Ethics and Integrity Training for Czech Public Officials

The purpose of the contribution is to present a newly designed training programme for public administrators in ethics and integrity. The programme was developed based on a broad empirical research among public administrators at the central and local levels of public administration aiming at identification of core values, major ethical issues, attitudes, and ethics instruments in place on the one hand and the training needs of civil servants and other public administrators on the other hand. Attention was paid to differences among rank-and-file administrators and managers and to differences between men and women where relevant.

Virtual Environments as Enablers of Civic Awareness and Engagement

The wide availability of accurate sensors currently hosted by smartphones are enabling new participative urban management opportunities. Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) allows people to actively participate in any aspect of urban planning, by collecting and sharing data, reporting issues to public administrations, proposing solutions to urban planners, and delivering information of potential social interest to their community. Although collected data can be very helpful to enhance the quality of life of citizens, mobile users are still reluctant to use their devices to take advantages of the opportunities offered by the digitized society, mainly due to privacy issues. From August to December 2018, the city of Florianópolis, capital of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, was used as a living lab environment for an MCS application called ParticipACT Brazil, a socio/technical-aware crowdsensing platform. While the current literature focuses on MCS from a purely technical point of view, this research demonstrated that a multidisciplinary approach that includes both human sciences and ICT is needed in order to better identify critical issues, highlights the untapped potential of MCS paradigm, and suggests research methodologies that could provide benefits for all the actors involved (researchers, public administrators, and citizens).

Higher Public Officials on Direct Citizen Participation in Turkey

Governments are expected to introduce public policies to empower citizens to engage in government business for various reasons including trust building. This chapter presents enablers/barriers before direct citizen participation (DCP) in Turkey by employing interviews conducted with higher public administrators at the ministerial level. The results reveal that DCP is mostly used for informing and consultation purposes rather than fostering a citizen deliberation. The main barriers before DCP are found as centralized bureaucratic structure, lack of administrators' awareness for DCP, and a lack of participation culture. The authors argue that DCP could be fostered where public officials are curious rather than institutionalized.

Will Facebook Encourage Citizen Participation?

Facebook, the most popular social media in the world, has changed the ways of citizen involvement in governance. Politicians and (elected) public administrators worldwide have adopted Facebook as an important approach to connect with citizens. This study explores whether the Facebook phenomenon can improve the process of online political communication and citizen participation. The study adapts a content analysis method and proposes six strategies for analyzing Facebook page posts of Taiwanese legislators. The authors compare Facebook posts during both election and regular sessions to see the difference in patterns of these posts and communication strategies adopted by the legislators. The findings reveal that a percentage of e-participation achieves an acceptable rate, but most communication of legislator Facebook is one way. The results indicate that legislators' Facebook is another platform to distribute public information to citizens, and many have potential to create more public values.

Models for Commercial Education

Arguments that higher education institutions should prepare the future private and public administrators of newly industrialising economies were general by the 1870s, but in all cases they involved the advocacy of commercial education. This was in fact the context in which economics developed to the 1950s in Britain outside Oxford and Cambridge, but these developments in Britain lagged those elsewhere in the world. This chapter discusses the leading international developments of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the better to locate British developments outlined in the following chapter. In the United States, university commercial education was part of the rapidly evolving higher education landscape of the late nineteenth century, although in every case courses of commercial education were created mostly using existing teaching provision. Even the creation of the Harvard Business School in 1908 did not alter this, and its ‘case study’ method only began to develop in the 1920s. In France, dedicated commercial colleges emerged in the 1860s, but these remained wedded to school curricula despite efforts to develop higher studies. Only in Germany did systematic higher business education develop before the First World War, but few outside Germany seemed aware of this.

