Suchergebnisse

Notwithstanding the persistence and proliferation of calls to serve "customers," these relationships incorporate distinctively public priorities and performance expectations—priorities and expectations often shaped by a desire to reduce customer vulnerabilities and prevent seller strategies that are deemed unacceptable. The authors examine these distinctively public relationships—between professionals and clients, guardians and wards, facilitators and citizens, and regulators and subjects. By acknowledging that public administration often involves relationships with multiple constituencies and that opportunities to serve them are bounded by particular legal and institutional contexts, this essay provides a pragmatic account of strategic opportunities to defend public service values.

The rapidly expanding literature on accountability reveals a centrally important paradox: Responsible interpretation and application of external accountability demands depends on the cultivation of the virtues that support good administrative judgment, but the institutions and mechanisms that are used to communicate these external standards, and that monitor compliance with them, often threaten the very qualities that support responsible judgment. Consulting a rich and varied literature, this paradox is explored as it emerges in both the more familiar compliance-based accountability processes and the less well-understood performance-based processes associated with reinvention and the new public management.

For two decades public administration has considered a series of evolving conceptions of professionalism, designed to address some of the field's central concerns. The authors evaluate professionalism's ability to provide practitioners a sense of unity and purpose, to promote virtuous and competent administrative practice, to defend public administration's legitimate institutional role in governance, and to enhance the standing of the field in the eyes of the public and its representatives. They conclude that the professional ideal, even a revised professionalism that avoids explicit claims to autonomous practice, is one that the field should relinquish.

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in policy analysis; however, a review of the curriculum in schools offering policy-related educational programs indicates a strong emphasis on rational comprehensive analysis as an orientation & approach. Detailed is a more complete 'map' of the phenomenon examined in public policy studies in an attempt to identify potential gaps in professional education preparing students for policy related work. By considering the various processes encountered in public policy studies in conjunction with the levels of analysis commonly employed, a more complete map can be derived. The processes considered include optimal allocation, mutual adjustment, & routinized activity. Levels of analysis include individuals, small groups, organizations, & systems. A brief discussion of each cell of this map highlights some work undertaken with each of the foci identified. It is suggested that this map should permit us to prescribe a more complete curriculum package that incorporates all of the phenomena involved in policy studies. AA.