ABSTRACT.  Why do government agencies invest in collaborative governance arrangements? Motivated by transaction costs theories of organizational economics, we propose a logic of agency investment in collaborative governance settings. This logic presumes that agency heads disproportionately bear large fiduciary and legal responsibility for making these formal partnerships on behalf of their agencies. We maintain that agency investments to coproduce with other organizations is positively related to an agency head’s policy-specific expertise, and that such relationships will take on greater importance when collaborating with non-governmental organizations. We test this proposition analyzing a novel database of 241,730 U.S. federal agency cooperative agreement decisions awarded between 1988-2008. The statistical findings reveal that agency head policy-specific expertise becomes crucially important for federal agency decisions to partner non-governmental organizations, especially for high-valued cooperative agreements. The evidence also shows that an agency head’s managerial skills has little bearing on these collaborative governance decisions.    

ABSTRACT. The work of U.S. state revenue departments (DORs) is vital for these governments’ fiscal sustainability—the collection of tax receipts and efficient flow of these funds into state treasuries is a foundation for state government operations. On the other hand, state revenue departments do not have constituents that support their work in the same sense that public health departments, or even corrections departments, have. That is, the “reluctant clients” (i.e., taxpayers) of revenue departments are only concerned with the performance of the department if it affects their own tax payments. Ironically, tax departments that operate efficiently and generate high collection rates provide taxpayers the benefit of bringing in the greatest amount of revenue quickly to fund public services. Mission statements, a requirement of most, if not all state agencies in the U.S., direct organizations to conduct legally prescribed and expected work and can orient employees to the organizational culture. In this research, we examine the mission statements in the 50 U.S. state government revenue departments to determine 1) the content, clarity and focus of these statements, and 2) the relationship, if any, of mission statement characteristics to agency performance. In addition to collecting and coding the characteristics of mission statements, we search for evidence of innovative strategies and processes these departments may engage to meet their missions. We collect data about agency resources, including fiscal, human and technological ones and have a planned survey of state government revenue department directors. Our dependent variable accesses revenue collections as a proxy for DOR performance. Our goal is to flesh out a model of state DOR performance, dependent upon measures of mission characteristics, innovations engaged and resources provided.

ABSTRACT. Extant literature documents how state level executives use various formal and informal tools to set state policy agenda to achieve their goals. Gubernatorial policy priorities have been known to influence state policymaking processes and outcomes. Less scholarly attention has been focused on the extent to which local governments pay attention and react to gubernatorial policy signals, however. State level binding institutions have been found to influence local policy choices, but the influence of less formal gubernatorial policy signaling mechanisms has not been studied as of yet. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature. Gubernatorial policy priorities are extracted from annual State of the State Addresses, in which governors lay out main policy initiatives for the upcoming fiscal year, using unsupervised computational text analysis techniques. The effect of these stated policy objectives is tested on the distribution of spending in 150 largest U.S. cities over eight years from 2007 to 2014. The empirical findings from panel regression models suggest that gubernatorial policy goals are significantly associated with city level policymaking. The strength of this relationship, however, varies by policy area and depends on political proximity between state and city level elected officials.

ABSTRACT. Organizations produce copious volumes of written documents, including position papers, meeting summaries, presentations, and budget justifications. These documents present a wealth of untapped information, which can shed light on a variety of organizational factors--individual and group behaviors, managerial and policy choices, and other key organizational dynamics, both within and between organizations. Computational text analysis methods offer a highly generalizable means of tapping into these documents in order to generate objective organizational data. We demonstrate how this method can be used to measure the functions of budget narratives in the state of California, highlighting both within-- and between-- county level variations along Shick's (1966) spectrum of budget narrative management orientations. We then empirically test how the factors in the internal and external environments of public sector organizations (county governments) relate to the use of competing management orientations during 2007-2017 fiscal years.

ABSTRACT. Research shows that transparency is normally associated with better governance outcomes. For example, budget transparency is a means of supporting more accountability in how taxpayer money is spent (e.g. Benito and Bastida, 2009). In a related sphere of research on the effects of citizen participation there is an analogous line of theorizing suggesting that policymakers can generate stronger legitimacy for new regulations if they deliberate through a citizen participation process (e.g. Coglianese, 2005).

However, despite our understanding of transparency and participation, there still remains a missing piece of the puzzle in our understanding of how they relate to each other. This interrelationship has been given public policy impetus by the emerging field of open government theory. Open government is a concept that encompasses both components, positing that they are not only important for governance, but that they are essentially two sides of the same coin. In this sense Meijer, Curtin, and Hillebrandt (2012) argued that open government is about giving citizens a certain degree of “vision” and “voice” towards what goes on inside public organizations.

We address this knowledge gap by investigating what effect transparency and citizen participation have on a decision-making process about public goods allocation, namely public housing for university students. We use an experiment to test the individual and combined effects of transparency and citizen participation. Furthermore, we estimate the effect on a range of outcomes that are important for public governance, including citizen satisfaction, procedural fairness, and trust. By experimentally studying these variables in a natural setting of a public organization, the research provides insights into the effects of open government in a realistic public decision-making scenario.

References:

Benito, B., & Bastida, F. (2009). Budget transparency, fiscal performance, and political turnout: An international approach. Public Administration Review, 69(3), 403-417.

Coglianese, C. (2005). Citizen participation in rulemaking: past, present, and future. Duke Law Journal, 55, 943-968.

Meijer, A. J., Curtin, D., & Hillebrandt, M. (2012). Open government: connecting vision and voice. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 78(1), 10-29.

ABSTRACT. The right to information is considered instrumental in establishing good governance and fostering democratic principles. It empowers citizens to make informed decisions and hold government accountable (Chennupati, Potluri & Mangnale, 2013). Though the U.S. was one of the early adopter countries of access-to-information legislation, now more than half the countries in the world have the legislation (Centre for Law and Democracy, 2018). India, the largest democracy in the world, has received global recognition for its legislation (Roberts, 2010). More specifically, the Indian Right to Information Act (2005) offers the poorest, least educated and most disadvantaged in society the right and possibility of requesting and obtaining information from the government at no cost and with assistance if necessary. The challenge is great for a country like India where about 27 percent of adults are still unlettered (UNDP, 2018) and two-thirds of its people live in rural areas (Roberts, 2010).

This qualitative field study in 17 cities and towns across the geographic regions of India began on October 14, 2016 and was completed on June 4, 2017. We conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 58 representatives from Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and 11 social activists (N = 69) who do outreach in communities of marginalized people. Our overarching research questions addressed to what extent marginalized groups (Dalits, women, Muslims, disabled individuals, and others) are included in the process of requesting information under the Right to Information Act (RTIA)? What barriers, if any, have kept this accountability institution from working in disadvantaged communities of citizens? How has the Right to Information movement played a role in advancing information-rights for marginalized people?

Preliminary findings suggest that marginalized individuals are not the majority utilizing the RTIA. The rate of application seeking information among women, for example, is less than 10 percent. In this study we will explore in-depth the reasons for low participation among marginalized groups. The study is important since enacting a law does not guarantee benefits for citizens, especially those who are disadvantaged.

References: Chennupati, D. B., Potluri, R. M. and Mangnale, V.S. (2013). India’s Right to Information Act, 2005: A catalyst for good governance. International Journal of Law and Management, 55(4), 295-303. Roberts, A. (2010). A great and revolutionary law? The first four years of India’s Right to Information Act. Public Administration Review, (November/2010), 225-233. U.N. Development Program. About India. http://www.in.undp.org/content/india/en/home/countryinfo.html

ABSTRACT. Social construction theory (Schneider and Ingram 1997; Schneider and Sidney 2009) argues that constructions in the popular debate of social groups as being either deserving or undeserving of social welfare are absorbed by citizens and affect their orientations and civic participation (Schneider and Ingram 1992). However, little is known about how and to what extent social constructions affect the well-being of people in those groups that are subject to socially constructions. To address this question, we connect social construction theory (Schneider and Ingram 1992) with the emerging literature on psychological costs experienced by beneficiaries of welfare benefits (Bhargava and Manoli 2016; Herd and Moynihan 2018; Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey 2015). We argue that benefit recipients experience psychological costs when they are negatively construed as being undeserving of social welfare in the public debate.

To test this theory, we use multiple experiments to examine experiences of psychological costs for welfare benefit recipients who are subject to discussions of deservingness. First, to establish the causal relationship in a controlled setting we construct a survey experiment with 900 current welfare benefit recipients in Denmark. Subjects are randomly assigned to deservingness cues taken from popular media to estimate how such cues affect the extent to which they report experiencing psychological costs in the form of stigma, loss of autonomy, and stress.

Second, we take advantage of two quasi-experiments to examine effects in the field. In 2011 and 2012 Denmark’s generous welfare state faced an unprecedented public and political debate in the aftermath of two prominent media cases known as “Lazy Robert’ and “Poor Carina.” Following these cases, approximately four out of ten Danes changed their opinions on social assistance benefits, generally becoming less supportive (Hedegaard 2014). To test the effects of changes in deservingness, we use highly valid individual level register data (more than one million observations) on all Danish social assistance benefit recipients in the years 2008-2017. We use regression discontinuity analysis to estimate if social assistance benefit recipients were more likely to be diagnosed with stress and more likely to receive stress-reducing medication in the aftermath of the two incidents. Moreover, we compare the results from the regression discontinuity analysis with similar analyses of placebo groups that are unlikely to have been affected by the incidents to examine whether changes in the dependent variables can be observed mainly for the recipients of social assistance benefits, as we expect.

ABSTRACT. The idea of civilian oversight is based on the hope of making the police more accountable to the citizens and perform their function better. Although debates between the advocates and opponents of civilian oversight have continued, the consequence of civilian oversight on the police organizations has not been fully understood. A few studies have shown how civilian oversight influence the perception of individual citizens or police officers, but its influence at the organizational level of the police remains untested. Thus, based on the understanding of civilian oversight as an accountability mechanism, this study explores the theoretical basis of the consequences of civilian oversight. Further, it attempts to estimate the effect of civilian oversight on the organizational outcomes of the police in the United States. The Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) data and the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data of 2007 are analyzed by utilizing the propensity score matching method. The result of the analysis suggests that the police agencies with civilian oversight have significantly lower clearance rates than the agencies without civilian oversight. The finding implies the significance of establishing civilian oversight based on the understanding the multiplicity of accountability relationships and the citizen-police relationship.

ABSTRACT. Recent efforts (Miller, Agle, O’Rourke, 2016) have begun to identify common ethical dilemmas in the workplace. But do employees, across all job types, recognize and process ethical dilemmas similarly? Jones’s (1991) pioneering work suggests that ethical responses may vary by moral intensity. Moral intensity is a multi-dimensional approach that reflects the magnitude of consequences, social consensus, probability of effect, temporal immediacy, proximity, and concentration of effect. In the field of public management research, recent works reinforces the theme of variable/contingent responses to ethical dilemmas. Wright, Hassan, Park (2016) found, for example, that employees high in PSM may behave more ethically.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a broader theoretical argument to suggest that public service oriented employees may uniquely recognize and process ethical dilemmas. The theory further suggests that public service dilemmas may be more complicated and cognitively difficult. We then empirically test our theory using an experimental design.

The essence of our theoretical argument is that most employees recognize dilemmas as conflicts between personal and organizational interests. Public service oriented employees, on the other hand, often contemplate a third set of interests that are neither personal nor organizational but that accrue to the general public’s benefit. The tension between personal, organization, and public interests uniquely describe public service dilemmas.

We test the veracity of this theory by presenting real-world ethical dilemmas gathered from executive MPA students and alumni. After reading a short dilemma we ask respondents to the identify parties and interests that they see as important in the dilemma. We then ask respondents to distribute 1,000 “points” across the interests that they’ve identified – assigning more points to the interests that they perceive as most important. Finally, we ask respondents to respond to several personality and demographic questions, including public service motivation (PSM) and prosocial motivation questions.

We hypothesize that respondents with higher levels of PSM, or respondents employed in public sector, will be more likely to recognize parties and interests that would be considered “general public benefit” and that they will also assign these parties and interests higher relative importance. We propose that one mechanism by which this might happen is moral intensity’s proximity dimension, such that public service oriented decision makers will consider public interests to be more proximate.

