Chester A. Newland

The Public Administration Review and Ongoing Struggles for Connectedness

Facilitation of connectedness has been a fundamental role of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the Public Administration Review (PAR) throughout their six decades of professional service. Together, they have sought to link practitioners and academicians across subfields and varied levels of activities. As a foremost refereed journal, PAR has sought to encourage the linking of practice and theory through timely publication of methodologically disciplined research, informed analyses and commentaries, and constructive literature reviews and correspondence. These responsibilities have been persistently challenging. ASPA and PAR have served a dynamic field that has made some wrong turns and had others forced on it, resulting in failed autonomy, followed by increasing partisan politicization of governments and reduced reliance on professionally expert administration. For ASPA, it has created leadership and membership problems. For PAR, it has sometimes exacerbated difficulties in connecting practitioners and academicians, but it has also created more shared concerns as important subjects of inquiry. Challenges now are to serve both enduring and new spheres of the field that are afforded by international and domestic developments. Both ASPA and PAR are striving to do that. Globalization of public administration opens a world of opportunities today. Localization, as a fundamental of constitutional democracy, is a priority internationally, presenting an engaging paradox of global attention to both place and planet. That is linked in this commentary to the classic democracy-bureaucracy quandary that has constructively challenged public administration. While arrays of other important subjects, old and new, need to command attention in PAR, these are linked in this analysis to todays theory and practice of interdependent facilitative states to assess how the journal serves its

Public Executives: Imperium, Sacerdotium, Collegium? Bicentennial Leadership Challenges

Challenges surrounding public executive leadership as America enters the third century of the Constitution are examined here. The focus is chiefly the presidency but with some comparisons and contrasts with professional local government managers. Since the beginnings of formal study of public administration, these two quite different executive levels have been principal concerns. Space limits prevent dealing with other executives here, and these two levels best highlight bicentennial era developments. Three crucial dimensions of the present environment of presidential and other public executive performance are discussed initially. First, big national expenditures fund many public activities which are performed by private interests and state and local governments; except for such direct entitlements as Social Security, relatively less is spent on functions performed directly by the national government. Second, American political parties-never disciplined in an European parliamentary sense-declined for nearly three decades before the 1980s as vehicles of sustained, national coalition building; special interest groups and political action committees have grown enormously in numbers, expenditures, and influence. Third, mass media largely dominate communication of political and governmental affairs; political image makers encourage a media focus on personality and contrived situations more than on substantive achievement. Factors two and three combine to produce a common result: BIG money is required to finance todays politics. That has major consequences for public administration. Big money in politics is significantly related to the first of two functions of chief executives which are discussed in part two of this assessment: executive staffing and increased reliance by presidents and other partisanly elected chief executives on transient political appointees for positions formerly filled by long-term professional experts. Besides executive staffing, a cluster of substantive functions of the chief executive is discussed in part two: policy leadership, implementation, and institutional/organizational maintenance and development. One thesis here is that achievement by the president and other elected political executives in these substantive responsibilities has been substantially diminished by a combination of high-level spoils and imperial/sacerdotal imagery.

The Facilitative State, Political Executive Aggrandizement, and Public Service Challenges:

Connecting public service with civic duty and advancing both as disciplines of facilitative governance are opportunities and challenges today. Making these linkages is a theme of this analysis, and theories and practices of facilitative nation states are the principal focus. Executive aggrandizement and combined complexities of a growing paradox of partisan fragmentation and seamless connections of politics, business, and government compose a second theme. Garrison state dimensions of counterterrorism are related. The final focus is on political and career service and standards of social and economic self-governance. Facilitative state disciplines of constitutional democracy are stressed in conclusion.

Policy/Program Objectives and Federal Management: The Search for Government Effectiveness

Management by objectives, instituted on April 18, 1973, by Presidential Memoranda to heads of 21 federal agencies, was pronounced still-born by some and wished so by others; and with the passing of the Nixon Administration in the incredible scandal of Watergate it has been assumed dead by many. But although prematurely pronounced dead, like its predecessor, planningprogramming-budgeting, MBO is very much alive in the federal government. In fact, both PPB and MBO are coexisting, almost comfortably, together with both older and younger siblings, cousins, and near-strangers in the complex of federal management, budgeting, and politics. To understand MBO in the federal government, it is essential to examine it in the context of dominant federal management and budgeting trends since the 1940s, in which MBO is one of the more important developments. That is the purpose of this article. The thesis is that performance budgeting, productivity measurement, PPB, the social indicators movement, MBO, and program evaluation are intimately related management approaches in an increasingly difficult search for government effectiveness.

Juggling and Serving Accountably: Panorama and Normative Synthesis on Public Service

Chet Newland is a teacher at the University of Southern California, where he serves as Duggan Distinguished Professor. He is a past national president of ASPA and a past editor in chief of PAR. His public service has included early years in the U.S. Air Force; elected city council membership in Denton, Texas; work as the initial director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library; and service twice as director of the Federal Executive Institute. Chester A. Newland, University of Southern California Beryl A. Radin, The Accountable Juggler: The Art of Leadership in a Federal Agency (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002). 160 pp.,

Public Management and Reform in the United States

21.95 paper. ISBN: 1-56802-643-9. Janet V. Denhardt and Robert B. Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serving, not Steering (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). 198 pp.,

PAR: A Professional Journal for Practitioners and Academicians

22.95 paper, ISBN: 0-7656-0846-4;

Marshall Dimock on leadership: Keeping the human element alive in large institutions

54.95 hard, ISBN: 0-7656-0845-6.

A Mid-Term Appraisal-The Reagan Presidency: Limited Government and Political Administration

Reform at the national level of United States government is, in many respects, a never-ending preoccupation. An old joke is that America was perfect in its creation and that Americans have been in a frenzy most of the time since to improve upon it. The last half of that statement is not a joke with respect to the administrative state since its rise to prominence during the last part of the nineteenth century. Yet, despite what appears generally as perpetual reform, some distinct movements are discernible. Some are simultaneous and either contradictory or complimentary. Disconnection among some reforms is common over time and at almost any given time.

Transformational Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe and Schools of Public Administration

very different perspectives agree about an article. While any good social scientist ought to be able to spot a bad paper or appreciate a brilliant one, disciplinary differences sometimes cause reviewers to disagree. Adjudicating such disputes is the editors equivalent of the policymakers need to deal with conflicting political, economic and social pressures. The object is to maintain professional standards without falling victim to disciplinary vetoes.