Anthony DeForest Molina

Style over Substance in Interventions for At-Risk Students: The Impact of Intrusiveness.

Academic advisors charged with developing and implementing student success strategies should ask: To what extent is the process of intervention, rather than the nature of any specific intervention,...

Institutional Vision and Academic Advising.

Quality academic advising in higher education is the product of a multitude of elements not the least of which is institutional vision. By recognizing and embracing an institutions concept of its capabilities and the kinds of educated human beings it is attempting to cultivate, advisors gain an invaluable apparatus to guide the provision of effective educational planning to students. In a case study survey, we assessed whether and how institutional vision can be transformed into action as both vision-driven initiatives and more incidental activities reflective of an institutions vision statement. Relative emphasis: theory, research, practice

Aristotelian Rhetoric, Pluralism, and Public Administration

This article discusses how Aristotle’s thought on rhetoric can help public administrators deal with situations that involve conflicting and irreconcilable values. We argue that Aristotelian rhetoric can be helpful to public administrators in dealing with value conflicts, because it promotes a greater self-consciousness among administrators about their own values, encourages them to seek ways of accommodating their values to the values of others, discourages any sense of finality in resolving value conflicts, and requires that administrators take account of the concrete specifics of particular practical situations in dealing with value conflicts.

The Heart of the Profession: Understanding Public Service Values

When NASPAA adopted new accreditation standards in 2009, it effectively placed public service values at the heart of the public administration curriculum. The efficacy of this approach is directly tied to the use that administrators make of public service values in the field. To explore whether and how public service values influence administrative behavior and decision making, this study used survey and qualitative interview data from a sample of 52 Midwestern state and local public administrators. Additionally, it used grounded theory methodology to develop a theoretical model that explains the link between public service values and the administrative behavior and decision making of practitioners. Data and conclusions drawn from the interviews, along with the results from a survey of administrative values, led us to conclude that administrators utilize a combination of ethical, professional, democratic, and human values to maintain legitimacy. In the public administrative context, legitimacy was understood by administrators to include personal credibility, professional competence, respect for democratic principles, and the ability to maintain positive relationships with citizens and colleagues. The article concludes with suggestions for further incorporation of public service values into the public administration curriculum.

Style Over Substance Revisited: A Longitudinal Analysis of Intrusive Intervention

In a recent report, the authors showed that the academic intervention process, rather than the specific intervention content, was responsible for a short-term influx in at-risk student performance ...

Style Over Substance Reconsidered: Intrusive Intervention and At-Risk Students with Learning Disabilities

In two recent publications, we reported that the academic intervention process, not the specific intervention content, was responsible for a short-and long-term influx in at-risk student performanc...

VALUES IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

This article argues that the field of public administration, academics and practitioners alike, would benefit by more explicitly addressing the role that values play in administrative behavior and decision making. It reflects on the extent to which values are embedded in the work of public administrators, and their role in serving as normative criteria for action. Because the values associated with democracy and bureaucracy are often in competition, though, the challenge for administrators is to arrive at a workable balance consistent with our constitutional tradition. To that end, the insights offered by an organizational culture perspective are helpful in understanding how particular values can be promoted in organizations. This article concludes with a brief discussion of some implications that such an approach has for how we study, teach, and practice public administration.

The Virtues of Administration: Values and the Practice of Public Service

This article explores the role that public service values play in the work of public administrators. The argument made here is that a virtue ethics approach rooted in the concept of a practice is a particularly helpful way of understanding public service values as a contextualized set of attitudes, skills, and behaviors that enable us to realize the goods, ends, and standards of excellence internal to the practice of public administration. Along those lines, the contextual factors associated with four ideal-type administrative roles—mediator, steward, magistrate, and advocate—are explored in order to highlight the manner in which values both create and mediate conflicts that arise between these roles.

Values, Context, and the Concept of Integrity: A Cross-Sectoral Comparison

This study examines the role that context plays in determining which values are considered most important in administrative practice by focusing on administrators in a wide variety of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. A qualitative research design was used to create a typology of context-specific administrative roles. The findings suggest that the concept of integrity, viewed as a contextualized set of values, is helpful in articulating the link between reported values and administrative practice.

A Systems Approach to Managing Organizational Integrity Risks: Lessons From the 2014 Veterans Affairs Waitlist Scandal:

An organizational integrity system consists of the range of institutions, policies, actors, and practices that are meant to promote the integrity of an organization. These include compliance-based mechanisms, values-based mechanisms, and the informal day-to-day practices that contribute to its ethical climate. Crucially, the way in which these various elements of the system interact can have the effect of either mitigating or exacerbating an organization’s vulnerability to integrity violations. This research draws on insights from the field of behavioral ethics to highlight the manner in which a systems approach can aid in assessing and managing the factors that contribute to organizational integrity risks. Along these lines, the integrity system of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is analyzed, with particular emphasis on a case study of the events surrounding the so-called 2014 waitlist scandal. On one hand, the VA has an elaborate integrity system consisting of conceptually well-designed compliance and values-based mechanisms, especially with respect to its award-winning IntegratedEthics program. On the other hand, certain policies and practices within the VA, as well as a number of external pressures outside its control, had the effect of undermining these formal elements of the system. Consequently, the case of the 2014 VA waitlist scandal appears to have been a perfect storm of integrity risk factors that illustrates the importance of taking a systems approach to managing organizational integrity risks.