ABSTRACT. Empirical studies in public administration literature show that the incidence of corruption increases state-local capital expenditures (Liu & Mikesell, 2014) as well as the size and costs of public infrastructure investment (Liu, Moldogaziev, & Mikesell, 2017; Liu, Moldogaziev, & Luby, 2017). These studies are important to governance scholars since the finding implies that corruption reduces the efficiency in government spending. Most studies on public sector corruption use the Leviathan or Budget Maximizing Bureaucrat arguments as their underlying assumptions to test the potential link between corruption and public sector capital spending. However, even though empirical evidence exists for the negative effect of corruption on state level public capital expenditures, there is a void in the literature regarding the efficiency of capital spending when corruption levels vary in the context of public sector organizations.

The dependent variable is a state highway construction efficiency score in a two way fixed effects panel, which is calculated as the ratio of highway construction outputs to inputs during 1998 to 2015. Outputs include annual road lane miles, road conditions and traffic flows. Inputs include state-administered highway spending on new roads and maintenance construction. Existing studies on highway construction suggest that procurement and project acquisitions are the stages where corruption is likely to occur and that it could be controlled through better project management and cost estimation approaches (Kalahan, 2006; Hudon & Garson, 2016). The aim of this study is to provide an economic efficiency based explanation for the effects of corruption on state-administered highway construction capital spending. Using allocative and technical efficiency production theories (i.e., Pareto Efficiency and Cobb Douglas Production Function), the study’s underlying assumption is that corruption reduces public capital spending efficiency through project management and acquisition costs. The findings will present the efficiency costs that the incidence of corruption puts on highway capital spending by state governments in the United States.

ABSTRACT. The current public pessimism about democracy, the decline of state institutions in developed countries, and the disappointment with reforms of bureaucracies in developing countries are all raising the stakes for public administration to provide answers to fundamental questions about honesty, ethics, and corruption in the public sector around the world. While many countries struggle with high level of corruptions, some countries have been consistently able to sustain an equilibrium of honesty and low corruption in public service. We argue that the selection of (dis)honest workers into the public sector is an important self-reinforcing mechanism underlying corruption levels between countries. To study this we rely on the dice game paradigm in a cross-country setting. The dice game paradigm involves experimental tasks in which subjects can increase their winnings by lying about the outcome of a die roll but face no risk of the researcher detecting their lie. Because the expected distribution of die rolls is known, however, the distribution of reports across repetitions of the game can benchmark what should have been observed if subjects were honest. This allows researchers to obtain statistical measures of the amount of dishonest behavior for some groups.

We field the dice game in a large-scale data collection effort spanning multiple countries including Denmark, Singapore, Sweden, United Kingdom, Germany, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, and Thailand. These countries provide us with great variation in corruption levels. Overall, we get a very large sample of prospective employees in either the public or private sector of each country (n=3,000). The results supports the theory that low and high corrupt countries see opposite patterns with respect to the selection of (dis)honest individuals into the public sector. Furthermore, comparing the results between low and high corrupt countries also points to the importance of integrating micro and behavioral findings with macro-level societal variation. Validated and standardized measures which work across contexts and countries are the foundation for building a body of evidence with high external validity and important real-world implications. It here adds to our understanding of the interplay between micro- and macro-level variables in studies of ethics and corruption in the public sector.

ABSTRACT. Public organizations increasingly face significant disruptive events that cause damage to infrastructure and harm to the public they serve (Boin and Lodge, 2016). Yet even as the regularity of extreme events increases, public organizations are often criticized as not undertaking adaptive change at a rate that is commensurate with the changing environment. This study recognizes that agencies are fundamentally embedded in institutional contexts that often work against adaptive change, but it challenges the conventional wisdom that change only occurs (or primarily occurs) after significant events that debilitate the organization and result in political intervention. Instead, this study uses institutional work theory to frame adaptation as a cognitive process in which top managers undertake micro-level decisions and actions that create, maintain or undermine existing institutions.

Our focus is on public transit organizations and the frequent and severe weather events that destroy infrastructure and impede transit services (Zhang, Welch, & Miao, 2018). Institutional work theory (Battilana et al., 2009; Lawrence et al., 2011) explains that actors use institutional logics as guidelines for interpreting complex organizational and environmental contexts and for determining appropriate behavior (Thornton, 2004; Greenwood, 2011). Conflicts arise when existing institutional logics that operate in the organization are perceived to be inadequate, insufficient or dysfunctional. Actors respond to competing logics by undertaking institutional work – making decisions or taking actions – that reconcile competing logics (Chen & O’Mahony, 2006; Sauermann & Stephan, 2013). We expect that as top managers recognize that existing norms, practices, operating procedures are insufficient for addressing new contextual realities of extreme weather, they will undertake decisions and actions that challenge orthodoxy in ways that are expected to improve adaptation. The study asks: 1) What micro-level adaptive decisions or actions do top managers take? What institutional conflicts are most salient in driving institutional work?

We test hypotheses using data from two national surveys (2016 and 2018) of top managers in five positions in population of fixed-route public transit agencies in the US with revenues over one million dollars. Our work advances the literature in two ways. First, we contribute to the adaptation literature by using an institutional work theoretical lens to better understand how continuous adaptation occurs. Second, we provide new measures of institutional conflict and institutional work that can be used to operationalize other cognitive approaches to institutional change. Findings should also help inform managers by making institutional conflict and evidence of adaptation more transparent.

ABSTRACT. Several state-level policies are in place to support and encourage sales of Electric Vehicles (EVs). Examples include loan and grant programs, technology mandates, and access to infrastructure. These policies were initially adopted in the 1990s to address local level air pollutions concerns. They have since evolved in nature and scope to become tools for sub-national governments to address sustainability and climate change concerns. State and local governments are investing in expanding the infrastructure to support charging and refueling of EVs. As of 2017, 23 states provided financial incentives, 27 had policies to support infrastructure, 13 had utility incentives and High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane access, 4 had reduced licensing requirements, and 14 provided zero and low emission vehicles with reduced licensing and usage requirements.

The potential inadvertent adverse effects of higher EV sales have affected state finances and caused jurisdictions to reassess these incentives. The feedback from consumers and market response has led to policy repurposing. This has led to variability in policy response. Some state governments are re-evaluating and changing their incentive designs while others are maintaining and even strengthening their support, and yet others have not even considered adopting these mechanisms. These changes and the rapidly evolving sector call for a systematic assessment of policy design and its effectiveness in generating market changes.

Public management research has explored policies in sustainability and alternative energy. Recent works include the analysis of Advanced Technology Vehicle Mechanism (Wise & Witesman, 2018), energy efficiency financing programs by local governments (Wang, Liu, & Hawkins, 2017), and the role of managerial environment in the success of sustainability initiatives (Swann, 2017).

Research so far has focused on the selection and continuation of programs and assessment of policy outcomes is limited. This paper aims to fill this gap and explores the adoption, design, and effectiveness of EV support policies at the state level, analyzing in detail whether the intensity of policies, and specific design features lead to higher sales of EVs.

The paper uses a fixed effects model of state level policies to support electric vehicles across the seven year time period from 2011 to 2017. The policy dataset is then combined with sales data and state level control variables to generate a panel dataset with state-year as the unit of observation. Different models specifications for total counts, types of policies – incentives and regulations are then run to estimate the effects on sales.

ABSTRACT. Transit agencies are vulnerable to an advancing list of natural and manmade extreme events that are increasingly affecting their ability to manage operations and provide services. Traditional emergency management approaches are repeatedly found wanting in meeting the intensifying demands as they are often responsive rather than anticipatory. A growing consensus is taking hold that emergency management approaches need to be complemented with proactive adaptation to reduce vulnerability and foster resilience in a changing environment (Boin & Van Eeten, 2013; McEntire, 2010; Zhang, Welch, & Miao, 2018). Nevertheless, there is increasing evidence that some pioneering agencies are incorporating resilience concerns in infrastructure design and construction, strategic plans and asset management. Building on prior work, this study asks: Why early pioneer organizations purposefully adapt to extreme events? For those agencies that have not undertaken adaptation to significant extreme events, what mechanisms can help them do so?

Because adaptation unfolds in a complex dynamic system, the study applies agent-based modeling (ABM) to identify the preconditions for adaptation to extreme events in the transit sector and produce theoretical insights. Adaptation is measured as the diffusion of capital investment by transit agencies to increase the resilience of their infrastructure and assets against weather impacts. Drawing on prior research on learning, social adaptation, and policy change, the agent-based model incorporates behavioral, political and social system features (Colyvas and Maroulis, 2015) to develop four propositions on determinants of adaptive behavior. Adaptation is more likely to occur when: 1) organizations experience repeated extreme events and impacts that increase perceived risk; 2) a few disastrous extreme events create windows of opportunity for organizations to boost adaptation implementation capacity; 3) given a window of opportunity, organizations are able to readily apply a viable solution; 4) organizations learn from others’ experiences with extreme events and the solutions they applied. The ABM will produce a refined set of theoretically justified propositions on the micro-level mechanisms that lead to agency adaptation to extreme events.

The study contributes to the literature by combining the various perspectives to form an integrated examination on the adaptation process. By giving insights into the factors that encourage and inhibit adaptation, it can help inform and promote adaptation initiatives and activities in the transit sector and elsewhere.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how public agencies scan the environment for extreme events, organize information for agency use, and translate information into policy advocacy. We explore how state transportation agencies are preparing for the deployment of driverless vehicles in the infrastructure grid. Drawing from Baumgartner and Jones (2015) we conceive of extreme events as significant environmental changes that present challenges faster and over a wider range of issues than agency structures and their implementation networks are designed to address. We conceptualize state transportation agencies as the owners of complex adaptive infrastructure systems and observe the adaptive learning processes in which they engage as they prepare for the advent of varying levels of vehicle automation.

Our model builds upon Baumgartner and Jones’s (2015) conceptualization of information search processes. Entropic search describes processes using diverse actors in search of problem definitions in a highly ambiguous space. Expert search describes processes used by agencies to find solutions. To this framework we add three concepts. Agent-based scanning describes variance in the organization of the scanning process. We observe variance in a) the degree to which the scanning effort is outsourced to third parties; and b) the types of actors engaged in scanning exercise. Principal-directed scanning captures the variance in the charge that initiated the scanning effort. Scanning processes may be directed by the state transportation agency, or initiated by a political principal, such as a governor or legislature. We explore advocacy to understand the range of actions, if any, that the scanning exercise recommends for the agency and the degree to which the agency embraces recommendations. Of particular interest is the degree to which agencies adopt a position of advocacy for promoting vehicle automation.

We observe the population of studies that state transportation agencies have commissioned to prepare for driverless vehicles (current n=37). We use a multi-method qualitative approach that combines Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to explore the strength of the core conceptual relationships. We combine the QCA with narrative analysis the texts exploring the relationship between scanning of extreme events and advocacy.

This study contributes to the literature by exploring how advocacy positions develop in response to extreme change. We also introduce the concept of agent-based scanning as a factor shaping entropic and expert scanning processes. In doing so, we explore how scanning processes influence whether state transportation agencies shift from their traditional role of infrastructure owner to advocate for new technology development.

ABSTRACT. This paper is about professional practices of government elites in different places: government ministries, frontline public services, and regulatory agencies. The tradition of studying managerial work and behaviour in the public sector, in particular by way of interpretive approaches (with emphasis on ‘craftsmanship’), has favoured (implicit) attention to departmental/ministerial chiefs working intimately with politicians. Survey research has also often treated professional practices and attitudes of public managers as a generic phenomenon. However, some scholars, notably Kaufman (1981) and Moore (1995; 2013), have broadened our view by including other settings – by contextualizing analyses. Treating the professional practices of executive managers in the public sector as a generic craft (assuming they are ‘one’) obscures differences in institutional settings, raisons d’être, and authorising environments with which these managers need to come to terms. They are ‘not the same’. A differentiation of contexts and practices is required to better understand how executive managers work in a turbulent world, either close to (high) politics or far removed from it. In this, we follow this line of reasoning and study the work and work practices of ministerial executives, chief executives of frontline service agencies, and leaders of regulatory agencies in The Netherlands. I use an interpretive approach and draw on 200 hours of original ethnographic shadowing to study these chief executives up-close. The findings are analysed by focusing on five core elements of professional managerial practices: allocation of attention and attendance; commitment; conflict management; rhetoric & performance; and timing & patience. We show how work and behaviour differ, by describing each of these dimensions. We conclude by comparing the three settings and we explore both theoretical and practical implications. We especially stress the importance of connective repertoires of professional public managers.

