Larkin S. Dudley

From reorganizing to reinventing: sixty years and “we still don’t get it”

Sixty years ago the “Brownlow Committee Report” was written by some of the most prominent members of the emerging field of public administration. Its recommendations had serious consequences for the way both our democratic republic and the field of public administration have evolved. In developing principles in which to anchor the recommendations, Luther Gulick, who was both the intellectual and political force behind the committee, contributed to a confusion of the concepts of organizations and the polity and those of management and governance. Some of the story of how the concepts promoted by Gulick and the Papers on the Science of Administration led to a misconception, which became public administrations living legacy is told in this article. We then discuss the Brownlow Committee Report as something which changed: our very conception of the Constitution; Gulicks rationale for cooperation with Franklin D. Roosevelt; the Report as a misplacement of organizational concepts upon a polity; the dimensions...

Learning and Teaching about Deliberative Democracy: on Campus and in the Field

Abstract College students, particularly those enrolled in public affairs programs, need to learn the skills of deliberative democracy. How can public affairs programs develop these skills and knowledge base among their students? This paper reports on a variety of efforts to teach deliberative democracy to undergraduates and graduate students through coursework and extracurricular experience.We describe how public affairs programs may include deliberative democracy in the curriculum through the teaching of basic participation models, the art of reasoned judgment, moderator skills, issue framing, and the crafting of research agendas from practice. Developing these democratic competencies will benefit students as future citizens and/or public officials.

ENDURING NARRATIVES FROM PROGRESSIVISM

The narratives that would give meaning to at least four generations of scholars and practitioners are amplified in the discourse growing out of the elements of technical rationality, pragmatism, evolution, and the rush of different ideas and new institutions that punctuate the Progressive period. The narratives explored below persist in public administration from the beginning of the twentieth century: preparation for the rise of national institutions, the citizen-state relationship, reconciling democracy and administration, and science and scientific management. Throughout the paper, the authors interest in the reconciliation of freedom and order is explored in the relationship between self and community, citizen and nation, and politics and administration.

Searching for a collective ethos in interorganizational relationships

Globalization accelerates the need to accommodate the ethical guidelines of different cultures, the subject of many of the papers in the symposium. In a similar manner, the increased use of interorganizational relationships to accomplish projects accelerates the need to confront the value discontinuities in collaboration among representatives from the public, private, nonprofit, and volunteer sectors within American society. Rather than tackling the question of the precise principles to follow in models of interorganizational relationships versus the need for the thick descriptions of the particular, the focus of this paper is more middle-range. The paper outlines some suggested means of connecting the assumptions of several models of interorganizational relationships with the insights of models of establishing a collective ethos. The tone is meant to be tentative and suggestive of a way to begin connecting diverse strands of literature, the problematic posed by the increasing engagement of interorganizational relationships in public administration

Rethinking relationships in governing: some Weberian distinctions

Uses the distinctions Max Weber draws between means and ends of economics and politics in Economy and Society to explore why the discussion of ends may be neglected in current conversations on privatization and reinvention. Includes a discussion of possible relationships between public and private based on Weberian concepts of the life spheres of politics and economics and the contrasting types of status and purposive contracts. Suggests that to increase emphasis on ends, as well as means, public dialogue should focus on giving an account as well as on holding organizations to account. For public management to focus on giving an account, more attention needs to be given to appreciating a public law framework, understanding the relationships in different types of contract, and creating conditions favourable to communicative rationality.

Looking Back to Look Forward: Federal Officials’ Perceptions of Public Engagement:

The authors of the Refounding volumes raised concerns about citizen inclusion in agency decision making. We respond by studying public participation in federal decision making through 61 interviews with federal officials. We examine the interviewees’ candid perceptions of public engagement through three themes of the Refounding: the importance of deliberation, attention to whose words are heard, and facilitation of the processes of interaction. Our findings suggest that while agencies do work to engage the public, there are still many challenges to achieving meaningful public participation, which yields consequences for legitimacy and trust.

Organizational learning: modeling an intervention in a foster care system

This paper maps the organizational learning processes in a policy intervention program. A state department of social services designed an intervention for local agencies and implemented it with a university. A closer observation of patterns detected organizational learning in local agencies by the increase in the penetration rate-a ratio of federal to state funding. An organizational learning model is constructed to understand the organizational learning process in this particular instance. The model includes learning modes and the roles that the policy knowledge instigators had played in the process. Each mode and role is defined and the model is refined based on in-depth interviews with participants in the learning process.