Ralph S. Brower

On Improving Qualitative Methods in Public Administration Research

What do exemplary qualitative accounts look like, and how do they convince readers of their correctness? What sort of standards can be used to assess qualitative research accounts for public administration? To address these questions, the authors examined 72 recent qualitative research journal articles. Proceeding from a set of preliminary guidelines, they worked iteratively between articles and the emergent template to produce refined guidelines. In addition, they identified specific types of dilemmas for public bureaucracies and policies that trigger researchers’ strategies for persuading readers that their qualitative accounts are credible. They conclude with four actionable recommendations for improving the field’s qualitative research.

Managing Expressive and Instrumental Accountabilities in Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations: A Qualitative Investigation

Various scholars have identified multiple sources of accountability in nonprofit and voluntary organizations (NPVOs) and have offered several typologies categorizing various streams of accountability. Only a few have attempted to offer strategies, however, to implement these differential forms of accountability. The study identifies multiple sources of NPVO accountabilities by engaging distinctions between these organizations’ instrumental and expressive activities. From a qualitative study in 16 Chinese Canadian NPVOs, three forms of expressive accountability and two forms of instrumental accountability are distinguished. The study further develops a two-dimensional accountability matrix for categorizing organizations into four types according to their levels of commitment to expressive and instrumental accountabilities. Lastly, by associating organizational and managerial factors with the task of balancing the two accountabilities, the authors draw conclusions and offer implications for managerial practice.

Organizational Fields and the Diffusion of Information Technologies Within and Across the Nonprofit and Public Sectors: A Preliminary Theory

This qualitative-inductive study examines the diffusion of information technologies across service providers that contract to provide public services for a state human service agency. The researchers were struck by extensive data that illustrated salient “ruptures,” inconsistencies, and contradictions in the information systems that stand in stark contrast to the touted characteristics of the ostensible systems. The analysis draws attention to the extensive political symbolism attached to the actual information systems and to contradictory institutional logics that different participants impose on the collecting and valuing of various parcels of information. The researchers provide a preliminary theory about the isomorphic diffusion of technologies into and across the nonprofit sector and argue that these institutional dynamics imply a structuration process at a level that is much more macro institutional than the structuration of information technology artifacts that has been emphasized by recent scholars who write in the adaptive structuration perspective.

Extending the Present Understanding of Organizational Sensemaking: Three Stages and Three Contexts

Despite a growing literature on the topic, our understanding of organizational sensemaking remains somewhat fragmented, and discussions have not yet fully integrated related ideas into a conceptual framework that includes the contextual terrain in which these activities occur. This article offers such a model. We begin with a story from a Korean fire inspector, delineating the process of his sensemaking into three stages: noticing, interpretation, and action. We demonstrate how sensemaking can be understood in three separate contexts— the ecological, institutional, and social relational. We show how each context provides a setting for a unique account of the three stages of sensemaking. We derive four theoretical propositions and conclude with implications and discuss prospects for this promising research area.

Distance Learning: Some Fundamental Questions for Public Affairs Education

Abstract This article raises fundamental questions that should be asked about the implications of distance education for public affairs teaching and practice. The questions discussed relate to educational objectives, students and their needs, adult learning theory, human and organizational limiting factors, implications for faculty, and the challenges of accreditation. The authors draw on evidence from the literature, a large focus group, and field observation on their own campus to address these issues. They conclude that student socialization presents the most important questions of all. New electronic technologies are now forcing our field to reexamine closely the processes through which we socialize future generations of public servants.

Pushing the Envelope on Organizational Effectiveness: Combining an Old Framework and a Sharp Tool

For nearly 30 years organizational effectiveness has been a central topic in the study of organizations, but the relevant literature has been characterized by controversy, confusion, and ambiguity. Moreover, powerful institutional and political forces buffet our contemporary public and nonprofit practitioners with narrowly drawn models that emphasize efficiency and productivity at the expense of other dimensions of effectiveness. This article reinvigorates a holistic model of organizational effectiveness, the competing values framework, by combining it with a newer analytic tool, data envelopment analysis, in a study of public university research institutes. This study shows that the framework and the tool are both eminently useful and that they work well in combination. We illustrate that some organizations may need to use a broader set of performance data to take full advantage of this more robust approach to assessing organizational effectiveness. The article concludes with suggestions for their continued use in subsequent effectiveness studies.

A “THIRD WAY” IN THE PHILIPPINES

This study illuminates the role of civil society actors in advocating for and helping implement The Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2010. We illustrate how these actors served as both bottom-up and top-down brokers and translators in communicating ideas and action between vulnerable communities they represent and policy actors in the Philippine national government. We situate their actions within the Philippines’ unique historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic context, noting the significance of their policy entrepreneurship by comparison to conditions a mere 25 years earlier, when the Marcos Regime would have hunted down and killed them for their activism. We conclude with observations about important contributions that the disaster risk reduction paradigm makes to development theory, and assert the importance of political and social goals, that are often drowned out by the dominant role that economics and ownership models hold in some Western conceptions of voluntary organizing.

Forms of Inter-Organizational Learning in Emergency Management Networks

This article presents a conceptual model that illustrates problematic linkages between organizational and inter-organizational learning and the effectiveness of networks of voluntary and public organizations that offer emergency and disaster management services. We believe that network effectiveness looks quite different under the turbulent environmental conditions of emergency management, and that the sorts of structures presumed to create network effectiveness under more stable institutional conditions may not necessarily operate in emergency management. The problematics of the inter-organizational learning cycle are illustrated with examples from emergency management, and we conclude with implications for studying and training for the relationships illuminated in the article.

Evolving and Implementing a New Disaster Management Paradigm: The Case of the Philippines

Two years in a row the World Risk Report has ranked the Philippines third out of 173 countries in susceptibility to disasters. The country is significantly exposed to storms, flooding, earthquakes and volcanic activity, but overall risk is exacerbated by vulnerability due to under development. As in many developing countries, disaster management historically focused on response and recovery with the military and national police as central actors. But in 2010, a consortium of civil society groups, business leaders, and university experts successfully championed a new law that emphasized community-based disaster risk reduction and attempted to intervene in the root causes of vulnerability—poverty and landlessness. We illuminate recent struggles to implement the law and offer implications for disaster management theory and practice. Ultimately, for disaster risk reduction to succeed, Filipino leaders must foster democratic institutions that are as responsive to bottom-up problems as top-down interests; build cooperation across public, private, and voluntary sectors; and strengthen human development capabilities in parallel with economic development.

How agency conditions facilitate and constrain performance-based program systems:a qualitative inquiry

This paper examines how administrators in two very different Florida state agencies implemented performance-based program budgeting. It identifies the key organizational conditions that facilitate and inhibit implemen-tation and propose implications for generalizing these observations to other settings. The study concludes that agency variables make implementation much more difficult in some settings and that a one-size-fits-all approach may contribute to a variety of delays and conflicts in the implementation process.