It is often charged that the study of public administration lacks boundaries and suffers from an identity crisis. This charge is grounded in a positivist belief in the unity of knowledge. From the perspective of positivists, the study of public administration lacks the epistemological unity that would make it a true science. Regarding public administration as an interdisciplinary study and prac…
Theory and evidence has grown on the role of strategy in public organizations. Miles and Snow suggest that strategy’s impact on organizational success will be greatest when external and internal factors are in alignment—when, for instance, managerial prospectors in decentralized organizations operate in a turbulent environment. This study examines three of the Miles and Snow factors—strategy, s…
Governance networks are characterized by complex interaction and decision making, and much uncertainty. Surprisingly, there is very little research on the impact of trust in achieving results in governance networks. This article asks two questions: (a) Does trust influence the outcomes of environmental projects? and (b) Does active network management improve the level of trust in networks? The …
This research focused on the interorganizational and intergovernmental response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The study used the concepts from the network and partnerships literature and used current techniques of network analysis. The study found that the use of intergovernmental and interorganizational response to coordinate complex operations in multiorganizational environments of …
Using the Romzek–Dubnick typology of accountability, the authors analyze challenges that reinvention and new public management reforms in the United States and China present with regard to maintaining legal controls, protecting non-mission-based administrative objectives, pursuing public values, and sustaining hierarchical authority. The authors show that reforms—especially outsourcing and resu…
Contrasting views are presented on the nature and rationale for public management reforms in China. One school argues that they are strongly influenced by international practice, whereas the other holds that they reflect the characteristics of Chinese politics and administration. The authors explore this proposition in the arena of performance management, where they pay particular attention to …
A striking feature of the performance measurement system in Chinese local governments is the emphasis on non-mission-based targets. Drawing on data collected in a 5-year field research project in one inland Chinese county, this article examines the causes, dynamics, and consequences of the rise of non-mission-based targets in local China. It argues that non-mission-based targets are largely an …
This study is designed to examine dual faces of ministerial leadership that functions in the gray area of politics and administration when a minister performs his or her role as a political appointee and as a department head. The dual faces of ministerial leadership require somehow both political responsiveness and administrative responsibility for effective ministerial performance. Using the p…
This introductory article engages with possibilities for cultural studies during the economic crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. It begins by considering the nature of the crisis and the recovery that follows. It goes on to explore the relationship between cultural studies and economic discourse, arguing that the cultural studies of the economy and the 'economic' has always taken place in refere…
The recent financial crisis has shattered lives and spread misery far and wide. The magnitude of damage has produced the desire for the economic equivalent of a truth and reconciliation commission. Yet the efforts to get the story right have pointed as much to a crisis of narrative, of theory, even of facticity among the standard-bearers of monied matters, public punditry and policy self-justif…
In what follows I am going to argue that the rise of the creative industries has in general been understood too narrowly. This narrow understanding has had implications for the way that a politics of management and labour in the creative industries has been framed and contained, and it has held back an analysis of class struggle in the creative industries. To elaborate an understanding of labou…
This research investigates the relative strength of two correlates of helping behavior: dispositional empathic concern and a moral principle to care about others. The empathy–helping and care–helping relationships are investigated using data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative random sample of the U.S. adult population. Ten helping behaviors are investigated. The results…
The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and athei…
Although race is one of the most salient status characteristics in American society, many observers cannot distinguish the racial ancestries of multiracial youth. This paper examines how people perceive multiracial adolescents: specifically, I investigate whether observers perceive the adolescents as multiracial and whether these racial perceptions are congruent with the multiracial adolescents…
This paper considers the process by which individuals estimate the risk of adverse events, with particular attention to the social context in which risk estimates are formed. We compare subjective probability estimates of crime victimization to actual victimization experiences among respondents from the 1994 to 2002 waves of the Survey of Economic Expectations (Dominitz and Manski 2002). Using …
This article uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1999; Weible and Sabatier 2007) and a refined version of the social learning approach of Peter Hall (1993) to assess and explain policy change in the Common (Agricultural) Policy (CAP) with a special view on Environmental Policy Integration (EPI). Three stages of EPI are discerned that move from central to vert…
In response to wide-ranging criticism of agricultural policy, especially within Western industrialized countries, new frameworks of justification are emerging and new hybrid policy fields have been established to tackle some of the 'externalities' of agricultural support. However, institutional frameworks are proving slower to change, partly because this would require coordinated action across …
A key motive for establishing the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was restoring public confidence in the wake of multiplying food scares and the BSE crisis. Scholars, however, have paid little attention to the actual political and institutional logics that shaped this new organization. This article explores the dynamics underpinning the making of EFSA. We examine the way in which learning…
For the past decade, the policy community/issue network typology of pressure group interaction has been used to explain policy outcomes and the policy-making process. To re-examine the validity of this typology, the paper focuses on the UK government's response to the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) crisis, and in particular the decision to pursue contiguous culling rather than vaccination to…
The policy network approach is widely recognized for its ability to describe different networks. Adding the concepts 'policy image' and 'cleavage in the party system' makes it possible to explain policy network change as well as policy change. This argument is supported by a comparison of the Danish decision in 1960 to straighten Denmark's largest river, the Skjern River, to gain farmland, and …