ABSTRACT. Top executives play vital roles shaping decision making and action in public organizations and as connectors between political principals and the executing organizations (Hambrick, 2007). Hence, it is no surprise that recent research has been interested in better understanding the dynamics of executive succession and the determinants of an executives length of tenure (Boyne et al., 2010; Petrovsky et al., 2017). Executive turnover is a major organizational event that often severely disrupts exeisting routines and work patterns. Previous research has shown turnover to be affected by organizational performance (Boyne et al, 2010, Petrovsky et al, 2017), financial strain and turnover among city council members (McCabe et al, 2008), political conflict (Kaatz et al, 1999; Whitaker and DeHoog, 1991) and changes in political leadership (Christensen et al, 2014). However, while a lot of the literature tests similar hypotheses around how contextual factors affect executive turnover, and emphasize the effects of economic and political uncertainty, the studies come up with mixed results. The objective of this paper is to gain a more nuanced understanding of executive turnover by combining the existing contextual determinats with theory on social relations and trust. Grøn and Salomonsen (2018) argue that the ambiguity characterizing politico-administrative relationship at the apex of public organizations calls for trust relations (see also Hood and Lodge, 2006, Svarra, 2006). We argue that the effect of adverse contextual circumstances, like increased uncertainty, is contingent on an executives personal relations with political principals, and that executives can whither a storm if a stronger mutual relation has been developed. Hypothessis: The increase in executives’ turnover likelihood caused by economic and political uncertainty is moderated by the personal relationship between politicians and executives such that the effect is weaker when stronger relations exist. The paper presents an empirical analysis of turnover of chief administrative officers (CAOs) in Danish municipalities with panel data ranging from 1980 until today, including turnover, and indicators of economic and political uncertainty. We employ different measures (co-tenure, demographic similarity) to assess the importance of personal relations between the CAO and the mayor as suggested in the hypothesis. As the same municipality has several executives and mayors across time, we are able to employ municipality level fixed effects. The paper contributes to existing knowledge by deepening our understanding of how executive succession in public organizations should be understood as a combination of context and interpersonal influences.

ABSTRACT. A large literature on the private sector suggests top managers appointed from within the organization they lead differ to those brought in from outside, and that these differences can affect the performance of the organization. Insiders bring knowledge of the organizational context, culture, practices and processes as well as connections with key stakeholders, all of which promote stability and reduce risk and uncertainty. Outsiders bring a fresh perspective, a potentially different leadership style, and experience, knowledge and skills from other settings, all of which can boost performance. Reforms to the public sector over three decades have sought to encourage greater inflow of leaders from a diverse range of settings, especially the private sector. In the public sector, organizations typically have multiple and often ambiguous goals. We therefore extend the theoretical argument about performance consequences to cover which dimensions insiders are more likely to improve, and which ones outsiders. We test these hypotheses about the different consequences of insider/outsider chief executive (agency head) appointments in the context of British Central Government Executive Agencies, using a panel dataset from 1989-2012. These agencies are given public performance targets by government ministers, against which performance is assessed annually. Many also cover services of great interest to the public, such as driver’s licensing and passport issuance. We test how their performance profile changes as a response to a transition in chief executive. This includes multiple operationalizations of performance: (i) achievement against performance targets as a rate; (ii) achievement against salient subsets of these targets; and (iii) media coverage of the agency. Our findings suggest that chief executives who are hired from outside the agency and the civil service (either in the greater public or in the private sector) perform better with regards to the overall target achievement rate than agency insiders in the year after succession, suggesting a temporary boost in performance as a result of a change from an insider to an outsider.

ABSTRACT. The U.S. president and his allies have decried the presence of a “deep state” of resistance to the president’s agenda. The public reporting on the administration, however, suggests that some of the bureaucratic resistance to the president may be coming from the president’s own political appointees rather than the permanent civil service. This raises the general question of when appointees do what the president wants and when they resist presidential direction. In this paper I use data from surveys of U.S. federal executives across two presidencies and hundreds of agencies to evaluate appointee responsiveness to the president. The results indicate that the choices of the president and long-standing features of agency design and culture predict appointee responsiveness to the president. I conclude with implications for electoral politics and presidential management.

ABSTRACT. Public management scholars and economists has long argued that people who are more risk-averse are more likely to choose to work in government. This is because public sector jobs are supposed to have a high job security and stability, making them attractive to risk-averse individuals. However, this argument has rarely been tested experimentally, and even less attempts have been directed at exploring whether risk-averse people always prefer public sector jobs. Is it possible that, under certain conditions, these people would be less likely to choose to work in government?

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, we seek to advance the literature by experimentally testing whether a higher level of risk-aversion increases individuals’ intention to apply for public sector jobs. Drawing on regulatory-focus theory in social psychology, we experimentally manipulate individuals’ risk-aversion using a novel experimental design. Specifically, prior to their exposure to a “job application” scenario, subjects in the treatment group will be asked to complete an ostensibly separate and unrelated task which has been shown to be effective in temporarily making individuals more vigilant and risk-averse. Subjects in the control group will complete a placebo task. Then, all subjects will be presented with a set of conjoint tables with two job profiles and randomly assigned job-related characteristics, and asked to indicate their job preferences.

Second, we seek to contribute theoretically by exploring the conditions under which risk-averse individuals may be less attracted to public sector jobs. In particular, we assume that the sector cues (public vs. private) are imperfect signals for people to infer job-related characteristics of a particular job (like health-care benefits), helping them to judge whether that job “fits” with themselves. However, when the actual information about job-related characteristics becomes available, people will rely less on sector cues to make their decision. We hypothesize that risk-averse individuals are attracted to public sector jobs due to the imperfect signals carried by the “public” cues. Yet, when the actual information about public sector job characteristics becomes available, and if some of these characteristics “unfit” with the regulatory focus of risk-averse individuals, these people would be less likely to choose to work in government.

The experiment will be implemented in late 2018. It involves a between subject design (risk-aversion: aroused vs not aroused) with repeated measures (multiple conjoint tasks). Students will be recruited in the field to conduct a lab-in-field study.

ABSTRACT. Government is facing an ecological system for social services where nonprofit and for-profit service providers are competing, while sector boundaries between the nonprofit and for-profit sector in the social service area are increasingly blurry. However, tax policies, research on the nonprofit sector, as well as education and training programs for nonprofit management are still established upon the uniqueness of “nonprofitness”. As such, whether, and the way in which, nonprofit service providers are distinct from their for-profit competitors remains an important question for scholars, service providers, and policymakers.

Early evidence suggests that nonprofit organizations behave and perform differently from their for-profit counterparts. However, “nonprofitness” not only diverse organizational behaviors of providers in the social service market; it also evokes ideological reactions and public perceptions that determine the social service provider’s success in an ecological system in which nonprofits, for-profits, and public agencies compete. However, research on the way the public perceives the difference between competing sectors in the social service market is limited. In this study, we theorize a psychological mechanism—stereotyping, through which people renders different understandings of nonprofit and for-profit service providers to answer the research question: How are nonprofit service providers perceived differently from their for-profit counterparts?

The study utilizes a stereotype content model (SCM) to operationalize people’s perception of nonprofit and for-profit organizations as warmth and competence; and, we conducted two online survey experiments which manipulated both the sector information and the collective judgment information of a social enterprise in two service areas to examine proposed hypotheses. Different from previous empirical findings, two studies both suggested that nonprofit organizations were perceived as warmer and more competent than their for-profit counterparts. More importantly, by adding a baseline group in the design, we observed an asymmetrical effect of the sector information: people perceived the for-profit organization significantly less warm and competent than the baseline organization, but they perceived the nonprofit organization and the baseline organization in no significantly different way. In addition, studies found no moderating effect of collective judgment on the effect of the sector information. Evidence from this study suggests: 1) people perceive nonprofit and for-profit organizations through the sector stereotype; 2) the sector stereotype results from people’s repugnance against profit seeking intention in social service market; 3) the difference between our findings and previous findings suggest that people’s understanding of “nonprofitness” is context-based.

ABSTRACT. Work motivation in the public and non-public sector: Economic theory faces itself

Laura Langbein
Fei Wang
School of Public Affairs
Dept. Public Administration and Policy American University

Abstract

Theories of labor in the private market regard wages as a measure of the marginal revenue product of an employee; in traditional theories, the primary determinants of wages are education and experience (Mincer, 1974). By contrast, the study of public employment but rarely examines wages, experience or education. Rather, the theory of public labor recognizes important contextual factors, such as the inability to monetize output, the lack of a profit-motive for the supplier, and intrinsic, value-based aspects of public employment for the employee, if not also the employer (Greenwood, 2016; Bysted and Hansen, 2013), it tends to ignore both wages and the role of alternative work in the private sector as a substitute. In short, the public frame tends to ignore money and substitutes, while the private frame ignores non-monetary factors, including public substitutes. This manuscript examines wages of nurses. While primarily employed in the private sector, nurses also have substantial representation in both the public and non-profit sector. It tests whether experience and education are the primary determinants of wages in the private (and other) sectors; it also tests whether fuller models of wage determination in the private, public, and non-profit sector are both more descriptive of each sector, and independent. If they are independent, the implication is that studies of wage determination (at least for nurses) in the public (or non-profit) sector can safely ignore wages in the private sector. The findings, limited to nurses, suggest that, in all sectors, experience and education contribute little (or nothing) to wage determination. Other factors, including other demographics, nursing specialty, and geographic location matter too. Wage determination is different in each sector. The findings also suggest that wage determination is each sector is not independent of wage determination in other sectors.

ABSTRACT. At the core of public management are questions about whether and how public and private sector organizations differ from each other (Bozeman 2004; Rainey et al. 1976). An important part of this interest are effects of sector on those working for these organizations (Behn 1995; Brewer and Brewer 2011). Do workers perceive public and private organizations as different in characteristics, including their goals, than otherwise similar private organizations and what are the consequences? We take as a starting point the issue of whether ownership cues that convey information about the organizations’ ownership status affect people’s perception of organizations and the way they work for them. We focus on an area of caring services (nursing care for elderly) where workers might reasonably be expected to have an interest in producing the service (Francois 2007). We focus on an important part of this issue: Do people work harder in the sense of more conscientiously if they work for a publicly owned government organization rather than a private organization providing the same service? One of the crucial differentiations between public organizations and private firms is that private organizations distribute profits to shareholders (Weisbrod 1988). Thus, worker’s efforts may be perceived as expropriated. Public organizations, in contrast, are subject to a non-distribution constraint; they serve the public good. On this basis, we expect variation in peoples’ perceptions about public and private organizations to affect the extent to which they contribute to them. In this sense people will be more likely to work more conscientiously if they work for a public organization because they are working for the public good rather than private profit which will be reallocated to shareholders. The non-distribution constraint of public and private not-for-profit organizations leads workers to believe that their work will be used for the service because any surplus ought to be reallocated. In this sense, we argue that public versus private ownership status serves as an imperfect signal of the organization’s perceived pro-sociality. To test our theoretical prediction, we designed an online field experiment which has been implemented in October 2018. Participants have performed a realistic work accuracy task. The task involves transcribing hand written time sheets of a hypothetical nursing home and checking their accuracy. Participants were randomly presented with information cues signaling the ownership status of the nursing. Systematic differences in work accuracy between experimental conditions will be used as evidence of public private differences.

