PAR Preview ▪ Issue 8 ▪ June 2012
PAR Preview is a monthly newsletter that calls attention to forthcoming articles in PAR.
PAR Preview provides brief summaries of content now available digitally in Early View,
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Perspective
Retirement security for Americans and the role of defined-benefit pension plans
Thomas P. DiNapoli (Comptroller of the State of New York) suggests that a recent move toward widespread availability of a 401(k)-style plan for public employees is shortsighted and we need to put the public pension debate into longer-term perspective. He believes that defined-benefit pension plans make more economic sense and cost less over the long term than 401(k)-style plans do. Particularly, the latter is inadequate for those who rely on them as primary retirement income since they are designed to supplement pensions and Social Security income. Also, public pensions have a stabilizing impact on the national economy by supporting employment and increasing tax revenues. In conclusion, the author argues we must ensure retirement security as an earned right for all Americans. Click to read this article
Research Article
Policy alienation of public professionals: The construct and its measurement
Lars Tummers (Erasmus University Rotterdam) investigates the identification problems that public professionals face with new policies by employing the concept of policy alienation and developing a scale for its measurement. Policy alienation is defined as a general cognitive state of psychological disconnection from the policy program which is implemented by a public professional who has regular interactions with clients. The author proposes that policy alienation has five subdimensions: strategic powerlessness, tactical powerlessness, operational powerlessness, societal meaninglessness, and client meaninglessness, and generates items for each subdimension. A survey of 478 Dutch healthcare professionals shows that the resulting 23-item scale of policy alienation is reliable and valid. Click to read this article
Understanding shared roles in policy and administration: An empirical study of council-manager relations
Tansu Demir (University of Texas at San Antonio) and Christopher G. Reddick (University of Texas at San Antonio) analyze what enhances the shared roles of elected officials and public administrators in policy making and administration. They propose and test a number of variables that might contribute to the policy-making role of city managers and the administrative role of elected officials. Using data from a nationwide survey of city managers in local governments, the authors find that the council's expectations and the city manager's role conception influence the city manager's involvement in policy making. On the other hand, the context of policy making, the city manager's support, and the council's access to resources affect elected officials' involvement in administration. Click to read this article
Commentaries on this article by Sheryl Sculley (City of San Antonio, Texas) and by Ivy R. Taylor (University of Texas at San Antonio) are available online. Click to read these commentaries
Public service motivation and support for citizen participation
David Coursey (University of Texas at Arlington), Kaifeng Yang (Florida State University), and Sanjay K. Pandey (Rutgers University-Newark) examine the relationship between public service motivation (PSM) and public managers' attitudes toward citizen participation. Based on Perry and Vandenabeele's reformulation of PSM theory, the authors test whether the effect of PSM on managers' evaluation of citizen participation activities is mediated by value congruence and whether it is moderated by their perception of the importance of such activities. A latent variable analysis of data from the National Administrative Studies Project suggests that PSM has a direct and positive influence on citizen participation evaluation and this impact is moderated by the perceived importance of citizen participation efforts. Click to read this article
Socializer or signal? How agency accreditation affects organizational culture
Manuel P. Teodoro (Colgate University) and Adam G. Hughes (University of Virginia) explore how agency accreditation influences organizational culture in public agencies. Agency accreditation helps professionalize public service not only by requiring an agency to adopt a set of standards, policies, and practices that are sanctioned by external organizations but also by changing employees' identities, beliefs, and preferences. The authors hypothesize that accreditation (1) socializes employees and/or (2) signals the agency's priorities to employees. An analysis of data from six police departments in the U.S. indicates that there is no relationship between agency accreditation and officers' own values, but accreditation is strongly associated with officers' perceptions of their agencies' priorities. Click to read this article
Book Reviews
Belief systems and the endurance of public agencies
Maja Husar Holmes (West Virginia University) reviews Mission Mystique: Belief Systems in Public Agencies by Charles Goodsell (2011). In the book, Goodsell develops a conceptual framework of how belief systems create, renew, and sometimes misguide public organizations over time based on in-depth case studies of federal, state, and local agencies. The most significant contribution of this book, writes Holmes, is to help understand what guides and empowers individuals in public organizations to deliver sustained public value. Click to read this book review
The Empowerment Project: Helpful but incomplete
Steven Rathgeb Smith (University of Washington) reviews Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End by Nina Eliasoph (2011). This book examines the Empowerment Project by exploring the actual workings of these community programs, their efforts on youth and adult volunteers, and the intended and unintended outcomes of the project. Smith emphasizes that this book is an excellent addition to the literature on voluntarism and community service, and it offers practical implications for policy makers and public managers. Click to read this book review
Public Administration Review is published by Wiley on behalf of the
American Society for Public Administration.
Editor-in-Chief: James L. Perry ▪ Managing Editor: Michael McGuire
Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs
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