Public Administration Review articles from September 1996

Public Administration Review archives from September 1996

What makes public administration a science? Or, are its "big questions" really big?
September 1, 1996... In his recent essay in the Public Administration Review, "The Big Questions of Public Management," Robert Behn (1995) has asked us to consider which "big questions" are to be of central importance for public management. His nomination of three...

The big questions of public administration in a democracy.
September 1, 1996... Behn's (1995) recent delineation of the "big questions of public management" makes an important and compelling argument that any field of inquiry should focus on major questions and should be driven by those questions, not diverted to more...

Professional certification in public management: a status report and proposal.
September 1, 1996... Certification of public managers is a logical, albeit controversial, byproduct of public administration's (PA) evolution toward "the professional state" (Mosher, 1968; 99). Although it has not commanded nearly as much attention as other concerns...

Faculty, graduate student, and graduate productivity in public administration and public affairs programs, 1986-1993.
September 1, 1996... It has been eight years since the productivity of public administration and public affairs programs was last measured by examining the faculty publications in selected journals (Legge and Devore, 1987). The purpose of this article is to duplicate...

Knowledge and theory development in public administration: the role of doctoral education and research.
September 1, 1996... The purpose of doctoral education and research in public administration might seem almost self-evident. If public administration were thought of like most other social science disciplines, the traditional purpose of the doctorate - the...

Women, research, and mentorship in public administration.
September 1, 1996... Women's struggle for acceptance in the field of public administration is an on-going concern in both the academic and practitioner worlds. It is well documented that women have made progress in securing careers in the public service, and these...

Public administration as a science of the artificial: a methodology for prescription.
September 1, 1996... Public administration, in the words of Herbert Simon (1969), is a science of the artificial. Unlike natural sciences, it is concerned not so much with how things are as how things might be. Simon's position is not so different from Max Weber's...

Representative bureaucracy: an estimation of the reliability and validity of the Nachmias-Rosenbloom MV Index. (Measure of Variation)
September 1, 1996... During the past ten years, the number of studies using the Measure of Variation (MV) index to assess minority incorporation (or representation) in the federal work force has increased. The MV index has been used primarily to gauge the extent to...

China's new civil service: what the emperor is wearing and why. (response to articles by Steven E. Aufrecht and Li Siu Bun, and John Abbott Worthley and King K. Tsao, Public Administration Review, 1995)(includes reply)
September 1, 1996... Two recent articles in the PAR (Tsao and Worthley, 1995; Aufrecht and Li, 1995) purport to introduce China's civil service system to American readers. We find them severely wanting as guides to understanding and interpretations of China's...

The new sciences of administration: chaos and quantum theory.
September 1, 1996... The "new sciences" - chaos and quantum theory - have attracted considerable attention from scholars across a spectrum of academic disciplines. Before his untimely death, I asked E. Sam Overman to prepare an essay that explains what the new...

Managing Chaos and Complexity in Government: A New Paradigm for Managing Change, Innovation, and Organizational Renewal.
September 1, 1996... The two books reviewed here are the latest in a wave of efforts to apply the concepts of the physical sciences to social processes and organization. The models we have customarily used to describe and explain the social, political, and managerial...

The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics, and a New Social Vision.
September 1, 1996... The two books reviewed here are the latest in a wave of efforts to apply the concepts of the physical sciences to social processes and organization. The models we have customarily used to describe and explain the social, political, and managerial...

Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organizations from an Orderly Universe.
September 1, 1996... Scanning the management literature on the new sciences, one is struck by the pervasive concern for how this emerging paradigm might rescue order and coherence from the disorder of social complexity. One also notes the expansion of technoese,...

Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Reading on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism.
September 1, 1996... Scanning the management literature on the new sciences, one is struck by the pervasive concern for how this emerging paradigm might rescue order and coherence from the disorder of social complexity. One also notes the expansion of technoese,...

The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science.
September 1, 1996... Scanning the management literature on the new sciences, one is struck by the pervasive concern for how this emerging paradigm might rescue order and coherence from the disorder of social complexity. One also notes the expansion of technoese,...