ABSTRACT. Although the impacts of red tape have been well studied, the link between red tape and the perceived legitimacy of rules and procedures has not been explicitly tested yet. The present research was set out to fill this gap. In two experimental studies, we manipulated red tape by rule burden and examined its impact on the perceived legitimacy of rules and procedures. The results showed that the perceived legitimacy of both government and corporate rules and procedures decreased with increasing red tape perceptions; however, we find no effects of rule burden on the perceived legitimacy. These experimental findings provide an initial evidence for the link between red tape and the perceived legitimacy of rules and procedures. Moreover, they indicate the distinct roles of rule burden and red tape—although rule burden has been theoretically assumed and empirically verified as the main driver of red tape perceptions, the impacts of red tape do not necessarily result from rule burden. Besides, the present research also examines two additional factors that might influence the perceived legitimacy of rules and procedures, namely outcome favorability and outcome dependence. The former is about individual perceptions of the outcomes of rules and procedures being positive or negative, and the latter is about to what extent individuals depending on the outcomes of rules and procedures. The results from the two studies verified the effects of outcome favorability on the perceived legitimacy, revealing that the legitimacy of organizational rules and procedures was perceived higher when the outcomes were positive than when they were negative. No evidence is found for the effects of outcome dependence on the perceived legitimacy of rules and procedures. The present research might contribute to the literature in several aspects. First, by demonstrating the link between red tape and the perceived legitimacy of rules and procedures, it advances our knowledge of the impacts of red tape. Secondly, it sheds a new light on the relations between rule burden and red tape as their distinctive roles were revealed. Thirdly, it illustrates the important role of outcome favorability in influencing the perceptions of rules and procedures. Lastly, it responds to the recent calls for replication of experimental studies in public administration by verifying the previously revealed effects of rule burden and outcome favorability on red tape perceptions.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the relationship between red tape and work motivation. Despite the abundance of literature examining the individual and organizational factors that affect work motivation in the public sector, the impact of red tape on work motivation has not been explicitly tested. Using the National Administration Studies Project-III survey data of public managers in the states of Georgia and Illinois, the author investigates whether perceptions of red tape impact three aspects of work motivation: job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. A generalized ordered logit model with a variety of dependent variables showed consistent support for the link between perceptions of red tape and work motivation. Public managers who reported higher levels of red tape were less likely to be involved, satisfied, and committed to their job. The results also underscore the significant influence of public service motivation (PSM) and the availability of alternative job offers on work motivation. While placing a high importance on the ability to serve the public and the public interest increased public manager’s motivation, placing a similar importance on having alternative job offers lowered their motivation.

These results add to the rich body of evidence showing the determinantal consequences of red tape. A better understanding of these consequences accentuates the need to reduce the multitude of rules and regulations public managers face. Ameliorating red tape can improve employees’ work motivation and, in turn, enhance other related areas of concern in the public sector such as productivity and efficiency. The results also identity an opportunity for public organizations to create an environment that reduces employees’ frustration and fosters their sense of involvement, satisfaction, and commitment. Such implications underscore the importance of this research.

ABSTRACT. Public officials often see public participation as burdensome. In this paper we study how job-centered red tape perceptions affect public officials’ attitudes toward public participation.

There is increasing evidence that public officials´ participatory attitudes are affected by the perceived burdensomeness and lack of effectiveness of rules surrounding public participation (Ianniello, Iacuzzi, Fedele, & Brusati, 2018; Liao & Schachter, 2018; Yang & Pandey, 2011). Previous studies argued that red tape increases participation-related procedural costs (Moynihan, 2003), induce risk avoiding behavior among public officials (Liao & Schachter, 2018; Yang & Pandey, 2011), and threaten officials’ sense of security (Feeney, 2012; Liao & Schachter, 2018). In sum, these studies demonstrate that red tape has negative effects on participatory outcomes and administrators’ attitudes toward participation (Liao & Schachter, 2018; Yang & Pandey, 2011).

Building on this research, we look at how different dimensions of job-centered red tape influence public officials’ attitudes toward public participation. More specifically, we examine how perceptions of rules’ compliance burdens and lack of effectiveness influence public officials’ attitudes on the added value of participation to the administrative decision-making process (van Loon, Leisink, Knies, & Brewer, 2016). Whereas rules’ burdensomeness negatively affects public officials’ willingness to participate with the public, a perceived lack of effectiveness could indicate that officials are of the opinion that public participation has no positive effect on policy making at all.

This paper provides several innovations. First, we provide a more complete examination of red tape perceptions by going beyond the previously used one-dimensional conceptualization of generalized red tape (Feeney, 2012; Pandey & Scott, 2002; van Loon et al., 2016). Second, we do so by examining red tape in a European public administration context (whereas other studies focus on the US). And third, we distinguish between the effects of different red tape dimensions on public officials’ attitudes toward participation, as rules’ burdensomeness and lack of effectiveness affect public officials’ attitudes and behaviors differently.

Data are gathered among a large group of European municipal public officials. The statistical analyses incorporate latent variables and are conducted using structural equation modeling (SEM) (Hoyle, 2012). In addition to the effects of job-centered red tape perceptions on public officials’ attitudes toward public participation (e.g.: several statements on the beneficial and detrimental effects of public participation on the decision-making process), we look at the effects of officials’, previous public sector employment, perceptions of citizens’ competences, participatory experience, and hierarchical position as covariates.

ABSTRACT. Early works in organization theory characterized goal achievement as a vital function of organizations and “the defining characteristic of an organization which distinguishes it from other types of social systems” (Parsons, 1956, p. 64). This emphasis on the importance of goal achievement to organizations has remained since then, especially among rational system theorists (Scott & Davis, 2015). Organizations are often described as “goal-directed, purposive entities” (Rainey, 2014, p. 147), “social entities that are goal-directed” (Daft, 2015, p. 13), “social structures created by individuals to support the pursuit of goals” (Scott & Davis, 2015, p. 11), and so on. As a result, goal achievement has become a major approach to defining and assessing organizational effectiveness by both academics and practitioners (Daft, 2015; Herman & Renz, 1997, 2008; Lecy et al., 2012; Mitchell, 2013; Rainey, 2014; Scott & Davis, 2015; Tschirhart & Bielefeld, 2012). This view has led management and organization scholars to study various aspects of goals and goal achievement, such as their functions, multiplicity, and social construction (Daft, 2015; Herman & Renz, 1997, 2008; Lecy et al., 2012; Mitchell, 2013; Rainey, 2014; Scott & Davis, 2015; Tschirhart & Bielefeld, 2012).

Nevertheless, an intriguing and yet underexplored aspect in this literature is the pursuit of common goals. It is an intriguing topic because this scenario poses an interesting tension. On the one hand, sharing a common goal should motivate organizations to work together to benefit from synergies; on the other hand, research on collaboration has revealed numerous drawbacks and costs of working together (Austin, 2000; Gazley, 2010). How goal sharers respond to such potential costs and benefits and structure the governance of their common-goal pursuit, however, remains unclear in the extant literature. This is an important gap given the accelerated and inevitable interdependence of organizations in this era of collaborative governance (Emerson et al., 2012), as collaboration becomes increasingly essential especially when it comes to combating cross-boundary, wicked problems (Kettl, 2006; Weber & Khademian, 2008). Moreover, considering the well-established belief in the strategy-structure-performance fit in the management literature (Chandler, 1962; Miles et al., 1978), a better understanding of governance structures for common-goal pursuit would also offer useful insights into explaining organizational strategies and performance.

This study aims to address the gap and contribute to management and organization theory by tackling two research questions. The first question concerns governance structures for common-goal pursuit. I review the governance literature to identify four generic governance structures for common-goal pursuit. This typology motivates the second question: Why do organizations adopt a particular structure? To address this question, I integrate two major theories of interorganizational relations, namely transaction cost economics and resource dependence theory, to construct a framework that explains why organizations may govern common-goal pursuit in a certain way. The proposed framework will be examined qualitatively and quantitatively in the context of North-South NGO relations. 

ABSTRACT. The nature of organizing has changed. Decentralization, a rise in market authority and the proliferation of diverse organizational forms characterize new institutional operating environments. These changes have prompted organizations across sectors to recognize their common enterprise and interact more. As a result, in today’s interconnected world, businesses are expected to adopt collective values in the pursuit of profit, and public and nonprofit organizations are urged to embrace economic individualism in pursuit of the common good. While supporters of sector cross-pollination often see it as a pragmatic way for organizations to thrive in the new economy; critics believe that such influences have eroded sector and organizational identity. Normative work on sector blurring has produced valuable insights into what values should shape sector identity. However, empirical research examining the values that actually shape sector identity is almost non-existent despite the strength and frequency of these themes in the literature. This research addresses that gap by examining issues of sector and organizational identity through the lens of Organizational Identity Orientation (OIO). Questions of identity orientation ask, “who are we as an organization vis-à-vis our stakeholders? Do we see ourselves as independent entities (individualistic), dyadically interdependent partners (relational) or as group members (collectivistic)? Employees in individualistic organizations view their organizations as “the best”, work hard to differentiate them from other similar organizations and are primarily motivated by self-interest. Conversely, relational and collectivistic organizations are thought to be other-orienting, primarily concerned with the welfare of particular others and collective goals, respectively. Employees might describe a relational organization as a “caring partner” and a collectivistic organization as “cause-driven.” Using data collected on Amazon’s Mturk platform from hundreds of employees across sectors, this research addresses the following questions in order to examine identity in the age of sector blurring: Do employee perceptions of identity orientation differ significantly across sectors? What factors help to explain these differences? Findings suggest that while member perceptions of OIO align with historical norms of collectivism in the public and nonprofit sectors and individualism in the for-profit sector, all orientations are reflected within each sector. Further, average views of individualism are closer across all sectors than are average views of collectivism, and in the case of nonprofit and for-profit members, not significantly different. Several factors such as client-type and industry help to explain these differences.

ABSTRACT. In the 21st century, community grant making organizations, such as United Ways (UWs) and independent community foundations (CFs), are at the forefront of many public policy innovations and are increasingly looked to as important funders of social initiatives (Daly, 2008; Graddy & Wang, 2009). Although UWs and CFs play important legacy roles in their local communities, global, national and local forces may be transforming the landscape of community philanthropy and forcing major organizational adaptations. As the 2005 report “On the Brink of New Promise” describes, “A combination of inescapable pressures, demographic changes, shifting expectation for regulation and accountability, the emergence of the commercial sector as an innovator, and changing relationships between sectors—is leading community philanthropy to something new” (p. 14).

Thirteen years after the publication of this piece, some CFs are reasserting new roles as community leaders and change makers, abandoning their role as “philanthropic bankers” and adopting new language of catalyst, impact, and invetors. At the same time, the federated system of UWs has been on the road to Community Impact for almost two decades, through focused grant making and engagement that drives community change. Reflecting these system changes, in some communities, local UWs and CFs may be playing similar roles as grant makers and leaders; in other communities, their roles may be diverging.

In this paper, we draw upon concepts of organizational identity to describe changes in the identities of the full populations of local American UWs and CFs (Gioia, Patvardhan, Hamilton & Corley, 2013). Our analysis focuses on the similarities and differences in these shifts between organizations operating in the same market space and the drivers of those changes. Although organizational identities are often enduring and resistant to change, adopting new identities that are perceived as legitimate for stakeholders, may be an important adaptation strategies (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991; Gioa et al., 2013; Boin et al, 2016). Using mission statements we identify patterns of convergence and divergence between both institutions and seek to identify how organizations in these two dominant philanthropic fields are balancing environmental pressures to adapt with the need to cultivate an enduring organizational identity (Brilliant & Young, 2004).

ABSTRACT. Accountability is a core topic in the literature on public and nonprofit organizations (or NGOs) (Kearns 1996; Ebrahim 2003; Talbot 2007). Organizations in both sectors typically confront multiple accountability demands, some of which may not be aligned and even conflict. In the nonprofit sector, for instance, organizations have to be accountable to government regulations as well as to their respective boards, donors, staff, members, and a variety of other potential stakeholder groups. At the same time, organizational websites have become a common, legitimate tool for expressing mission and identity (Powell et al 2016). Organizations in all sectors utilize websites to engage the communities, clients and customers they serve, and websites also provide some transparency about the activities these organizations undertake. Websites can even become public forums for accountability, a clear point of reference for organizations to demonstrate – to anyone interested – how they are contributing to the public good. Though not all organizations utilize their websites for the purpose of accountability, and some organizations undoubtedly are better than others at balancing diverse accountability demands, a critical first step is to have a website.