ADMINISTRATIVE DISCRETION AND INSTRUMENTS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS: ADMINISTRATIVE AND LEGAL AND DEONTOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS

The article focuses on the relationship between public administration and legal deontology. Public administration is a renewed form of public administration. The difference is that public administration is a more democratic process of state-authoritative impact on social relations. This democracy is manifested in the forms and methods of managerial activity used. Among the forms and methods of public administration, a softer set of forms is selected – an appropriate combination of legal and non-legal forms, the method of persuasion and coercion. The very activity has an executive and administrative nature. The executive orientation implies the call of public administrations to promote the practical implementation of laws. Orders – to adopt and implement legal acts of administration. Forms and methods together constitute the tools of activity of public administrations. Executive-administrative activity is carried out through appropriate managerial procedures. The basis of activity is administrative discretion. It consists in the possibility at one’s own risk to use forms and methods in their totality depending on the choice of the public administrator himself. This requires its appropriate level of professional training and the necessary level of compliance of the activity of a public administrator with increased moral and ethical parameters. Given the lack of administrative and procedural legislation, it is proposed to consider the use of discretionary powers as permissible with the possibility of expanding their limits within the law. But this is only on condition of introducing into the normative regulation of public administrators’ activity the code of their professional conduct. Such a code should contain an ideal model of professional conduct of public administrators. Conformity of professional conduct of an official of public administration body to the requirements of the code is a prerequisite for the implementation of its social mission. The code of ethics of a public administrator should contain a set of requirements of moral and ethical nature, compliance with which in the activities of the public administrator will contribute to the implementation of constitutional requirements on the social orientation and conditionality of the activities of the state and all its bodies.

Seismic resilience for recovery investments of bridges methodology

Bridges are fundamental links for the movement of goods and people and bridge damage can thus have significant impacts on society and the economy. Earthquakes can be extremely destructive and can compromise bridge functionality, which is essential for communities. Evaluation of bridge functionality is thus fundamental in the planning of emergency responses and socioeconomic recovery procedures. It is especially useful to define parameters to assess investments in bridge infrastructure. Resilience is a key parameter that can identify decision making procedures necessary for recovery investments. In this regard, resilience can be defined as the rapidity of a system to return to pre-disaster levels of functionality. This aim of this work was to assess the lack of robust analytical procedures for quantifying systematic restoration for earthquake-damaged bridges, to provide a link between the assessment of resilience and its application in decision making approaches. The proposed methodology (called seismic resilience for recovery investments of bridges) uses functionality–time curves that allow quantification of resilience along with readable findings for a wider range of stakeholders. The results presented in this paper should be of interest to multi-sectorial actors (i.e. bridge owners, transportation authorities and public administrators) and could drive interdisciplinary applications such as the assessment of recovery techniques and solutions.

Politics, Policy, and Crime Ethnography

This chapter encourages social scientists, policy planners, and public administrators to reflect critically on the methods used to define crime problems and policy responses to them. It argues for the increased use of ethnographic methods in formulating policy by seeking points of connection with quantitative approaches. Quantitative methods are better suited for crime policy given their methodological rigor, instrumental and programmatic orientation, and relatively low costs per datum unit. However, qualitative methods have a complementary role to play, being better attuned to the subjective experiences of crime and crime control and better able to illustrate factors correlated with these phenomena. Ethnographic methods permit reflexivity regarding the broader settings and specific contexts of crime and criminological research. Two cases of ethnographic techniques within criminal justice practice are shared to demonstrate their viability—one from the US Department of Justice and another from Court Watch Poland. The chapter finishes with lessons for researchers and policy planners, including the importance of engaging in collaborative research, triangulating methods, embracing uncomfortable findings, and reconsidering research ethics.

Reimagining Otherness, Recreating the Public Space: Public Administration and the U.S.-Mexico Border

How can public administrators tasked with enforcing immigration laws bring care and commitment to human relationships and public connections? The contemporary anti-immigrant (anti-Other) “narrative” related to immigration policy is provided as exemplary socio-political-administrative terrain for exploring this question. Considering the undocumented alien as the “other” that possess a threat to the whole is problematic for democratic immigration policy making and governance. This paper suggests that pragmatism and Hannah Arendt’s political theory of publicness offer a theoretical groundwork for understanding and overcoming the destructive dynamics of “othering.” This framework can help administrators, through reflection in action and situational awareness, make sense of their daily practice. Finally, the discussion centers on lessons for street-level bureaucrats to reconsider the border and “others” under a new light, as constitutive of the public space.