ashamed and redeemed”, and “The legacy of disenchantment”.


1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 899-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall E. Dimock

The government corporation has become a familiar device of public administration all over the world; and yet in some countries, and especially in the United States, uncertainty as to its distinctive purpose and underlying principles seems to grow, rather than to diminish, as the public corporation becomes older and more extensively used. Lack of interest and research cannot be blamed, because in recent years the degree of concentration in this area has probably been relatively as great as in any other sphere of political science. The basic explanation is that administrative formulas and management principles are rarely, if ever, capable of immunization against group pressures and public policy controls, which bend administration to their own designs, sometimes in conformity with what the impartial experts consider sound principle and practice, but just as often in knowing disregard of such considerations and in a determined effort to support their own interests and economic viewpoints.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaifeng Yang

Exploring the appropriate role of the public in public administration has been an active and ongoing area of inquiry and experimentation since the birth of the United States (King, Feltey and Susel 1998). Especially in last three decades, public administration has struggled to bring the public into the administrative process in the recognition that many programs cannot be effective without the collaboration between citizens and public administrators.


Author(s):  
Bing Wang ◽  
Longmei Xia ◽  
Alfred M. Wu

AbstractSocial development around the world has been stunted by the lack of a comprehensive understanding and definition of public value. Public value theory can provide guidance, and inform a universal standard for social development. However, it is difficult to define and measure public value due to its philosophical complexity. Public values are driven by various economic, political, and social forces, and can be created by many stakeholders including enterprises, governments and non-governmental organisations. Government is central to human society and is primarily responsible for inclusive social development, which requires setting and maintaining public values orderly and synchronously according to the plurality of views held by those in society. Social development failure may occur when some key public values are ignored. This study uses thirty economic, social, and political indicators to measure public value, and the results demonstrate strong correlations among them. Through a principal component analysis and a cluster analysis, these thirty indicators can be reduced to four principal components. The first one, which represents economic value, can explain 65.8% of the total information, identifying that economic value is playing a fundamental role among plural public values. Countries are clustered and their development neighbors are identified in order to compare countries with similar levels of development. Public value theory can help to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different countries, and advance the social and economic progress steadily and authentically.


Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842110153
Author(s):  
Sharon Mastracci ◽  
Arthur J Sementelli

Administration draws its legitimacy from neutrality in cultural contexts where power relations are shaped by gendered norms. Neutrality bestows legitimacy where power is vested in the male generative force and is heritable. In the public sphere, neutrality renders administration nonthreatening to politicians and justifies administrators’ use of discretion despite their lack of democratic accountability and oversight. We examine historical and cultural roots of administrative neutrality as embodied by the physiologically transformed man and the resulting genderedness of public administration. We highlight two examples of power and sexuality in anime and different implications of neutered maleness. We also discuss enforced administrative neutrality in practice—the Hatch Act in the United States—which prevents administrators from engaging in political activity, rendering them “political eunuchs.”


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