In this study, we explore which foundations in the state of Washington had websites as of 2016, and we develop hypotheses about what drives the use of this tool. Private foundations are a unique type or classification of nonprofit, they are established with a substantial gift and their primary purpose is to provide grants to charitable organizations. Other than basic disclosure requirements that obligate these philanthropic institutions to abide by legal regulations, they are accountable only to their benefactors. Given that foundations are grantmaking organizations, a lack of capacity (i.e. resources) is not likely to prevent them from creating websites. Moreover, foundations are required to distribute five percent of their net investment revenue each year, and websites would be useful for clarifying funding priorities, yet we find that just 383/1751 foundations (22%) have websites. We argue that many foundations prefer to maintain a “low profile” and seek out potential grantees rather than inviting proposals. We expect foundations with more extensive ties to civil society, with higher levels of professionalization, and with social change missions to be more likely to have websites, and we anticipate that the environmental context in which foundations are embedded will shape the likelihood of having a website.

ABSTRACT. There has been a growing interest in the phenomenon of status hierarchies in organisations and their implications for decision making (George et al., 2016; Sauder et al., 2012). Graffin et al. (2013; p. 314) note how “status hierarchies that rank social actors on valued attributes are ubiquitous in human society” and perpetuate inequality by channelling benefits to high status individuals or groups regardless of performance or skills (Washington and Zajac 2005). Although status hierarchies remain highly resilient to change (Bothner et al., 2012), recently there have been growing attempts to challenge this “somewhat static” (George et al. 2016; p. 9) account of status hierarchies and explore the dynamics of change as well as stability (Delmestri & Greenwood, 2016). Specifically, change may be triggered by exogenous events at the field level (Sauder et al., 2012), that question the legitimacy and perceived utility of status hierarchies (Magee & Galinsky, 2008).

In the paper, we focus on how the emergence of alternative beliefs (or logics) linked to changing regulation can trigger a process of adaptation. We utilise two related concepts from institutional theory: the notion of ‘institutional complexity’ (Pache & Santos, 2010, 2013); and the importance of field position (Greenwood, Raynard, Kodeih, Micelotta, & Lounsbury, 2011). As an empirical case, we concentrate on coercive regulatory changes in the English National Health Service (NHS) and their impact on professional status hierarchies within hospitals. Since the early 1990s, as part of a wider reform process linked to the new public management (NPM), governments in the UK (and elsewhere) have increasingly sought to challenge the collegial hierarchy of physicians in which seniority is linked to the possession of status credentials (Verbeeten & Speklé, 2015). The reforms called for professionals (including physicians) to participate more fully in management through the development of new hybrid roles such as clinical directors at the middle tier, and medical directors who sit on boards.

The preliminary results of our analysis based on fuzzy set/QCA demonstrate the continued influence of externally derived professional status criteria for access to the highest-ranking professional manager roles in public hospitals. However, they also reveal that in situations where hospitals have achieved greater formal autonomy, newer organisational criteria (emphasising management competency) have been influential. These findings lead us to propose a model for understanding how, under certain organisational conditions, coercive regulation may trigger a form of defensive adaptation of status hierarchies.

ABSTRACT. With the increasing popularity of information disclosure policies, it is imperative to understand their implications for governance. Of special importance are their impacts on traditional regulations. Do regulatory behaviors in traditional regulations respond to information disclosure policies? This paper attempts to answer the question by examining environmental protection agencies’ response to Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).

TRI requires firms to disclose information about their toxic emissions. Instead of directly mandating emission reduction, it uses information to empower regulators, communities, media, NGOs, and private sector to press polluters to improve their environmental performance. Extant literature has extensively examined how stock market (Hamilton, 1995; Khanna, Quimio, & Bojilova, 1998; Konar & Cohen, 1997), housing market (Linda & Mayer, 2003; Mastromonaco, 2015; Oberholzer-Gee & Mitsunari, 2006), and media (Hamilton, 1995; Saha & Mohr, 2013) respond to TRI. Regulators claim to be important users of TRI information. EPA states that information disclosed in TRI is being used to facilitate effective emergency planning, to improve enforcement of other environmental regulations, and to provide basis for further rulemaking. While anecdotes abound, systematic research on regulatory response is lacking.

This paper will examine whether or not enforcement actions in Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act respond to TRI with a panel dataset of enforcement actions. I exploit the difference in the facility coverage of TRI and other environmental regulations with a difference-in-difference approach to examine whether or not being in TRI affects the number of inspections conducted on a facility. Preliminary analysis shows that the number of enforcement actions increase for facilities in TRI. However, the response is heterogeneous; it is more intense if a facility is located in a community that is richer and with larger share of White population.

This paper will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of the effects of information disclosure policies. It will also shed light on how information disclosure polices interact with traditional regulations and its implications for environmental governance.

ABSTRACT. Investigating the impact of front-line staff and management on performance in public organizations has been a long-standing challenge for public management scholars. Recent research, often using large N datasets, has assessed management’s impact on performance, especially outcomes related to educational achievement and public safety. These findings affirm the importance of management but also leave space open for studies that systematically address the relationships among goal clarity, technical complexity, political context, and performance. This project continues the process of developing ‘theory of context’ by extending public management scholarship to natural resource management (NRM). As a policy area, NRM presents a set of contextually driven managerial challenges that have yet to be examined by scholars. Within NRM, managers face a charged political environment, which demands disparate outcomes related economic development, resource extraction, private property rights, and public health/safety. Additionally, NRM inspectors operate in a networked environment in which their decisions are impacted and shaped by other stakeholders. If an inspector decides, for example, to issue a ‘notice of violation’ or ‘administrative order’ it is reviewed by the regulated entity and overseen (and potentially overturned) by regional and centralized state offices. Finally, NRM managers operate in a highly technical environment that has undergone significant innovation in recent years.

To investigate management’s impact on performance, we turn to a novel dataset that includes 750,000 oil and gas site inspections, the type of well, its exact location, the inspector, as well as violations as recorded by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) from 2000-2017. Utilizing a series of interactive and multi-level statistical models, we ask how inspectors behave in light of: (1) Competing and often ambiguous goals i.e. to encourage efficient extraction AND protect health and environment, (2) Technological innovation i.e. the advent and proliferation of new hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques, (3) Changes in years of experience and compensation among inspectors.

By focusing on NRM during a period of change, this study can shed light on how public management processes and outcomes have evolved over time. It also provides an opportunity to systemically model the impacts of a wide range of theoretical factors related to goal clarity, network environment, and political context that may explain performance as it relates to NRM.

ABSTRACT. We live in an increasingly divided society. In particular, tensions between rural and urban communities and racial tensions have been high. What implications do these tensions have for civic engagement and community strength? Evidence suggests that race is an important determinant of individual volunteering behavior, with many studies finding that racial minorities are less likely to volunteer than whites (Boraas 2003; Foster-Bey, 2008; Musick & Wilson, 2008, Musick, Wilson & Bynum 2000). Although race and socio-demographic correlates of race appear to be important determinants of volunteering, we know less about how the racial make-up of one’s community affects an individual’s volunteering behavior or how that effect might differ depending on an individual’s race. Although racial diversity is beneficial for the overall health of society, Putnam (2007) finds that levels of social capital tend to be lower in diverse communities. There are three possible explanations for this. First, people who are similar to each other interact more often than people who are dissimilar (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). Second, conflicts over resources lead majority group members to feel threatened and cause people to pull away from their neighbors (Putnam, 2007). Third, in diverse communities, individuals are less likely to share values and norms, making it harder to agree upon, much less act cooperatively toward, collective priorities (Coffe and Geys 2006). Community diversity can potentially suppress or alter volunteering behaviors but these effects may differ across rural and urban places. The main research question for this project is how community-level racial diversity affects volunteering decisions and whether community-level diversity has a different effect on volunteer in in rural communities compared to non-rural communities. We test these questions using the Current Population Survey (CPS) volunteering supplement (2002-2015). The CPS data include individual measures of volunteer activity and respondent demographic characteristics. Using the geographic identifier code (fips) we match a variety of county characteristics from several external data sources (including Decennial Census Data) to each individual record. This enables us to control for levels of county racial diversity. We use a multi-level modeling approach with individuals nested within counties. This manuscript offers several main contributions. First, we tease out how racial diversity affects rural and non-rural communities differently, particularly in terms of one measure of civic engagement, namely volunteering. As noted earlier, as the US becomes more diverse, understanding how diversity shapes civic life is an important question for community leaders and policy makers.

ABSTRACT. Managing workplace and leadership diversity has become increasingly important and complex in organizations. In addition to the changing demographics, organizations are driven to increase and manage diversity in the workplace by four major forces, including legal compliance, legitimization and representation, the pursuit of effectiveness and creativity, and conformity towards cultural integration (Selden & Selden 2001; Thomas 1996). However, while most charities and many local governments rely on volunteers (Hager & Brudney 2004; Nesbit & Brudney 2013b), little attention has been paid towards managing volunteer diversity. The demographic change coupled with the incremental decline in volunteering rates in the U.S. (McKeever 2015) presents two inter-related challenges. First, racial/ethnic minorities are likely to take up a large proportion of the volunteer population in the next few decades (Nesbit & Brudney 2013a). Second, managers are under-prepared for recruiting and retaining diverse volunteers such as racial/ethnic minorities and the younger generations (Nesbit & Brudney 2013a). Therefore, in this article, we examine (1) whether female, racial/ethnic minority, and younger generation volunteers tend to have higher turnover rates, and more importantly (2) the effect of nature and nurture on the turnover results of diverse volunteers. We use 2013-2017 longitudinal administrative data from a large nonprofit organization serving 26 Indiana counties, matched with county-level demographic data from the American Community Survey (2013-2017). The county-level racial/ethnicity diversity ranges, for example, in 2016 alone, from 62% white in Marion County to 97% white in Rush County. The administrative dataset contains gender, race/ethnicity, and age information on approximately six to seven thousand active volunteers each year (total N = 35,330), and reports human resource management (HRM) practices including training and recognition. We use survival analysis to show turnover patterns among the “minority” volunteers in the organization. On the effect of nature, we examine whether the turnover rates were higher among diverse volunteers serving the more homogenous counties. On the effect of nurture, we examine whether the HRM practices of training and recognition mitigated or exacerbated the retention challenge. Our preliminary results show that both practices only had direct effects on the male and white volunteers respectively. The article extends the diversity management literature to volunteerism and highlights the importance of effective HRM practices with deeper understandings of diverse volunteers. We conclude by discussing volunteer retention challenges and opportunities for organizations in less diverse areas.

ABSTRACT. There is much debate around the world about whether gender diversity in boards of directors makes a difference for the performance of organizations. The general assumption is that gender diversity can increase organizational performance through the pooling of complementary resources, such as knowledge, skills, and leadership styles, and correcting informational biases in strategy formulation and problem solving (Deszö & Ross 2012). Empirical evidence however is not only mixed, but also scarce, especially for public organizations (Opstrup & Villadsen 2015). It remains unclear whether women indeed bring different resources to a board or management team, and if so, what consequences these differences have for organizational performance. In this paper, we examine the effect of board gender diversity on the performance of public organizations, focusing on one key type of resource that is both likely to differ between male and female board members, and to have an effect on organizational performance: their professional networks.

Although much evidence exists supporting the claim that external networking as a management activity pays dividends to organizational performance (Meier & O’Toole 2003; Hansen & Villadsen 2017), very little attention has been paid to gender differences in networks. Recent evidence in this regard seems to indicate that female managers tend to engage less in external networking behavior (Rho & Lee 2018). They however tend to have more diverse networks, which more often include contacts obtained from various business and non-business backgrounds, and give access to a diversity of perspectives and skills (Terjesen et al. 2015).

