AIDS media lead unexpected lives once distributed through urban space: billboards fade, posters go missing, bumper stickers travel to other cities. The materiality of AIDS campaign objects and of the urban settings in which they are displayed structures how the public interprets their messages. Ethnographic observation of AIDS media in situ and interview data reveal how the materiality of objec…
This essay uses a deviant case analysis of the 19952000 Detroit newspaper strike to critique and revise theories of strike activity. As the formal institutions regulating industrial relations in the United States have declined, workplace struggles have expanded or reentered into other arenas of the state and civil society. In addition, the essay develops the methodological concept of a signal…
The idea of administrative limitsin the sense of constraints or bounds on what can be achieved by the activity of administration in general and public administration in particularis important for a proper understanding of twenty-first-century public administration. What are the effective limits of taxable capacity in the modern state, as debt-ridden governments seek to reduce debt levels and …
The development of states coincides with the continuous (re)definition of administrative limits, according to Kutsal Yesilkagit, in this response to Christopher Hood. Hoods thought-provoking essay suggests putting the concept of administrative limits to greater use as an analytical concept and explores the idea of administrative limits from three basic ways of thinking: cybernetics, economics …
A central tenet of The Federalist is that good government depends on good administration. Two hundred and twenty-three years have passed since Publius began writing this extraordinary text. As American democratic institutions have grown larger and more complex than what the founders ever imagined, many of the ideas expressed in The Federalist remain as relevant today as when James Madison, Alex…
To what extent were Woodrow Wilsons ideas about public administration informed by German organic political theory? Drawing on the writings of Wilson, Lorenz von Stein, and Johann K. Bluntschli on public administration, and comparing American and German primary sources, the author offers insights into Wilsons general concept of public administration, as well as his understanding of the politic…
Does the public administration research from the late 1970s and 1980s on managing decline contain useful lessons for today's Great Recession? Do these studies serve our current research needs? Why has decline continued to be a major focus of research in generic management, but not in public administration? The answers to these questions give some clues as to a possible new, revitalized research…
Cutback management in the public sector poses unique problems. More than 30 years ago, Charles Levine illustrated these problems by discussing the paradoxes of cutback management in public organizations. Building on Levine's work on cutback management and developments in publicness theory, the author provides a contemporary perspective on cutback management. He asserts that publicness creates p…
The most important administrative aspect of the George W. Bush presidency was not its formal management reform agenda, but its attempt to extend the politicized presidency. Efforts to assert tighter political control of the federal bureaucracy, revived during the Ronald Reagan administration, were pursued to an extreme under Bush. Loyalty triumphed over competence in selection, and political go…
What has been the impact of the U.S. Supreme Courts 2009 decision in Ricci v. Destefano on the selection and promotion practices of public employers?; Relying solely on circumstantial evidence, the Supreme Court held that the Civil Service Board of New Haven, Connecticut, had engaged in Title VII disparate treatment discrimination by refusing to certify the results of a promotion examination t…
Despite the significant volume of studies on public sector performance measurement, a paucity of empirical research describes in detail the systems and processes used at different levels of government to measure and manage performance. This study focuses on the experience of Public Service Agreements in the public sector in England. In particular, the impact of a centralized, performance measur…
Local administrative professionals typically are accountable to multiple stakeholders, including other governmental units, special interests in the business and nonprofit sectors, and citizens. How are these accountability relationships ordered? What is the position of citizens in that hierarchy, particularly the influence of citizen participation? Focusing on patterns of hearing participation …
Does board diversity or representativeness influence organizational performance? Though it is understudied in both the public and the nonprofit sectors, learning more about this critical subject can enhance organizational performance within highly collaborative settings. Community mediation centers, which rely on multiple public and private resources to meet their programmatic objectives, provi…
Public administration continues to face an identity crisis that turns on the question of whether the animating principles of the discipline are to be discovered in the political foundations of a given regime, or whether they are to be found in more universal and transcendent principles of scientific management. Herbert J. Storing reframed the identity crisis as a problem arising from Americas …
The global financial crisis that began in 2008 has resulted in the widespread destruction of jobs and livelihoods. Among the factors that precipitated the crisis, growing inequality both within and between countries contributed to low levels of aggregate demand and the reliance of low-income households on unsustainable borrowing to maintain living standards. The crisis provides the opportunity …
This paper sets out a framework for thinking about the gender dimensions of the economic crisis. It considers the likely impact of the crisis, as well as the responses to it, on the part of both individuals and collectivities, in three spheres of the economy: finance; production; and reproduction. It identifies the kinds of 'gender numbers' that we need; sex-disaggregated statistics of various …
This article draws on the grassroots experiences and research of MAP Foundation to examine the gendered impacts of the economic downturn on migrants from Burma/Myanmar1 who are working in Thailand. The article looks through a gender lens at the wages, working conditions, family relations and safety and security issues. It finds that migrant women have experienced decreases in wages, lay-offs, i…
This article discusses the findings of Oxfam-commissioned research into the impact of the economic crisis on women garment workers in the Philippines. It provides policy recommendations aiming to ensure that measures put in place by the government and international bodies support the women workers who have seen their jobs lost or their working conditions worsen, and ensure that recovery measure…
Despite immediate promises of economic recovery by some Latin American governments, women in some regions of the continent are feeling the aftermath of the crisis deeply. This is because of both the interconnectedness of their regions to the export market, and pre-existing economic policies and social factors, including gender inequality that strengthens inequalities. These factors are intensif…
This paper investigates the impact of the global economic crisis on the migration of Ethiopian women domestic workers to the Gulf. It argues that migration as a strategy to cope with existing crises in Ethiopia will be severely constrained by post-downturn policy shifts, which have already produced a significant decline in numbers of recorded migrants and remittances. Evidence suggests the cons…