Jennifer K. Alexander

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.

Public-Nonprofit Partnership: Realizing the New Public Service

This longitudinal study tracks the generation of trust between a public agency and nine community-based nonprofits (CBNs) over a 10-year period. The evolution from active distrust to trust was demonstrated by the generation of ideological consensus and domain consensus achieved through sharing information, integrated responsibilities and authority, and collaborative decision making. Results indicate that public—nonprofit partnerships create a locus for the practice of the New Public Service. CBNs offer public administrators a bridge into disenfranchised communities and a point of engagement where partners join public agency resources and expertise with tacit knowledge of community through a trusted institution.

Introduction to the Symposium: Accountability and Performance Measurement: The Evolving Role of Nonprofits in the Hollow State

In October 2008, the Center for Accountability and Performance (CAP) of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) cosponsored a symposium to examine the challenges of accountability in public–nonprofit partnerships. This unprecedented partnership brought together scholars and practitioners to examine one of the most challenging issues facing both public and nonprofit organizations—accountability in third-party government. Two of the main themes driving the call for greater nonprofit accountability were the “hollowing of the administrative state” (Milward, Provan, & Else, 1993), a metaphor that describes the public sector’s heavy reliance on nonprofit and private sector organizations to deliver services, and the new public management (NPM), a movement to introduce private sector management techniques into public and nonprofit organizations in the quest to make them more effective and efficient. The symposium solicited research directed to practitioner concerns and was structured to elicit dialogue between practitioners and academicians with the intention of identifying and defining issues and trends to inform application given the practical challenges experienced by nonprofit and public sector managers. Held at the Maxine Goodman Levine College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, the symposium on “Accountability and Performance Measurement: The Evolving Role of Nonprofits in the Hollow State” attracted 130 attendees to workshops and panel sessions over 2 days. The closing session, structured as a “fishbowl,” was led by six practitioners who reviewed the recurrent themes of the panel sessions. These practitioners included executive directors of large community social service organizations with established histories of partnership with the public sector as well as government leaders. The fishbowl encouraged audience participation and dialogue, and

A Global Comparison of Business Journal Ranking Systems

The authors compared business journal ranking systems from 6 countries. Results revealed a low degree of agreement among the systems, and a low to moderate relationship between pairs of systems. In addition, the French and United Kingdom ranking systems were different from each other and from the systems in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, and the United States. The authors discuss results from a cultural embeddedness perspective. They provide conceptual implications and managerial implications for business schools.

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.

A NEW ETHICS OF THE BUDGETARY PROCESS

This article analyzes the ethical codes within public budgeting literature to demonstrate the need for a professional ethic that fosters an expanded sense of role responsibility. Drawing on examples of discretion exhibited by state and local budgeting administrators, the article argues that a number of administrative activities fall into a gap of the academic literature. The article asserts that responsible budgeting decisions must be tied to an understanding of how administrative activities affect the collective welfare. Finally, the author argues that a pedagogy of public budgeting that considers the ways in which institutional forces and the long-term public interest inform administrative action more adequately prepares budgeting administrators to understand their roles and responsibilities.

Administrative Discretion: Can We Move Beyond Cider House Rules?

The authors use a novel, The Cider House Rules, as a framework to examine legitimate administrative action when execution of a law will result in harm. Four political values that have informed administrative dissent are reviewed: publicity, utility, democracy, and liberty. The authors identify questions to serve as guidelines for front-line administrators when deciding to exercise discretion in opposition to a political mandate. The questions offer checkpoints for considering whether administrative action in opposition to mandate is ethical. The authors extend the logic of the new public service by arguing that administrators are responsible for protecting liberty because liberty is constitutionally fundamental and particularly at risk in the case of citizens peripheral to political processes. The authors argue that administrative discretion in opposition to mandate requiring secrecy or misrepresentation may be exercised under particular circumstances, for the protection of individual liberty, given its elevated status among the regime values.

Book Review: Cultivating Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America

tral importance or fail to reveal and explore basic concepts that are needed to manage and understand a nonprofit organization. Such is the case with the otherwise very thorough Marketing chapter, which fails to point out that NGOs have to compete on two markets, that of clients or beneficiaries and that of donors. More often than not, the beneficiaries’ market is not a solvent one, whereas donors—whether private or government—have no control over the actual satisfaction of the beneficiaries. This has an effect on all aspects of marketing, from pricing to competition. A key issue is therefore the ability of the NGO to navigate between and position itself appropriately toward both of its markets. Similarly, the chapter on Strategy Development omits any discussion of vision, mission and values of the NGO, the clarity and relevance of which are core to any successful nonprofit strategy. The chapter on volunteering, on the other hand, stands out from among the management chapters. It presents the theoretical material in a way that is related to the experience of NGOs in CE and discusses key issues facing NGO leaders and volunteers—for example, the stifling effect of state paternalism on citizen activity and how this has been slow to change in the past 15 years. It also points to the dangers of using volunteers with the wrong motivation and describes problems volunteers can cause in the NGO, which is usually overlooked by other studies on volunteering. It also provides concrete examples and tips and hints for managing volunteers. Despite the above-described drawbacks, Part III of the book is a great resource on probably the widest range of management issues compiled in one publication in CE. It does provide an overview of all the necessary basic knowledge to run an NGO. In summary, the editors and contributors of the book deserve thanks from current and prospective policy makers, practitioners, and supporters of the nonprofit sectors in Central Europe. Such a comprehensive collection of thinking on civil society has been long awaited in this part of the world.

Ranking Business and Economics Journals in South America Using the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO).

Access to published research for knowledge creation and education in the administrative science disciplines in South America has been enhanced since the introduction of the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). Although SciELO has been available as an online journal indexing and publication service since 1998, there have been no bibliometric investigations conducted to identify the quality of journals available through the database. The authors used 4 common ranking measures and an overall index to evaluate the quality of SciELO journals. Age and discipline of the journal seem to be important factors to support impact and ranking. Implications of the findings for business school faculty, administrators, and researchers are discussed.