We test these mediation effects of the volume and heterogeneity of networks using data of 339 supervisory boards of Dutch secondary schools, consisting in total of 1,550 members. Supervisory boards in Dutch secondary education are internal accountability bodies that can be seen as counterparts of boards of directors in private sector organizations. We argue that board members’ employment records are associated with their professional network and their access to resources that can be used in the execution of board tasks. Data on the employment records of board members was obtained through hand-coding of Linked-in profiles and online resumes. These data are combined with school performance data on the quality of education (exam scores and pass rates) and financial stability.

ABSTRACT. The recent explosion of interest in the potential of user and community co-production to improve public services and outcomes has generated many qualitative studies from around the world on how co-production can mobilise citizen resources to achieve public purposes. However, this paper provides detailed quantitative evidence from Germany on the level and drivers of co-production. It draws on the results of a large-scale representative citizen survey in Germany, which focussed on the contribution of civic society to improving the wellbeing of both older people and younger people. The quantitative research followed qualitative focus group research, which informed the development of the methodology and, in particular, the survey questionnaire. The authors develop an innovative conceptual framework which hypothesises how citizen voice and citizen action operate in practice, categorizing the range of citizen contributions to local public services and to the quality-of-life outcomes experienced by other citizens. Current citizen contributions were explored, together with the willingness of respondents to undertake further such actions in the future. A finer level of detail of co-production was achieved by asking questions separately on citizens’ activities in co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment with their local authorities. In order to compare how co-production works in different contexts, the survey explored in detail the contributions of citizens to the quality of life both of older people (65+) and of younger people. The survey recorded respondents’ socio-economic characteristics, along with their responses to a range of attitudinal and contextual factors, derived from the literature and from previous empirical work by the authors, including satisfaction with both the performance of current public services and the ways in which they were involved by those public services, their level of trust in the public sector and in other people and also their sense of self-efficacy. We use multivariate regressions to examine the key drivers of different forms of co-production and their interrelationships. Quantitative findings are informed by focus group insights on possible reasons for the more unexpected study findings. The study probed the mediating variable ‘self-efficacy’ more deeply than previous research, using several different measures, as previous research had suggested it was particularly strongly associated with co-production activities. The paper therefore provides a uniquely in-depth analysis of how co-production differs in its levels and drivers, across a full range of co-production dimensions and in two very contrasting contexts. Finally, our study draws out some of the policy lessons emerging from the findings.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines citizen participation in the context of privatized health and human services, exploring inter-relationships among motives for involving citizens, citizen engagement efforts and challenges, and use of citizen input. Recently, there has been renewed scholarly interest in citizen participation with related research appearing in the field’s top-ranked academic journals (e.g., Bryson, Quick Slotterback, & Crosby, 2013; Clark, 2018; LeRoux, 2009; Nabatchi, 2012; Smith, 2010) and featured at leading national conferences, including PMRC. These studies typically investigate citizen engagement with services delivered directly by public agencies and have focused on a variety of different issues including the forms of citizen participation, motives for seeking citizen input, and engagement challenges. To date, not enough attention has been paid to inter-relationships among these factors and if they influence whether organizations actually use citizen feedback, particularly when services are contracted out. To address these gaps, our mixed-methods paper describes how public organizations and their contractors engage citizens and examines whether organizational commitment to citizen participation is related to the extent to which organizations seek citizen input and use citizens’ feedback in decision-making. This study is based on 93 semi-structured interviews with public managers and managers of nonprofit and for-profit organizations implementing county government contracts in six counties across four states in the Northeastern region of the United States. The sample included major metropolitan areas, small cities, as well as rural communities. We first coded the interview data thematically using NVivo 10 and then subsequently converted it to a quantitative data set for further analysis. Most organizations we studied engaged citizens in some way although they tended to rely on conventional forms of participation, such as client engagement, advisory boards and public hearings. The extent and depth of participation varied. Managers who reported a greater number of motives for engaging citizens and were more committed to participation also offered more diverse opportunities for citizens to provide feedback and used this input in more ways. At the same time, organizations that were more active in engaging citizens through various strategies and using the feedback they received in more diverse ways also faced more challenges. These findings suggest that even though engaging citizens is inherently challenging, this doesn’t dissuade managers who are committed to engagement from pursuing it. Taken together, this study contributes to public management research by highlighting the complex dynamics of citizen participation.

ABSTRACT. Citizen participation in public budgeting has been widely advocated by academicians and public managers alike. Although public involvement in the budget process has become increasingly popular around the globe, empirical analyses of whether and how citizen input actually affects budgetary outcomes are still limited. The present study takes on this challenge by examining whether citizen involvement in the budget process enhances efficiency and equity of public resource allocation. Specifically, we test if greater citizen involvement affects the size of total budget and distribution of funds among types of public programs.

In theory, citizen participation in budgeting serves two main goals. First, it improves the information flow between policy makers and citizens, and thus allows for a better match between public preferences and allocation of scarce resources. Second, it opens the technocratic budgetary process, and thus makes public officials more accountable to the public and limits their opportunities for rent-seeking. In a sense, citizen involvement should make public budgeting more efficient, responsive, and equitable in terms of distribution of cost and benefits among social groups. Drawing on the above theoretical considerations, we formulate two hypotheses. First, we expect that greater public involvement in the budgetary process will be associated with a larger budget size, operationalized as the ratio of government expenditures out of the country’s GDP. Second, following Peterson’s (1981) classification of government programs into developmental, redistributive, and allocational, we hypothesize that when the budget process is more open to public comment, the governments will spend more on redistributive programs than on developmental and allocational programs.

To empirically test these propositions, we use panel data from 100 countries between 2012 and 2016. We operationalize citizen participation in budgeting using the newly created Public Engagement Index from the International Budget Partnership (IBP). The index offers a consistent cross-country measure of citizen involvement in public budgeting. The models control for the political, fiscal, economic, and cultural context in each country. The data come from various sources, including the World Bank, IMF, and OECD. In order to deal with the econometric issue of endogeneity between citizen participation and budgetary outcomes, we employ both panel instrumental variable estimation and dynamic panel model estimation.

Our findings make three main contributions. First, they broaden our understanding on the determinants of budget size and resource allocation. Second, the results demonstrate that citizen input matters in setting budgetary priorities across a wide array of countries. Third, the study offers evidence on how engaging citizens in budgeting leads to a more equitable distribution of resources among social groups and enhances fiscal accountability of governments.

ABSTRACT. The rational decision model regarding citizen participation usually makes an unrealistic assumption, that bureaucrats can objectively assess the level of participation in existence and/or required (e.g., Thomas, 1990). Anecdote evidence suggests that bureaucrats tend to overstate the participation opportunities government offers to citizens. So far, however, there has not been any systematic evidence about the perception variation between bureaucrats and citizens regarding the level of participatory governance, and little efforts has been made to explain such variation. Two related issues are: given the same “objective” reality of a city’s participatory governance, why do bureaucrats have different perceptions? Why do citizens have different perceptions?

This study aims to address the three questions. Data were collected from both bureaucrats and citizens in 123 Chinese cities via surveys. Additional data about city demographics were collected from Chinese Census Bureau, other organizations, and data mining. To answer the first question about the difference between bureaucrats and citizens, we aggregate individual level data into city level data, taking the difference of the average scores between the two groups as the dependent variable. We hypothesize that the distance between bureaucrats and citizens, both physical, organizational, and cognitive, shapes the perceptual variation. These “distances” are operationalized by city level variables such as a city’s size, location (distance from Beijing), level of decentralization, budget transparency, and social media use. To answer the questions regarding within-bureaucrat variation and within-citizen variation, we use hierarchical linear modelling, putting the same city level variables at the second level. For the first level, we follow the similar “distance” logic and include variables such as hierarchical level, cognitive participation (traditional media and social media), paternalistic cultural identity, trust, and minority status. In theorizing about the results, we want to go back to the classic concern about size and democracy, or how to practice democracy in a large and modern jurisdiction. A traditional argument is that the smaller the jurisdiction the better for democracy. In a modern ear, we argue that it is not only about physical interaction and distance, but also about distance on the Internet and social media, as well as organizational, cognitive, and cultural distances.

ABSTRACT. In the U.S., federal, state, and local/county levels of public health agencies aim to fulfill society’s interest in population health. Every day, approximately 2,800 county-level local health departments (LHDs) work to ensure the safety of water and food, prevent people from getting sick, take actions on emergencies, and promote wellness by encouraging healthy behaviors. In recent years, LHDs are confronted by wicked social problems, expanded population health needs, rapid disease transmission, and diminished capacity. Meanwhile, public health agencies have been seeing soaring expenditures and rigid budget constraints since the 1960s. Given the changing environment, LHDs need to consider a variety of solutions including contracting out health services to private firms and nonprofit organizations in order to reduce costs and maintain responsibility. Some privatization theorists argue that the private sector can deliver public goods and services more efficiently and effectively than the public sector. Others contend that public health services should keep accountability and not be contracted out to the private sector. This study examines local health departments’ delivery of health services through contracting out and applies current public management theories to empirical practices. The following broad questions are asked by this study of local health departments’ practices of contracting out population health services: (1) Why would local health governments choose the alternative of contracting out as an appropriate means of public health service delivery? (2) What factors influence the make-or-buy decision? (3) What determinants count for the extent of contracting out in local health governments? This paper advances existing discussions with several contributions to the emerging literature. First, this study focuses on contracting out in LHDs. Among the prior research in regard with contracting out, the majority explore a variety of governmental functions. Few studies, however, concentrate on government’s public health functions. Second, this study covers all major functions of LHDs rather than only a single function of public health such as mental health and public health lab. Third, this study employs national data. Some studies use data in a single state or several states. This study explores factors for contracting out with national samples, making the conclusion more persuasive. This study uses data from 2016 National Profile of Local Health Department Study and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) linear regression models to estimate in what extent the determinants influence the make-or-buy decisions in LHDs.

ABSTRACT. Government organizations have struggled to reconcile democratic values with an efficient and effective bureaucracy since the early years of the administrative state (Frederickson, 1996; Moore and Morris, 2009). A representative bureaucracy offers a solution where effective public service delivery can be achieved while reflecting the interests of diverse and historically underrepresented social groups in policy decisions (Riccucci et al, 2015). The theory of representative bureaucracy states that organizational actors that share characteristics with the constituents are more likely to respond to their interests through policies and implementation activities (Kingsley, 1944; Krislov, 1974; Frederickson et al, 2016). This study analyzes survey data to examine the extent that representativeness of local government decision-makers impacts local government contracting policies and implementation of these policies. Supplier diversity are government contracting policies aiming to enhance access, limit discrimination, correct historical injustices, and empower small disadvantaged business owners (McCrudden, 2004; Fernandez et al, 2007). In general, these policies target women, minority, veteran, and other small disadvantaged business owners (U.S. Small Business Administration, 2017). This study specifically examines policies impacting women and minority owned business enterprises. Findings aim to contribute to the existing contracting literature by demonstrating how social equity and inclusion can be integrated with existing public service delivery processes of public organizations. Furthermore, findings have implications for representative bureaucracy theory and for government contracting practice where efficiency often trumps equity.

ABSTRACT. Governments may rely on the same contractor to repeatedly provide goods and services. Contractor expertise relative to the public managers, lack of vendor market competition, and advantages embedded in repeated interaction contribute to the contractor dependence. A horizontal model of contractor relations as discussed in the relational contracting literature places knowledgeable contractors as a proactive actor who could shape public management practices. This study examines contractor influence over public management through the isomorphic effect demonstrated by contractor sharing. Using an innovative text analysis approach, we show that financial disclosures of two local governments converge as they contract with the same independent auditor and the convergence increases with contractor dependence as measured by auditor tenure. The study further analyzes implications of contractor dependence on goal tradeoff. While contractor dependence improves timeliness in service provision, it may give rise to vendor opportunism and compromise public accountability.

