How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This general question is the concern of officials in all branches and at all levels of the public sector: legislators, elected and appointed executives, and judges at federal,...

Institutional reform litigation places significant, and, at times, inappropriate constraints on the public manager’s ability to balance individual and collective justice. An exemplary misuse of such litigation was the recent New York child welfare case of Marisol A. v. Giuliani. The U.S....

For a decade, public administration and management literature has featured a riveting story: the transformation of the field's orientation from an old paradigm to a new one. While many doubt claims concerning a new paradigm–a "new public management"–no one questions that there was an old...

Governments everywhere are engaged in self-conscious projects of administrative and managerial improvement. Scholars of public management thus confront a fascinating array of talk, conjectures, and facts on administrative and managerial change that can be assembled from myriad sources. There are...

This paper addresses the widely-held belief that effective public management is inherently strategic and entrepreneurial, i.e., concerned with the formulation and achievement of overarching goals that transform and redirect government agencies. Evidence suggests, however, that statutory,...

Passage of the Chicago School Reform Act by the Illinois legislature in 1988 has brought sustained attention to the central features of the reform: the creation of elected councils for each of the 550 schools with the power to hire and fire the principal, to contribute to and approve the...

The field of public management is a significant area of teaching and research in schools of public policy. Within these schools, there is general recognition that public management mediates the relationship between the ideas of policy analysts and the decisions of policy makers, on the one hand,...

How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This general question is the concern of officials in all branches and at all levels of the public sector: legislators, elected and appointed executives, and judges at federal,...

Scholars within different disciplines employ a wide range of empirical approaches to understanding how, why and with what consequences government is organized. We first review recent statistical modeling efforts in the areas of education, job-training, welfare reform and drug abuse treatment and...

The so-called "charitable choice" policy of the Clinton and Bush administrations is another milestone in the transformation of a social services sector that was once decentralized, independent, often informal, and voluntary into a deliberate instrument of public policy. Issues associated with...