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Editor's Choice Articles
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The Editor of The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory selects one paper from each new issue for its high-quality contribution to the field of research. The below articles are available to read and download for free. This collection is updated regularly so check back to keep up-to-date with the latest advances in the field.
Will trust move mountains? Fostering radical ideas in public organizations
Raimundo Avilton Meneses Júnior and others
Demands for greater quality of public services and enhanced efficiency have intensified changes in public organizations. Not surprisingly, these organizations are increasingly searching for new and useful ideas, including disruptive ones, to meet current demands. Whereas previous studies on team ...
Burdens, bribes, and bureaucrats: the political economy of petty corruption and administrative burdens
Fernando Nieto-Morales and others
Bribery and other forms of petty corruption typically arise in bureaucratic encounters and are a common element of the everyday experience of the state in many countries, particularly in places with weak institutions. This type of corruption is especially troublesome because it creates direct costs ...
All hands on deck: the role of collaborative platforms and lead organizations in achieving environmental goals
Heewon Lee and Yixin Liu
This study examines the effectiveness of collaborative platforms in supporting local collaborations for natural resource management. It also explores how governmental and non-governmental lead organizations adopt differing collaborative implementation approaches and how these variations influence ...
Volunteers in Public Service Production: Modeling the Contributions of Volunteers to Organizational Performance
Seong C Kang
Volunteer use as an alternative service delivery arrangement entails public organizations directly incorporating volunteers in service production through a quasi-employment relationship. However, research evaluating the contributions of volunteer labor to organizational performance are relatively ...
Distributive Justice in Collaborative Outputs: Empowering Minority Viewpoints Through Deliberation
Jiho Kim
This article explores how deliberation affects distributive justice for minority view participants in policy decisions made through collaborative governance. It also examines whether the quality of deliberation (i.e., willingness to accept opposing viewpoints) and quantity of deliberation (i.e., ...
(Mis)Led by an Outsider: Abusive Supervision, Disengagement, and Silence in Politicized Bureaucracies
Joana Story and others
Employing loyal external appointees has been identified as a key strategy used by incumbents to gain control over the state bureaucracy. This phenomenon is known as politicization and has been associated with democratic backsliding. Frequently, career civil servants perceive these appointees as ...
A Mercantile Theory of Expert Knowledge Utilization in Patrimonialist Bureaucracies: Evidence from the Health Sector in Peru
Diego Alonso Salazar-Morales
This article formulates a theory of expert knowledge utilization in patrimonialist administrative traditions characterized by politicians’ predominance over bureaucrats. The argument is that in these weak institutional contexts acquiring “expert knowledge” enables politicians to control key ...
Dismantling or Disguising Racialization?: Defining Racialized Change Work in the Context of Postsecondary Grantmaking
Heather McCambly and Jeannette A Colyvas
Grantmaking organizations (GMOs) exert considerable influence on education systems, public policy, and its administration. We position the work of GMOs—in the distribution and management of funds for the public good—as a form of public management. Using recent work on racialized organizations from ...
Slipstreaming for Public Sector Reform: How Enterprising Public Sector Leaders Navigate Institutional Inertia
Shibaab Rahman and others
We situate public sector leaders as actors who deal with competing institutional demands, and examine how public sector leaders can facilitate reform implementation in the face of institutional inertia in a transitional setting, Bangladesh public administration. Based on 32 interviews with current ...
Developing the Theory of Pragmatic Public Management through Classic Grounded Theory Methodology
Joseph A Hafer
Public administration scholars argue that further research is needed to understand ordinary day-to-day behaviors of the traditional government agency in the era of inter-organization collaboration and governance, including reconciling traditional bureaucratic management theories with modern-day ...
Acres for the Affluent: An Interactive Model of Nonprofit Resources and Demand Heterogeneity
Samantha Zuhlke
According to the theory of government failure, nonprofit organizations emerge when governments fail to provide goods or services to a public with heterogeneous demands. This study approaches this fundamental theory of the nonprofit sector from a pluralist political viewpoint, marrying the theory of ...
Comparing Systemic and Individual Sources of Racially Disparate Traffic Stop Outcomes
Kelsey Shoub
The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought discussions of race and policing to the forefront in the summer of 2020 in the United States, spurring protests and calls for policing reform. However, enacting successful reforms curtailing racially biased policing requires understanding ...
Do Cogovernance and CSOs Supplement Municipal Capacity for Service Delivery? An Assessment of Differences in Simple versus Complex Services
Renzo de la Riva Agüero
Municipal governments in the Global South vary in their ability to provide not only complex social services, like environmentally proper solid waste disposal, but even simple services, like trash collection from the streets. This article examines whether variation in service provision outcomes is ...
“Whatever it Takes”: Sexual Harassment in the Context of Resource Dependence
Erynn E Beaton and others
Research suggests powerful resource dependencies are present in the public and nonprofit sectors. The individuals operating at the nexus between organizations and resource providers, and who mitigate dependencies, are referred to as boundary spanners. Research suggests that there may be both ...
Deliberation and Deliberative Organizational Routines in Frontline Decision-Making
Anne Mette Møller
Deliberation is a widely recognized but understudied aspect of frontline decision-making. This study contributes to theory development by exploring deliberative practices in frontline organizations and their implications for decision-making. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study in three ...
Management, Organizational Performance, and Task Clarity: Evidence from Ghana’s Civil Service
Imran Rasul and others
We study the relationship between management practices, organizational performance, and task clarity, using observational data analysis on an original survey of the universe of Ghanaian civil servants across 45 organizations and novel administrative data on over 3,600 tasks they undertake. We first ...
Who Is in Charge? The Provision of Informal Personal Resources at the Street Level
Einat Lavee
Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) nowadays provide services under conditions of increased demand for public services coupled with scarcer financial resources. The literature that focuses on how workers adapt to this situation mainly examines their provision of formal resources as part of their job. ...
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