Slides: Contractor as an Isomorphic Force and Implications of Contractor Dependence

ABSTRACT. In recent years, research on government contracting has received considerable attention in the areas of public administration and management. Scholarly attention has focused on the types of contractual arrangements and their implications for public sector performance based on issues such as efficiency, quality of provision of contracted public services, and the like. In this study, we seek to understand the variability in contract lengths offered by U.S. federal agencies when public services are handled by a third-party entity. Specifically, we wish to evaluate whether less politically vulnerable agencies encourage "policy lock-in" consistent with (i.e., independent agency commitments). Or instead, the opposite occurs as longer contracts are associated with the supply of policy benefits from politicians to core constituents and supporters, with the agency serving as the conduit (i.e., politicized agency commitments). We employ a novel database on approximately 17 million government contracting decision from 2001-2016 to evaluate these propositions using recent advances in survival/duration modeling that accounts for heterogeneous conditional relationships across time quantiles. Our aim for this project is to make contributions to the scholarly debate in two areas of public administration: (1) the politics-administration dichotomy along the lines of political accountability (Herman Finer) versus bureaucratic responsibility (Carl Friedrich); (2) yielding new insights on government contracting decisions that complements that can inform what we already know from research analyzing contracting amounts($) and the management and performance implications of contracting decisions. Specifically, our study can shed light on why some contracting decisions make costly, protracted commitments that impose a burden on governments while other decisions offer weak, short term commitments that governments can easily get out from under.

ABSTRACT. While management studies have recognized the political dimension of social action, the network management literature in general, and the scholarship that focuses on network leadership both have tended to downplay this dimension. Unexpectedly, in a previous project (Saz-Carranza and Ospina 2018) we find that successful network leadership practices are very “political” in nature. This is not consistent with the collective leadership premise that network leadership by its nature implies explicit and transparent communication and more participatory decision-making with members of the collective. We find that network leadership seems to also exploit goal incongruences in the network and the members, promote the bargaining of goals and side-payments, and leverage on the control for execution. In this paper we propose a research agenda based on a review of the literature about whether, when and why political behaviors are necessary and conducive to collaborative advantage. Previous work on leadership has generally mentioned power and political behavior in a negative light. Muller-Seitz’s (2012) review of network leadership does not mention power or politics. Emerson et al.’s (2014) framework of collaborative governance regimes refers to the political environment in which regimes operate, but omits political dynamics internal to the collaborative. The basic take-away on power in these readings is that a collaborative leader or broker can—at most—make use of its power advantage only to rebalance power differentials (Emerson et al. 2015; Imperial et al. 2016; Purdy 2012). Perhaps Huxham and Vangen’s (2005) work stands out in pointing towards the use of power and political dynamics to move the collaborative forward, what they call “collaborative thuggery.” They conclude that “legitimizing a degree of manipulative and political activity through the notion of collaborative thuggery can also be helpful in this respect [i.e. to empower collaborative managers] (p41).” The notion of political behavior in a network context is aligned with Cyert and March’s (1963) ground-breaking work on the firm-as-a-political-coalition. Yet there are also important differences given the nature of the network form. The surprising findings help us refine emerging theories of network leadership. A return to considering Cyert and March’s political approach seems to be more resonant with recent collective leadership research suggesting that collective leadership should be treated as an ambiguous leadership space (Chreim, 2015) that cannot be studied apart from the dynamics of hierarchy in complex environments.

ABSTRACT. Organizational networks formally organized to address wicked problems have become increasingly more important to the delivery of many public services (McGuire and Agranoff, 2011). The resolve in practice and in research is often to create seamless systems and strengthen communities through coordination among service providers. Achieving this seamless coordination among providers is no easy feat and takes time to develop. At the same time, networks are intentionally structured to be flexible structures, thus, organizational members’ participation ebbs and flows. With this fluidity of organizational networks, a common challenge in practice is keeping momentum going when participation is not constant.

One recommendation offered to balance this tension between stability and flexibility (Provan and Kenis, 2008) is a strong reliable core that allows for more fluctuating participation at the periphery (Provan and Lemaire, 2012). However, this reliance on a core can create vulnerability for the network as well because even organizations at the core of a network effort are subject to environmental influences that might impact the participation of the organization in the network over time. Thus, the research question driving this research is how do changing priorities of organizations key to a formal organizational network impact the structure of the network over time?

To address this research question, we draw on a longitudinal mixed method study of a child education and development network over time. First Steps is a formally organized network of public and non-profit providers working to improve child education and development in a rural community in southwest Virginia. To analyze the network over time, we draw on a baseline network analysis conducted in 2015 before the formal network initiative began and a follow-up network analysis currently being conducted. In addition to the network analyses, our study includes observations and interviews on the processes of the network’s development over time.

For this paper, we specifically examine how the structure of the network has changed over time and how leadership by key organizations shifts due to external influences as well as changes as a result of the network building efforts. We discuss implications for theory and practice on how networks can overcome the vulnerabilities due to the ebb and flow of network participation over time.

ABSTRACT. The paper will explore the nature and role of leadership for the governance of public sector ‘fuzzy networks’. By ‘fuzzy networks’ we mean goal directed networks that consist of a core group of actors that are aware of being part of the network and support the network goals but these networks also include other actors on an incidental basis which leads to unclear or moving network boundaries. The additional actors often are not aware or do not feel being part of the network. This will likely lead to a core periphery structure in the network where several organizations jointly govern the network which combines elements of a lead organization and shared governance mode (Provan and Kenis 2008). In addition, their representatives provide collective or distributed leadership for the network through their brokerage position (see for example a recent study by Nowell et al. 2018 on a modified core-periphery structure for the effective governance of disaster response networks). By leadership we mean those activities that contribute to initiating the network as well as mobilizing of partners, designing, developing and giving direction to the network as a whole. Recent work on dealing with complex social issues which often trigger a network response has argued that ‘adaptive’ leadership is a key tool in addressing these issues and transactional or transformational leadership is not suitable in such contexts (Head and Alford 2015, Danken et al. 2016). Rather than single handedly developing and implementing a vision or strategy as in case of transformational leadership, adaptive leadership requires the leader(s) to engage in a process of mobilizing of adaptive work (Head and Alford 2015:729). This leads to the following research questions: First, what are the conditions and behavioral implications of collective leadership in brokerage positions in fuzzy networks. Second, what type of leadership do we encounter? Third, what is the effect of leadership on the behavior of actors in the network periphery? and fourth, what are the implications for the governance of such fuzzy networks? We will explore these questions with empirical material from a recent study on the governance and effectiveness of an organizational network in a Dutch municipality whose goal it is to prevent people in social housing to get into financial difficulties to an extent that they cannot shoulder their living expenses anymore and manage the negative impact of such a situation.

ABSTRACT. Scholarly interest in psychological conditions that are associated with positive employee outcomes continues to grow across many disciplines, including public management. However, studies tend to exist within disciplinary silos and an integration of perspectives is far less common. The present study has two aims. First, we test an integrated model of employee affect examining public service motivation (PSM), sense of community (SOC), sense of community responsibility (SOC-R), affective organizational commitment (AOC), and organizational identification (OI) on their relative contribution to explaining employee engagement and psychological well-being. We test these factors because scholars argue they some of the most important direct predictors of employee motivation across multiple fields (i.e., public management, management, and psychology), and because they share commonalities in affective connection (i.e., SOC & AOC), an emphasis on identity and values (i.e., SOC-R, OI, & PSM), and a concern for others (i.e., SOC-R & PSM) as aspects of human motivation. Second, we further examine PSM as a factor in understanding how employees relate to their organizations in terms of organizational identity, commitment and sense of community, building on growing evidence that PSM especially acts as an indirect predictor of employee motivation in situations where additional contextual or motivating factors are simultaneously introduced in the analysis. Findings from the study suggest that community experiences are powerful predictors and that the role of PSM is more indirect than direct in relation to employee outcomes. The study provides a starting point to developing more integrated models of employee motivation across disciplinary boundaries.

ABSTRACT. While researchers largely agree prosocial behaviors are driven by other-regarding motives, concepts aimed at describing and explaining those motives vary by discipline. Public service motivation (PSM) has captivated public management scholars since Perry and Wise (1990) first coined the term, but has yet to gain significant traction in other disciplines. With the wide-array of concepts across fields, is PSM a useful concept for broader management and other disciplines? To address this question, we examine the influence of PSM on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), a key prosocial behavior within the organizational context. In order to transport PSM theory to other fields, scholars need to establish the boundaries of PSM (e.g., Perry & Vandenabeele, 2015; Ritz, Brewer, & Neumann, 2016; Vandenabeele, Brewer, & Ritz, 2014) and differentiate PSM from related concepts in other disciplines (Boyd et al., 2018; Nowell et al., 2016). In response to these calls, we distinguish the effects of PSM from measures of altruism, a relatively common concept across fields and a concept most closely related to conceptions of PSM. One prosocial behavior within the workplace that has gained attention from general management and public management scholars alike is OCB. Although the relationship between PSM and OCB has been established in the public management literature (Bottomley et al., 2016; Kim, 2006; Koumenta, 2015; Pandey, Wright, & Moynihan, 2008; Ritz et al., 2014; Shim & Faerman, 2017), data limitations have prevented scholars from disentangling PSM from altruism in motivating OCB. The relationship between PSM and OCB documented in previous research may capture latent motivation common to both measure of general altruism and PSM. After reviewing the literature across disciplines on the many concepts related to “prosocial motivation,” we test the proposition that PSM and altruism are distinct in explaining OCB using an original survey module in the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). With a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens, the respondents were asked about their motivations on the pre-test survey instrument prior to the 2016 Presidential Election and asked about their behaviors on the post-test survey.
Findings have implications for advancing our understanding of PSM in relation to both OCB, a management concept, and altruism, a “regarding others” concept that cuts across disciplinary bounds that we measure in line with social psychology.

ABSTRACT. We know that Public Service Motivation (PSM) matter to attraction, selection and attrition to public sector jobs (Andersen & Pedersen, 2012; Kjeldsen & Jacobsen, 2013; Wright & Christensen, 2010), as well as to performance and behavioral outcomes in public organizations (Andersen, Heinesen, & Pedersen, 2016; Bellé, 2013; Jensen & Vestergaard, 2017). It is also well known that different motivational forms interact and exist simultaneously (Rainey, 2014, Chapter 9). We still need to find out how PSM integrates with concepts from related disciplines. In particular, there is a need to investigate how different motivational forms are at play in different phases of the recruitment process. Putting a lot of effort into recruitment of employees with high PSM is less fruitful, if the employees de-recruit rapidly again if the need for job-fit is not met (Christensen & Wright, 2011). Therefore, we need to expand our knowledge on how different motivational forms matter in different phases of the recruitment process. Thus, the research question in this paper is how the importance of different motivational forms vary in the process of attraction, selection and attrition.

The empirical contribution of the paper is to extend the analysis of motivation, recruitment and de-recruitment to an extreme setting in order to discuss the potential motivational forms have for improving public service provision under extreme conditions. The theoretical contribution is to compare and contrast public service motivation with related theoretical concepts in psychology most notably excitement motivation and SOC-R in order to discuss how this can expand the frontier in which PSM may operate in relation to the ASAmodel. By evaluating PSM within the broader theoretical constructs on motivation and experiences of communities we aim to clarify the utility of PSM within a broader landscape of knowledge on career choice and organizational behavior.

ABSTRACT. The goal of the paper is to provide a systematic literature review of empirical studies on PRP and PSM, categorising the organisational types of agencies including core administration. It analyses the patterns of public administration/ public manage-ment/ management literature and shows that there seems to be a neglect of SOEs. Considering research on Performance-related Pay (PRP) and Public Service Motivation (PSM), this is an important research gap because studies have shown differences be-tween public and private organisations (Baarspul and Wilderom 2011). Based on the reviewed studies, the first framework for future research on performance effects of PRP and PSM in SOEs is developed, providing a conceptual bridge for PSM and PRP re-search beyond the boundaries of public management literature. Further, the review gives an overview of studies examining major other-oriented motivational constructs in addition to PSM like pro-social motivation, altruism, sense of community responsibility, etc. It provides a reflection regarding conceptual debates concerning interdependencies of PSM and major other-oriented motivational constructs and analyses implications for this future research direction.

