Charles T. Goodsell

The Concept of Public Space and Its Democratic Manifestations

The term public space has multiple meanings depending on the scholarly discipline. One aim ofthis article is to develop a unified concept of public space that draws on varied pertinent literatures, while at the same time expanding the idea’s coverage to incorporate the impacts oftele vision and information technology. A second objective is to utilize the concept to explore empirically the practical possibilities for making public space more democratic, using for this purpose several photographs of actual public spaces.

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.

Six Normative Principles for the Contracting-Out Debate

Six normative principles are developed for consideration in the debate as to when and how government should directly administer its activities versus contract them out. These differ from the inherently governmental and economic efficiency criteria commonly espoused. The principles are inspired by the purposes of government stated in the Preamble to the Constitution and are developed according to Friedrich’s concept of public administration as a disciplined taking of measures. Even though illustrative rather than comprehensive, the principles collectively show how public administration has moral, legal, and economic obligations.

Client Evaluation of Three Welfare Programs A Comparison of Three Welfare Programs

Three welfare programs—Social Security, Public Welfare, and Unemployment Compensation—are compared with respect to client evaluations of services received. To structure this comparison, an independent variable of administrative program is derived from three components, namely, climate, technology, and clientele. Data on client evaluation are obtained from exit interviews of clients as they leave welfare offices. A hypothesized order of client satisfaction among the three programs is supported empirically in large measure. It is proposed that the field of comparative administration concern itself more with such comparisons instead of concentrating on cross-national comparisons.

The Contented Older Client of Bureaucracy

Interviews of 240 welfare clients as they departed from welfare offices in four U.S. cities indicate a marked tendency for older clients to be more satisfied than younger clients with treatment and services received in just-completed bureaucratic encounters. Other studies have shown similar tendencies. It is speculated that the phenomenon is a combination of pro-elderly discrimination on the part of bureaucrats and a tendency for older Americans subjectively to perceive their experiences with officialdom in a more favorable light.

Mission Mystique: Strength at the Institutional Center

Despite discussion in the literature of “new governance,” the self-standing government agency continues to constitute the institutional center of American public administration. Drawing on his volume Mission Mystique, the author proposes that the book’s concept of mystique and its template of institution-strengthening characteristics be used to reaffirm this point, buttress agencies against defunding, and enable them better to oversee devolved activities.

Administration as ritual

Public administration as an activity possesses in large degree the formal attributes of secular collective ritual, e.g., repetition, role playing, stylization, order, staging, and creation of meaning. Three types of administrative ritual can be identified: explicit rites, such as ceremonies and regularized events; formalistic processes, like budgeting and auditing; and expressive programs, exemplified by anti-drug campaigns and rural free delivery. Rituals constructed inside organizations tend to use specialized language and involve active participation; those directed to outsiders employ lay language and dramatic forms. Ritual in administration is unavoidable, and it affects different observers differently. If excessively compelling, it could be dangerous, but within proper constraints it helps to state collective purpose and reinforces common bonds. Administration can be understood, at least in substantial part, as ritual. It is argued here that a ritualistic interpretation of administrative life provid...

Insights for Public Administration from the Terrorist Attacks

In this article written in mid-January 2002, the author offers four insights for his field derived from the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. These relate to how public administration can stir our hearts and meet exigencies on one hand and how the field needs to do some rethinking and maturation on the other.

The new comparative administration: A proposal

This position paper proposes that pessimistic self-criticism in the field of comparative public administration be replaced by recognition of its already notable accomplishments; and, more importantly, by its clearly great promise when the field is not narrowly conceived as merely non-American public administration but a generic, master field of administrative study. Hence the “new comparative administration” incorporates subnational and supranational comparisons as well as those in which the independent variable of national or national system is used. Also the redefined field will embrace: organizational, programmatic, and other such comparisons; use of disparate comparative methodologies ; and research aimed frankly at ameliorating practical problems. This redefinition is intended not to down-grade the study of public administration in foreign countries, but merely to place that work in a broader disciplinary context in which revitalization can proceed.

Teaching State Public Policy: Distance Learning and “Converged” Instruction

Abstract Distance learning technologies may be regarded as the means to accrue instructional economies, but more importantly they create opportunities for enriching the higher education learning experience in imaginative, mixed-media ways. This article describes an experimental course on State Public Policy taught at Virginia Techs Center for Public Administration in which spatial, temporal, pedagogical, and study-practice distances were transcended by a coordinated strategy of converged instruction. The course design sought to establish a multiple yet focused set of connections between students disbursed throughout the state on the one hand and the policy-making process in the state capital on the other, thereby immersing the class in the realities of intense legislative-session politics and policy.