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On the 75th anniversary of Herbert A Simon's "Proverbs of Administration," it is fitting to consider its place in the public administration canon, with an eye to contemporary realities. In Proverbs, Simon interrogated prevailing mid-century "principles of public administration." But even as he reduced in rank each "principle," he preserved a central tenet of earlier pioneers of a "science of administration"—namely that public administration theory should focus, first and foremost, on administrative efficiency. Seven and a half decades after its publication, a clear-eyed examination of Simon's essay is in order, with attention to both its historical and contemporary contexts. This essay urges that the administrative efficiency tenet was already on unstable ground at the time of Proverbs' publication, rendering Simon's reformist agenda less than paradigm-changing. In the contemporary context, the democratic shortcomings of Simon's agenda are even more apparent. Proverbs is out of synch with the goals for public administration promulgated by respected associations in the field. Simon's approach also lacks inspiration for students of public service eager to shore up the American democratic project amidst unprecedented challenges.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are increasingly touted as platforms not merely for networks of friends and for private diversion, but as vehicles that allow ordinary people to enter and influence the many arenas of public life. On the surface, the disparate and shapeless population of "i‐reporters," policy "tweeters," and anonymous news web site "commentators" would appear to challenge the comparatively well‐defined cast of professional diplomats, journalists, and propagandists that Harold D. Lasswell identified as policy‐oriented communicators. However, to illuminate the roles and impacts of social media in politics and policymaking, insights from Lasswell's "science of communication" must be embedded in Lasswell's broader lessons on value assets and outcomes. A closer look at the so‐called democratizing functions of social media in politics reveals the influence of powerful intermediaries who filter and shape electronic communications. Lasswell's insights on the likelihood of increased collaboration among political elites and skilled, "modernizing intellectuals" anticipates contemporary instances of state actors who recruit skilled creators and users of social media—collaborations that may or may not advance experiments in democracy. Lasswell's decision process concept is deployed to discover social media's strengths and weaknesses for the practicing policy scientist.

The purpose of this inquiry is to identify how environmental indicators and environmental technology in the science/policy boundary alternately facilitate and encumber international environmental negotiations. In a case involving a dispute between Sweden and Finland over one another's contribution to the organochlorine pollution load to the Baltic Sea, indicators of environmental risk, including measures of allegedly toxic concentrations of organochlorines in Swedish and Finnish chemical pulp wastewater, did not bring the two sides closer to a settlement. Also, ironically, advances in technological solutions to the problem were unhelpful to the negotiation. For many months, the disputants failed to acknowledge that deliberations were slowed down by the parties' pride and confidence in their respective national scientific, technological, and regulatory institutions. In recent years, the problems caused by organochlorine emissions from Swedish and Finnish pulp mills have been all but solved-a comparatively rare transboundary environmental "success story." With the tackling of the problem, the competition between Sweden and Finland's preferred engineering solutions has dramatically faded. Adapted from the source document.

The pathologies of the presidential appointment process are well documented and include appointees' frequent lack of federal government work experience and their short appointment tenures. Less well understood are whether and to what extent these problems affect different subsets of high‐level appointees, such as administrators in the environmental bureaucracy. Top‐tier environmental appointees tend to stay longer in their appointed positions than do presidential appointees generally, and more than 40 percent have prior federal government management experience. These and other data suggest that key problems ascribed to the presidential appointment process are less salient in the case of high‐level environmental appointees. Appointees in Republican and Democratic administrations have comparable levels of academic training and federal government experience. These similarities notwithstanding, White House expectations for appointees' political loyalty varies more from administration to administration. The Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (first term) administrations maintained the highest demands for political loyalty, with consequences for the policy–administration dichotomy in environmental agencies.

Critics contend that conventional policy analyses usually ignore "inconvenient" aspects of real problem contexts, such as the many, varied, & often conflicting value demands of relevant stakeholders in the policy process. Mapping real problem contexts, with formal attention to policy participants' values, is an antidote to problem-blind, positivist policy analysis. For professional advisers to public managers, competent contextual mapping improves the chances for productive use of policy advice. Contextual mapping, as practiced by a policy adviser to a foreign aid agency, is examined, & generic categories for mapping policy contexts are elaborated. 2 Figures, 42 References. Adapted from the source document.