Administration & Society articles from September 1998

Administration & Society archives from September 1998

Race: constructs and dilemmas.
September 1, 1998... The concept of race, from a scientific perspective, has such poor construct validity and reliability that there is a growing consensus that the term should be abandoned. It is the premise of this article that the concept of race is not only a...

The empowerment construct in manager-executive relationships.
September 1, 1998... Empowerment is common to both the scholarly and the popular management literature. However, empowerment' s many interpretations have dulled the concept as a research tool. Here, empowerment is separated into perceived environment and individual...

Strategic management or environmental change: which determines success in health care organizations?
September 1, 1998... It is often difficult in complex organizational systems for managers to attribute accurately changes in organizational performance to changes in management strategy. In this case study of the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Health Care...

Creating new public management reforms: lessons from Israel.
September 1, 1998... The New Public Management (NPM) has been well studied in nations with previously reformed, modern administrative systems. Considerably less is known about the feasibility of adopting NPM reforms in countries such as Israel, in which national...

Public sector information technology initiatives: implications for programs of public administration.
September 1, 1998... On the 10th anniversary of the recommendations published by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) on information system instruction in schools and departments of public administration, sweeping...

Identifying facets of democratic administration: the empirical referents of discourse.
September 1, 1998... This article takes on the difficult task of trying to ascertain the practicality of discourse as a means toward establishing a more democratic public administration. Of concern are the methods currently used to evaluate the authenticity of such...

Method: the tail that wants to wag the dog.(response to "Identifying Facets of Democratic Administration," in this issue, p. 443)
September 1, 1998... Kenneth Hansen's methodological disciplining of Fox and Miller's warrants for discourse is a worthy aspiration, but at what point do we hand over too much to method? This implicit and sometimes explicit expectation--that method will yield an...

The ideology of technocratic empiricism and the discourse movement in contemporary public administration: a clarification.(response to "Identifying Facets of Democratic Administration" and "Method," in this issue, p. 443 and p. 462)
September 1, 1998... The field of public administration in the United States may well be in the midst of, to use a term in contemporary vogue, a sea change. It seems appropriate to designate this shift as the discourse movement, a term meant to refer to a broad...