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This article assesses how changing paradigms of public administration have been reflected in public sector human resources management over time. It finds that large-scale reform acts, such as the Pendleton Act or the Civil Service Reform Act and the National Performance Review reflected the "ideals" of the rule-following bureaucrat of the Old Public Administration (OPA) and of the result-seeking entrepreneur of New Public Management (NPM). However, the advocate, empath, and networker of New Public Administration (NPA) and New Public Service (NPS) has not been pursued through similarly encompassing reform efforts. While gradual changes such as a more representative bureaucracy and increased collaborative governance have paved the way for a deeper integration of NPA and NPS values into human resource policy and practice, more efforts are needed to promote advocates, empaths, and networkers as the core of the "new" public service. We conclude by making some tentative suggestions in this direction.

ABSTRACTGraduate students are primarily socialized into the political science profession in departments, with networks of peers and informal mentors providing crucial sources of support. This article describes one model of departmental professional socialization that the authors have led—the Graduate Student Caucus—which can improve graduate students' day-to-day lived experiences. In this model, a small cross-cohort group of students is elected for a year-long term to develop professional and social programming for graduate students and to assist them in navigating university bureaucracy, teaching and research responsibilities, and the job market. The Caucus also regularly compiles and presents student concerns to their department administrators to steer the program's direction. We describe the structure of the Caucus and its activities to highlight the benefits of this model and its adaptability to other institutional settings. Governance mechanisms like a Caucus cultivate trust, boost confidence, and demystify the "hidden curriculum" in the profession.

AbstractCommunication professionals are increasingly found within government ministries. Based on classic work on bureaucracy and recent literature on mediatization and personalization, this article develops two ideal types: the government information provider and government spin doctor. These ideals are constituted by six dimensions: recruitment criteria, values, loyalties, reputational concerns, interactions, and tasks. A study of nonpartisan communication professionals in Norwegian ministries is used to illustrate the empirical relevance of the ideal types. The analysis shows that for loyalties and reputational concerns, Norwegian communication professionals resemble the government information provider. Regarding interactions and tasks, they resemble the government spin doctor. For recruitment criteria and values, the picture is mixed. The empirical application thereby illustrates a fruitful aspect of the framework as certain configurations will bring forth inbuilt tension in communication professionals' role. The framework allows a fine‐grained approach to extend ongoing debates of appropriate and inappropriate practices of communication professionals in ministries.

AbstractThe present study attempts to study the credit supply process in the Iranian banking industry by using the viable system model (VSM) to identify its vulnerabilities and improve the financing system. The method used in this study consists of three steps: (a) identification of system, (b) diagnosis of system and (c) control of information flow, communication channels and frequent errors. In this research, 37 credit experts from 17 different bank branches were interviewed about the process of granting facilities, and SPSS 23 was used to examine research objectives through the Delphi method. The results show that the structure of Iran's credit supply chain network suffers from such problems as deviation in the appropriate use of allocated credit resources, structural faults of the banking system and lack of administrative health, high bureaucracy, directed facilities, etc. In the end, some suggestions are provided for redesign and optimization of the credit supply network.

Political theory is rediscovering the colossus of public administration—the vast public service and regulatory bureaucracies and their countless employees and extensions that conduct the daily business of government. This review explains how something so visible could ever have fallen from view, and surveys four burgeoning areas of research. These pertain to the legitimacy of public administration, to the articulation of standards of good government distinct from good public policy, to the analysis of how the moral agency of bureaucrats is implicated and undermined by the everyday operation of bureaucratic agencies, and to how we should conceptualize the state when we apprehend it through the seemingly banal routines of administration. What emerges from this body of work is a picture of the executive bureaucracy as an object of normative, critical, and conceptual inquiry on a par with the other two branches of government, the legislature and the judiciary.

Resumo Estudos sobre implementação de políticas públicas têm buscado melhores formas de compreender as falhas e a própria realidade desse processo. A partir de uma revisão sistemática da literatura, que contou com análise bibliométrica, este artigo aponta a historiografia e as frentes de pesquisa sobre a temática e analisa a autoria e as redes de cocitação de autores. Posteriormente, uma metanálise das publicações que compõem o portfólio teórico final (construído por meio do ano de publicação, número de citações e fator de impacto dos periódicos) apresenta as perspectivas e os modelos teóricos prevalentes, os resultados empíricos e as lacunas de cada trabalho. Resultados apontam que temas como governança, desenvolvimento sustentável, e-government, street-level bureaucracy (burocracia de nível de rua), políticas de saúde e descentralização dos processos da administração pública trazem um cenário de pesquisas relevantes para teorizações e aplicações empíricas das discussões do campo. Por fim, apresenta-se uma agenda de pesquisa futura.

AbstractHow do frontline workers implement policy when it is politically contested and they face strong pressure from politicians and the media? Based on original data and a multi‐method analysis of juvenile justice policy and child protection policy in Switzerland, we show that political conflict can change policy implementation when frontline workers adapt their implementation practices in response to political and media pressure. We demonstrate that frontline workers seek to limit the influence of political pressure on policy implementation to safeguard their professional autonomy and reputation. However, we observe that they may also occasionally engage in what we call "blame‐avoiding policy implementation." While formally complying with the policy mandate, frontline workers exploit their street‐level discretion to make policy implementation less scandal‐prone and blameworthy, thereby lowering the likelihood of blame attacks. The findings have important implications for our understanding of policy implementation and the functioning of bureaucracy in more conflictual times.