The review examines PRP and PSM because both topics have created special in-terest in research (cf. Ritz, Brewer, and Neumann 2016, 414; Perry, Engbers, and Jun 2009; Perry and Wise 1990). Theoretically, existing studies do not allow conclusions concerning effects of PRP and PSM in SOEs because of the tension between public service provision goals and financial goals, special ownership structures and a differing regulatory framework (Andersen, Pallesen, and Pedersen 2011; Bruton et al. 2015; Jung and Rainey 2011). Research on SOEs can enrich the debates on PRP and PSM which emphasize the role of organizational goals (Andersen et al. 2013; Kjeldsen 2012; Jung and Rainey 2011) and ownership (Abner, Kim, and Perry 2017; Bruton et al. 2015; Baarspul and Wilderom 2011) as important determinants of performance effects of PRP and PSM.

SOEs offer a promising and under researched field for further research on PRP and PSM on performance effects (e.g. Ritz, Brewer, and Neumann 2016; Homberg, McCarthy, and Tabvuma 2015; Moynihan 2010). PRP and PSM research could progress by testing theories/concepts/constructs in SOEs and expand the frontiers of current PSM/PRP research.

A focus on both PRP and PSM together is demanded in literature (Langbein 2010; Moynihan 2010; Weibel, Rost, and Osterloh 2010; Perry and Vandenabeele 2015). This combined approach allows to provide of a holistic overview of the two closely related key drivers of performance and to derive structural conclusions for a re-search framework on performance effects.

The systematic review of 19 leading peer-reviewed journals of public administration, public management and management literature shows that out of 236 articles only 9% (21) on PRP and PSM focus on SOEs, despite their relevance. With its empirical contri-bution, the paper shows a research imbalance within and beyond the disciplinary bound-aries of public management. Moreover, it provides a conceptual contribution for comparative research by enhancing the categorisation of agencies and public-sector organisations. Further, it develops the first framework for future research on performance effects of PRP and PSM in SOEs.

ABSTRACT. In public management, discrimination is assessed in terms of citizens’ access to public goods and services. From this perspective, emphasis is placed upon the public manager and the administrative structures they work within as sources of discrimination. Yet, citizens are also likely to discriminate in their dealings with public officials. This perspective on discrimination has gone unaddressed by public management scholars, yet is significant in that it likely makes it much more difficult for public managers on the receiving end to do their job. In turn, this form of discrimination has implications for the representativeness of public organizations,.

The objective of this study is to help shed light on this important issue. Our assessment is guided by three research questions:

1) To what extent do citizens’ evaluations of public manager performance vary according to whether a public manager is white or black? 2) Does citizen attribution for high or low performance vary according to the race of the public manager being evaluated? 3) Does greater performance information disclosure strengthen or weaken citizen biases in evaluation and attribution?

We empirically assess our research questions using two survey experiments that vary levels of performance information disclosure and perceptions of a public manager’s race (black v. white). In study one, we focus upon participants’ response to poorly performing public managers and for the second study, run with an independent sample, we focus on responses to high performance. We draw on samples of white citizens. Focusing on white citizens’ responses to public manager race is relevant to understanding representativeness and capacity of public organizations in that prior work suggests white citizens discriminating against black public managers is highly consequential when it comes to personnel and hiring decisions. Moreover, we employ a novel measure of discrimination that pairs open-ended response questions with sentiment analysis to more accurately evaluate biases in performance evaluation and attribution.

Overall, this study offers insight into how innate discrimination on the part of citizens helps shape the representativeness of public organizations. Given the positive performance outputs associated with more diverse, representative public organizations, this offers a new perspective on factors that inhibit attempts to foster greater diversity in public organizations.

ABSTRACT. Psychological research states that organizations have a collective personality (e.g., Hofmann & Jones 2005; Ployhart, Weekley, & Baughman 2006) and—in line with Schneider’s (1987) attraction-selection-attrition framework—prefer to employ individuals with personalities that match their organization’s collective personality. Against this background, it is traditionally assumed that people working for government need different personality characteristics than those who are employed in other sectors. In particular, it has been argued that those who work for government need to have a high degree of conscientiousness—but in contrast to private-sector employees—not a desire to take risks or a creative mind-set. However, public administration scholars have shown that—inspired by New Public Management and, recently, New Public Governance—government agencies implemented management practices originally developed in business settings to enhance their performance. For example, life-long tenure is replaced by short-term flexible contracts; civil servants need to collaborate across team- and organizational boundaries; and are expected to show empathy in their interactions with customers to enhance customer or client satisfaction. Given these developments, the question arises to what degree working for government (still) requires different personality characteristics than working for any other type of organization. As job ads play a crucial role in attracting suited applicants (De Cooman & Pepermans, 2012), we investigate in this study to what degree personality characteristics asked for in job ads differ across types of jobs, organizations, and sectors. We use state-of-the-art text search tools and a thesaurus of personality characteristics built on the AB5C-model of personality (Hofstee, De Raad, & Goldberg, 1992) to analyze a corpus containing over a million of job ads. Using multi-level analyses, we control for type of function, task characteristics, offered salary, geographical location. Before running the analyses, we validated the thesaurus of personality characteristics by conducting a survey among users of several job-finding search engines.

ABSTRACT. Research on user satisfaction has increased substantially in recent years. However, the relative importance and relationships between different determinants of satisfaction remains uncertain. Moreover, quantitative studies to date tend to test for significance of pre-determined factors thought to have an influence with no scalable means to identify other causes of user satisfaction. Meanwhile, digital technology development has enabled new methods to collect user feedback, for example through online forums where users can comment freely on their experience. New tools are needed to analyze large volumes of such feedback. The use of topic models is proposed as a feasible solution to aggregate open-ended user opinions that can easily be deployed in the public sector. This novel methodological approach is applied to a case of service reviews of publicly-funded primary care practices in England. Findings from the analysis of over 200,000 reviews covering almost 7,700 primary care centers indicate that the quality of interactions with staff and bureaucratic exigencies are the key issues driving user satisfaction across England. Moreover, patient satisfaction is strongly influenced by the quality of bureaucratic procedures and facilities, issue areas not considered in state-of-the-art patient surveys.

ABSTRACT. In today’s increasingly complex, fragmented and interdependent world, public managers are confronted by many major public issues which threaten the sustainable development of future human society. Addressing these ‘future public issues’ requires the long-term investment of public resources and longstanding cross-sector collaboration. 

This article focuses on local carbon reduction projects aiming at resolving a typical ‘future public crisis’, climate change. We adopted the analytical viewpoint of integrative public leadership and focused on the discussion about the integrating process of different stakeholders in the broader territory of public governance. Drawing on the existing study of public leadership and value co-creation, this article explores the following question: under the uncertain background, how public leadership is enacted across the governance network and interact with the co-creation of value.

We empirically examined the implementation processes of three carbon reduction projects in Edinburgh (Scotland, UK). The database contains 35 semi-structured in-depth interviews with respondents from various organizations; 12 ethnographic observations, and more than 100 text or video documents. Qualitative coding is applied as the data analysing method, with the support of temporal bracketing strategy to decompose the chronological data into successive time periods. We provide the simplified synopsis of each case in tables and a synthetic portrait of the evolution over time of actors’ relationships and interactions. 

The findings of this article involve four points. First, we constructed a three-stage model to describe the integrative leadership process, which identifies three stages of coordination between key leaders, network actors and external environment. Second, we summarize that, although previous studies largely emphasized the importance of the values consensus in terms of facilitating cross-sector collaboration, in the long-standing public governance, private values remain diversified. Third, in accordance with diversified private values, the individuals’ participation is fundamentally driven by the private value creation result or aspiration; and the private value creation chain, consisted by several small-wins, constitutes the essential condition of the integrative leadership process. Based on it, fourthly, we summarized three common links in one single small-win cycle: the value commitment, proposition and creation. 

As a summary, a process model of the integrative public leadership process is constructed, with the aims of explaining the dynamics of leadership process and value co-creation in the longstanding public governance setting. We discuss how this model could respond to other literature in the field of integrative leadership, value co-creation and public governance in four aspects in the discussion and conclusion section. 

ABSTRACT. A lack of interorganizational coordination can have significant impacts on human lives, the economy, and social and ecological systems. Unlike existing research that examines coordination in single emergency management networks, this study proposes a network-level conceptualization of interorganizational coordination and applies a multiplex network approach to assess interorganizational coordination in response to disasters. Organizations interact with one another to exchange information and resources, plan for emergencies, and coordinate actual response efforts, thereby constituting multiplex emergency management networks. Multiplex emergency management networks, in this study, focus on design networks, implementation networks, and diverse types of interactions within and across these networks. Design networks refer to interorganizational networks that are formally defined in policies, frameworks, and emergency management plans with established roles, responsibilities, functions, and coordination structures for responding to potential disasters. Implementation networks refer to the observed patterns of interactions among organizations in response to actual disasters.

The study will focus on interorganizational coordination in response to Hurricane Irma in three counties of Florida. It will address two research questions: What are the characteristics of design and implementation networks? (ii) What are the overlaps and disparities between design and implementation networks? This study will use mixed methods—content analysis and organizational surveys to collect data. This study will obtain data on design networks through content analysis of the National Response Framework, state and local comprehensive emergency management plans (CEMPs), and incident action plans. Data on implementation networks will be collected through content analysis of situation reports, after-action reports, and an organizational survey. Organizational surveys will be sent to the directors of the lead organizations of Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) and the emergency managers of the three counties. In addition to descriptive network analysis, exponential random graph models (ERGMs) will be run to examine the network structures and interplay among design and implementation networks, organizational characteristics, and factors that influence the implementation of policies, frameworks, and plans.

This study assesses interorganizational coordination by identifying the characteristics of and relationships among multiplex emergency management networks in the aftermath of an actual disaster. This study will contribute to network research by applying a multiplex network approach to examine the complex interdependence and functioning of interorganizational coordination. The study will also provide policy recommendations to improve the alignment between the design and implementation of disaster policies, frameworks, and plans.

ABSTRACT. The Refugee Crisis in Europe from 2015 to the present resulted from multiple crises requiring public, NGO and voluntary responses (Francart and Borton, 2016; UNHCR, 2017). A cross-sectoral interorganizational partnering approach served as the primary perspective to view and evaluate these multiple stakeholder responses (Comfort, 2007; Kapucu, 2008; Martin, Nolte and Vitolo, 2016; Nolte and Boenigk, 2011; Raju and Becker, 2013). Strategy and learning received much attention in this transboundary crisis (Moynihan, 2008). Practitioners and researchers logically asked what lessons learned could be applied as refugees arrive at a new location (Italy, for example) or as patterns of flows settle over time (Ansell, Boin and Keller, 2000).

Our work highlights the importance of change over time within this crisis and the inter-relatedness of decision causes and effects across sectors and across borders. In this cross-country study of the refugee response along the Balkan refugee route, our respondents shared a widespread common understanding of important phases of activity based on critical turning points that shifted crisis response. These different phases involved different stakeholders as well as involving the same stakeholders differently.

These changes had enormous effects for programming, staffing and budgeting as expected. But they had an even more profound effect on the way stakeholders from different sectors viewed each other and thus had implications for the nature of partnering across sectors, and the actual mechanisms for partnership. Players were perceived by each other quite differently across these phases. Using the four key factors of leadership, predisposition to cooperate, number of stakeholders and incentives to partner, we explore how cross-sectoral relationships during this crisis evolved over time (Faerman, McCaffrey and Van Slyke, 2001; Waugh and Streib, 2006).

This research is based on seven field-level focus groups, 50 individual interviews and eight site visits to formal refugee centers, informal camps, open air shelters and resource centers for refugees in urban areas. Respondents represented multiple levels (field staff, mid-management, senior leadership) in governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Greece, Macedonia and Serbia in Spring 2017. Data were coded using NVivo software, generating 11 primary codes (beneficiary involvement, best practices, context factors, coordination and partnerships, crisis to transition phase, donor agencies, government perceptions, INGO perceptions, local NGO perceptions, and volunteer perceptions). Those codes were further refined into over 50 sub-codes. Those sub-codes were then used to recode the entire text in a second phase of research and were queried based on change over time.