Nicholas C. Zingale

Chains of Freedom: A View from Erich Fromm on Individuality within Organizations

Do individuals have freedom or are they free? This project utilizes phenomenology and Erich Fromms concepts of having and being to explore the issue of awareness through the lens of individuals working in public and private organizations. It argues that awareness of freedom is not only structurally constrained within organizations, but serves to conflate a way of being. Further, it suggests, individuals, and especially societal leaders, have a responsibility to take a stand and act according to what provides them with meaning so as to preserve and expand access to individual freedom.

Retaining Public Value And Public Law Value In Outsourcing

We argue that the proliferation of governance in the public sector has raised questions regarding individual constitutional rights. While some proclaim cost savings and entrepreneurial solutions to vexing social ills, others suspect that these benefits donʼt outweigh the risk of diminished accountability and the loss of constitutional protection over public service production. We propose a new model to examine the relationships between direct government, governance, public value, and public law value. We apply this model to analyze two landmark Supreme Court cases and one contemporary federal appellate court case to explore the ongoing tension between the governance model and public service production. Our findings suggest that enforcible contract language and public-private entwinement can be used as tools to protect constitutional rights in the face of increasing pressure of governance approaches.

Leadership Matters: So Does the Attitude of the Leader

Lively debate has surrounded the issue of regulatory agencies shifting from a coercive to a cooperative approach and the effects this change will have on environmental policy and practice. Advocates for cooperative interventions claim that voluntary approaches for protecting the environment, in the form of an environmental management system (EMS), provide opportunities for improved environmental performance and compliance (Ammenberg & Hjelm, 2003; Corbett & Cutler, 2000; Global Environment and Technology Foundation, 2000; Howard, Nash, & Ehrenfeld, 1999; Potoski & Prakash, 2005; Prakash, 1999; Raines & Prakash, 2005; Tan, 2003). In addition, some proponents are convinced that a facility with an effective EMS will operate more predictably and yield environmental performance while at the same time reducing the government’s inspection and enforcement costs (Corbett & Cutler, 2000; Potoski & Prakash, 2004; Prakash, 1999; Scholz & Gray, 1997). This, it is argued, allows the government to redirect scarce regulatory resources toward higher-risk facilities (Global Environment and Technology Foundation, 2000; Howard, Nash, & Ehrenfeld, 1999; Prakash, 1999). Opponents, who dispute the likelihood that an EMS will result in better environmental performance, disagree that environmental management

Loose Governance in Action: Tinkering Around in a Shrinking City

Eva Sørensen noted that “liberty is a way of governing not an opposing concept.” This is a powerful statement for public administration to contemplate as American society drifts further toward networked governance approaches. This article considers the role of public administration in community economic development projects when tinkering around with new ideas in legacy cities. Focusing on a worker-owned cooperative case in Cleveland, Ohio, we use in-depth interviews, observations, and document reviews to analyze the structural, conceptual, and contextual conditions leading to the formation of the cooperative. We discovered that innovative initiatives are not always well planned, can happen in the shadow of administration, and, in fact, might need to be structurally and functionally loose to enable social entrepreneurial bricoleurs (tinkerers) optimal space to play around with ideas. We argue that public administrators need to be aware of the overarching conditions framing community economic development projects (doxa) and offer a way for public administrators to think about their role within loose governance in order to gain and/or sustain political capital.

From Grout to Grip Intentionality and the Freedom to Gain a Feel for the Work

This article explores the different understandings of intentionality as applied to the San Francisco cable car transportation employees. We argue that part of doing work requires a person to act and choose, meaning foreclosing on some possibilities while attending to others as an intentional expression of freedom. We draw a parallel between cable car operators and public administrators and suggest that each has to do more than just learn a set of skills traditionally depicted as knowledge acquisition. They must also become skillful by developing a feel for the work and a greater appreciation for the meaning of their craft.

Trial by Space: Articulating Value in the Context of a Shrinking City

Successfully guiding the transition of space within shrinking cities presents a challenge to public administrators, urban designers, and planners faced with developing policies and practices to cope with declining conditions. This project examines a particular site, “The Flats,” the waterfront area of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, and asks how assumptions about desirable uses have shifted over time. Henry Lefebvre’s notion of “trial by space” is adapted to create a heuristic tool for highlighting the implications of alternative land uses along two axes: domination and appropriation. Historic postcards, interviews with administrators, and recent planning documents for the Flats are analyzed to highlight values embedded in past spatial practices and proposed land uses. Finally, we suggest that the trial by space model is applicable beyond shrinking cities and can operate as a tool with which not only scholars but also policy makers, administrators, politicians, planners, and citizens can assess the implications of administrative plans and land use proposals.

Dementors Circling Higher Education: Countering the Administrative Mood (Stimmung) of Empirical Science

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was concerned with our tendency to place greater value on numbers than they ought to have, and in response called for science to return to the “soil” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) . Other thinkers like Follett, Arendt, and Hummel have hinted that our desire for objectivity might have led us to believe that numbers can not only bring us closer to reality, but that numbers, in fact, provide us with reality. This article explores the overall mood created by the application of limited measures in higher education and uses the image of a dementor, a figure from Harry Potter that pulls or teases at the soul of an individual, to analyze the implications of the current practices of academic administration. It argues that the academic administration’s contextualized “managerial processing and efficiency” response to current political pressures questioning the value of higher education has altered the mood in higher education by pulling at both employees and students by using ideas from empirical science. This response has affected education in a serious way. This manuscript examines things like “bean-counting”—for example, the preoccupation with teaching evaluations, grants, graduation rates, or grades—and asks why they are with us as technologies, the mood they create, and what they could mean for how we understand the meaning of higher education. We write not in believing that we can necessarily escape the powerful mood of empirical science as a political response to waning belief in the value of higher education, but in an effort to develop a counter mood.

Introduction to the Forum: Stories in Tribute: The Legacy of Ralph P. Hummel

The bureaucratic “conversion machinery” of which Ralph Hummel (2008, p. xxi) so eloquently spoke is not abating in strength. It continues to subvert the ideals for creating a more humanistic world under the shroud of technicism capable of devolving moral responsibility in the promise of instrumental reasoning. It is maliciously and insidiously subverting the meaning of everyday experience. It is totalizing, although not necessarily totalitarian. It is everywhere, and nowhere in particular. The tentacles of bureaucratic machinery, indeed, touch on virtually every sphere of human existence trapping the individual person in a Weberian iron cage while accepting, even welcoming, a shackling of the mind. Like Virgil to Dante, Ralph Hummel exposes us to the hellacious conditions of an enframed mind (see Dante Aligiheri, trans. 1980). And yet, the possibility for resistance remains, at least for those, to apply differently Hummel’s words, who have “the courage of exercising whatever is left of human freedom” (2008, p. 231). For those craving to resist, and for many others, Hummel’s work continues to be a crucial landmark in thinking of a different world. This forum is a tribute to Ralph Hummel’s legacy and concedes that every experience exceeds what can be said about it. Nonetheless, we have attempted through these selections to feature various authors whose lives were touched by Ralph Hummel as a person and as a scholar. María Verónica Elías directly addresses the core aspect of Hummel’s scholarship, our freedom under threat from the unrelentingly imposing narratives of technical rationality, which ignore or marginalize those “who are amateurs in theory but experts in life,” as she puts it in Hummel’s words. Hummel’s unremitting call for freedom, Elías reminds us, is also a call to action and a ray of hope for the recovery of humanity in our communal interactions, in which we can negotiate everything