This article analyses 26 interviews with frontline female practitioners from domestic violence and abuse (DVA) services for racially minoritised women in England and Wales, exploring how these practitioners – who are from the same racially minoritised communities as the women they support – responded to the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. These specific practitioner perspectives offer valuable insights into the specific ways in which the pandemic exacerbated the intersectional vulnerabilities of minoritised women experiencing DVA. Interpreted through a standpoint feminist lens, the findings reveal how frontline practitioners used bureaucratic discretion both to meet minoritised women's changed needs during the pandemic in order to enhance their safety and to challenge the exclusions and intersectional inequalities underpinning pandemic policies. The study illuminates the institutional dimensions of frontline practitioner responses to the pandemic and contribute to debates within the street-level bureaucracy scholarship about the nature of bureaucratic discretion exercised by frontline practitioners.

AbstractThe paradigmatic ascent of the new public management (NPM) doctrine in the 1980s was a joyful moment for advocates of market‐led public sector reforms. Four decades later, following disappointing results, the NPM is no longer dominant. Pending the emergence of a new leading paradigm, however, NPM‐inspired reforms are still being pursued in several nations worldwide. The central African nation of Gabon is one of those. For 8 years, it pursued an unsuccessful program of agencification of the state apparatus reportedly to create a "modern" public bureaucracy that would support economic modernization. This article provides the first scholarly analysis of the effects of this program. It shows that agencification fundamentally undermined the fragile foundations of the Gabonese administrative state. The magnitude of the damage to the state apparatus stands as the key finding of this study. This outcome further strengthens the case against an uncritical adoption of exogenously‐developed public sector reforms.

Public administration scholars have provided a variety of theoretical insights to understand bureaucratic whistleblowing, and have emphasized its ethical, legal, and practical rationales in the context of democratic bureaucracy. To enhance our understanding of this principled dissent behavior in the public sector, this study systematically reviews 71 whistleblowing articles and dissertations that address three aspects in the literature: (1) definitions and theories; (2) methods and data, and (3) factors associated with whistleblowing intention and behavior. The findings show public administration whistleblowing research typically uses Near and Miceli's definition, grounded on psychology, ethics, and human resource management (HRM) theories. Methodologically, there is a notable recent trend in the growth of empirical research using survey data, and equal attention has been paid to both whistleblowing intention and behavior variables. Based on the review findings, the study discusses two issues—definitional and theoretical—and presents four research agendas for future bureaucratic whistleblowing scholarship.

Based on representative bureaucracy theory, the current study investigates whether increasing Black representation in police forces is negatively associated with racial discrimination in law enforcement. This study additionally investigates how associations may differ according to the organizational or environmental contexts of the forces. Results show that an increased share of Black officers is associated with decreased police-involved deaths of Black residents, but is not significantly associated with a change in order maintenance arrests of Black suspects. In addition, the negative association between Black representation and police-involved deaths of Black residents disappears when the percent of Black officers surpasses about 15 percent, especially in organizations where White officers comprise a larger share. These findings support the potential negative role of organizational socialization on the effectiveness of increasing the share of Black officers in policing, implying that additional long-term efforts to change organizational culture are needed to realize the benefits of enhancing Black representation.

Permen LHK No. 24/2020 is a land use policy for Indonesia's food security through food estates program. The program aims to increase the added value of local agricultural production in order to increase employment, low food prices, and the development of large-scale agricultural businesses. According to regulation issud by LHK, food estate policy has the potential to change forest areas into agricultural land because it is legalized by the government through Undang-Undang Cipta Kerja. The consequences of implementing this policy are including environmental damage, increased conflict and poor land use management which is not in accordance with the Central Kalimantan spatial plan (RTRWP). The food estate program becomes government's priority in achieving food security through the State supports in a fast and less bureaucracy process on land licensing. This indicates that the process of land clearing for food estate violates forestry and land use regulations.

Traditional analysis of China's policy experimentation has focused on the role of central–local relations and rotating leaders in shaping the local agenda-setting process. Less is known about the role of less mobile mid-level local bureaucrats who serve as bridges in the implementation process. This paper examines why some cities have performed better than others at implementing and maintaining low-carbon policy experiments. Drawing on a comparison of four case cities and over 100 expert interviews, I argue that the availability of bureaucratic entrepreneurs and their resource mobilization capacity determine the level of local engagement in climate policy experimentation. This study shows that the institutionalization of local policy experiments is not only driven by the central government or rotating top local leaders but also by bureaucratic entrepreneurs who help policy experiments survive periodic changes in the bureaucracy. The findings have important implications for the fulfilment of China's 2060 carbon neutrality pledge. (China Q/GIGA)

Indonesia's response to the 2016 UNCLOS tribunal ruling was underwhelming, even as a nonclaimant in the South China Sea disputes. Given its maritime geography and interests, the response is symptomatic of the country's underdevelopment of an "archipelagic foreign policy"—one where the entire foreign policy system, from its bureaucracy, doctrine, and strategy, should be geared to secure and defend its external maritime interests. This article further argues that the authoritarian New Order regime (1966–1998) repressed the development of an archipelagic foreign policy in two ways: (1) the army‐dominated foreign policy establishment deprioritized external maritime interests and (2) the infusion of the National Resilience (Ketahanan Nasional) concept into the "Archipelagic Outlook" (Wawasan Nusantara) doctrine as a regime maintenance tool further "domesticated" what could have been a geopolitical outlook. These authoritarian legacies put Indonesia's foreign policy on a path‐dependent trajectory that even President Joko Widodo's Global Maritime Fulcrum could not break.