Camilla Stivers

Implications of Welfare Reform: Do Nonprofit Survival Strategies Threaten Civil Society?

Nonprofit organizations play a pivotal role in recent efforts to devolve public responsibilities to lower levels of government and other sectors. The capacity of these organizations to serve as the public safety net, however, has come under question. This multiphase research project focused on the impact of welfare reform on community-based nonprofits in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The study includes surveys, focus groups, and a case study. Results to date strongly suggest that, in spite of their importance to the welfare reform effort, the capacity of smaller nonprofits to adopt the business-oriented approach required to meet the expectations of government contracts is profoundly limited. This study discusses the implications of these findings for an enduring issue in political theory, the role of nonprofits as schools or laboratories of citizenship, and suggests that the loss of their public character is in danger of going unnoticed.

Understanding Excellence in Public Administration: The Report of the Task Force on Educating for Excellence in the Master of Public Administration Degree of the American Society for Public Administration

Abstract Understanding Excellence in Public Administration, the report of the Task Force on Educating for Excellence in the Master of Public Administration Degree of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), has been received both well and controversially. Practitioners have responded warmly and positively to its serialization in PA Times. Most academics like it, although some have reservations, as they expressed during well-attended panels devoted to the report, which were held during the national conferences of NASPAA in 2008 and ASPA in 2009. Some of the report’s recommended actions, such as those that touch on accreditation, honest advertising, programmatic clarity, and core curricula, have spurred some debate. It is worth noting, therefore, that the Task Force members, though just five in number, are broadly representative of pertinent intellectual currents. The report reveals strands of thinking that are held by constitutionalists and communalists; by technocrats and philosophers; by management scientists and political scientists; by public administrationists and public policy analysts; by those who push the hard-nosed techniques of the New Public Management and those who favor the soft-schnozzed values of the New Public Administration. This report is a first step. It is up to the professionals and professors, who are ‘public administration,’ to take the next steps.

The Ontology of Public Space Grounding Governance in Social Reality

The “new governance” envisions a network of so-called actors—sometimes organizations, sometimes individuals—which collaborate with each other to accomplish policy goals. But the ontology of this model has been largely unexplored. When examined, its objectivist assumptions obscure network dynamics and render mysterious whatever collaboration manages to occur. These assumptions, it is argued, are not logically or empirically necessary. An alternative ontology, grounded in phenomenology, opens democratic vistas that comport as well or better with empirical reality and provide much stronger support for democratic governance.

A Place Like Home Care and Action in Public Administration

Public administration has regularly reached across the divide between public and private to import ideas and practices from private business, yet ideas of home rarely make their way into administrative theory. Inspired by the “city as a home” thinking of progressive-era social reformers, this article explores conceptual barriers and generative possibilities. It suggests, first, that home vivifies aspects of administration that foster caring concern for human development. Second, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, it argues that despite Arendt’s dim view of the household, an ontology of home furthers her vision of action—public spirited speech—in administrative practice.

Administration Versus Management A Reading from Beyond the Boundaries

Public administration and public management are engaged in a struggle for control in the arena of public service. At first glance, the contest seems to be between ministering, justice, duty, and practicality on the one side and results, efficiency, objectivity, and science on the other. When a critical theory based on feminism is applied, however, each of the sides is also seen to be covertly at war with itself: each advocating a “hard” approach yet showing itself dependent on an unacknowledged but constitutive “soft” factor. As an alternative to continuing the conflict, the author advocates a regrouping of both camps around the idea of publicness.

An Ethic of Race for Public Administration

Remarkably little public administration scholarship has explored the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgments of individual administrators. We raise the issue of race in public administration despite the widespread view that the lens of race is obsolete or counterproductive. We argue that scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining long-standing policies and practices with racist implications. We explore the question of whether the lens of race reveals the outline of an ethic for administrative practice. After a brief illustrative historical review, we critique the current approaches to incorporating race into administrative practice (managing diversity and cultural competence) as inadequate for the necessary rethinking at the theoretical level. We propose an ethical framework based on American pragmatist philosophy and on Hannah Arendts notion of inclusive solidarity.

Public Administration's Myth of Sisyphus

I f there is such a thing as hell on earth, it must be an academic field in which members are condemned to have the same conversation over and over ad infinitum. Like Sisyphus, public administration appears to have been sentenced to an eternal fate: Ours is to battle over our logic of inquiry but never to get anywhere. There seems little hope of making a difference, but as a card-carrying optimist, I can do no less than try. Since the epic match in the 1950s between Herbert Simon and Dwight Waldo, the critics have been telling the science guys, “You’re not meeting your own scientific standards,” and the science guys reply, “Yes we are, and the only reason you can’t see it is that you don’t understand science.” Sometimes the scientists seize the offensive: “Your work is inferior because it doesn’t measure up to our scientific standards.” In this case, the rejoinder is, “Our standards are not inferior, just different.” In the current clash between Larry Luton and several empiricists (as he calls them), the tactical details vary, but the terrain and battle lines are essentially the same as 50 years ago. And we thought the Battle of the Somme was a pointless struggle! The contest looks at first like one that can be won, but in actuality, the way the battle lines have been drawn guarantees that no winner is possible. It is time to reconfigure the conversation and past time for us to stop slinging paper bullets at one another. Administration & Society Volume 39 Number 8 January 2008 1008-1012

Constructing Civil Space: A Dialogue

What are the possibilities for greater democratic authenticity in administration? How should this authenticity be understood? This dialogue looks toward the opportunities in constructing civil space, starting from the vantage point of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Some find it relatively easy to recognize what this greater authenticity stands against. It can be expressed in such oppositions as that between the administrative state and the authentic public, and it can be understood in terms of such targets as the traditional view of American public administration (P.A.) as a mere rationalizing project. Authentic citizen space is an issue that opposes the privileging of instrumental rationality and of the administrative itself. It speaks against the privileging of mere expert rationality, at the expense of notions such as citizen inclusion and dialogue (including participation and transparency). That these opposing inclinations should be live tensions is indicated whenever important decisions— such as those on economics or foreign policy—are “pushed down” into the bureaucracy. Consider an illustration. The prospect of decisions with adverse financial consequences for the elite surely has tended to encourage a pushing down of some major economic decision making (such as

Democratic Knowledge The Task Before Us

Maintaining the continuity of each “disputatio” is not easy. For example, there are more responses to Kenneth Oldfield’s contribution in our January DSF that could not make the printing deadline for this April issue, but they will be appearing in the May issue-probably along with responses to Camilla Stiver’s contribution in this issue. In this DSF, Camilla Stivers explores the relationships between the ways we develop, teach, and utilize knowledge in governmental systems that are assumed, or claim to be, democratic. I am confident that in reading her contribution you will be either provoked or enlightened and possibly both. Whatever your reaction, we welcome your written comments.

Unfreezing the Progressive Era: The Story of Julia Lathrop

Public administration needs to pay more attention to the Progressive era, not less. The field has forgotten what settlement workers learned about policy and administration. Julia Lathrop, a 20-year resident of Hull House and the first woman to head a federal agency, serves as an exemplar. Whereas Olasky (1992) maintains that settlement residents used poor people as means to the grandiose aim of societal change, Lathrops life and work, particularly as chief of the U. S. Childrens Bureau, show how settlement folk consciously linked their own lived experience and those of their neighbors to policy concerns. Today, their voices remind us of the inadequacy of private charity; the value of government in social action; and the importance of person-to-person connections between people in government and people in neighborhoods.