A growing number of public administration theorists are taking up the question of ontology—the nature of existence. This primer on the topic provides a basic explanation of ontology, describes the fundamental debates in the competing ontologies of Western philosophy, and discusses why ontology is important to social and political theory, as well as to public administration theory and practice. Using an ideal-type approach, the author analyzes how different ontologies imply particular political forms that undergird public administration theories and practices. This ideal-type model can be used to identify the ontological assumptions in these theories and practices. The article concludes with an invitation for personal reflection on the part of scholars and practitioners in regard to which ontology best fits their experience and beliefs and the alternatives that we might pursue for a better future.

While there is little empirical evidence to demonstrate which types of environmental management systems (EMSs) are associated with greater environmental improvements, governments worldwide are encouraging facilities to adopt them. This research compares the environmental performance of facilities that adopt ISO 14001–certified EMSs, complete (noncertified) EMSs, and incomplete EMSs across multiple environmental media. The authors analyze these relationships for manufacturing facilities in seven countries using a two-stage model to control for selection bias. Findings indicate that the adoption of all types of EMSs is related to improved environmental performance in an international setting. However, ISO 14001–certified EMSs are associated with environmental improvements to a broader array of environmental media. These findings offer important implications about which types of EMSs have greater promise as voluntary environmental governance tools.

This article is a longitudinal examination of a publicly funded network of health and human services organizations that provide services to mentally ill adults. Data were collected at two points in time from a single network in a large U.S. metropolitan area: when the network was completely reorganized, and again when it had matured, four years later. Analysis focuses on changes in the patterns of interaction within and across five resource-based subnetworks. The authors argue that the structure of network relationships depends on the type of resources involved—whether tangible or intangible, the stage of network evolution, and whether macro- or micro-level interactions are considered. Implications for theory and for network management, governance, and policy are discussed.

A significant increase in catastrophic wildfires in the interior West of the United States has left public land agencies scrambling to reduce dangerous fuel loads and manage forests according to an ecological understanding of fire and forest health. However, this has not translated into standardized on-the-ground fire and fuel management in public land agencies. Different on-the-ground management practices raise questions about the extent to which ecosystems management is being utilized and how well land agencies are adapting to their new responsibilities. This study employs an institutional analysis and development framework to examine how and why on-the-ground decisions and outcomes differ. Decisions and outcomes are discussed as a function of the multiple layers of institutions that guide and constrain the decision processes of line officers who are responsible for developing and executing fire and fuel management projects.

Economic theory suggests that it is optimal for governments to use precautionary saving as a countercyclical tool. However, the availability of surplus funds often triggers political pressure for tax cuts and spending increases. Mechanisms for alleviating that pressure include limiting the transparency of slack resources and limiting politicians’ discretion to use slack resources for purposes other than stabilization. This article investigates the extent to which these two mechanisms are substitutes. In particular, the authors examine whether the widespread adoption of budget stabilization funds (BSFs) in the U.S. states over the past several decades has been accompanied by a decline in conservative revenue forecast bias. Using panel data from 47 states over a 22-year period, they find that the adoption of a BSF reduces revenue underestimation by approximately two-thirds; however, the size of the effect depends in part on how much a state saves in the BSF and the rules governing BSF deposits and withdrawals. The results suggest that BSFs have the unintended effect of increasing fiscal transparency.

For more than three decades, the U.S. national government has wrestled with the problem of siting a central repository for high-level radioactive waste, most of it spent fuel from nuclear power plants. Scholars and practitioners recommend a collaborative and participative approach to the siting process to ensure accountability and representativeness, but the search for a working repository so far has been unsuccessful. Consequently, more nuclear power plants must add or expand dry cask facilities to store accumulating amounts of spent fuel. Are collaboration and accountability and successful execution of results possible in state decisions on dry cask storage in a way that they have eluded the central siting process? The special characteristics of dispersed dry cask storage, in contrast to transporting the waste to a central repository, can facilitate collaboration and accountability, as decisions on dry cask storage in Minnesota and Vermont demonstrate.

This article contributes to our understanding of public service motivation and leadership by investigating ways in which organizational leaders can reinforce and even augment the potential effects of public service motivation on employees’ attraction to the organization’s mission (mission valence). The results contribute to two research questions. First, the findings provide new evidence on the sources of public service motivation. The authors find that transformational leadership is an organizational factor associated with higher public service motivation. Second, the article examines the relationship between transformational leadership and mission valence. The authors find that transformational leadership has an important indirect effect on mission valence through its influence on clarifying organizational goals and fostering public service motivation.

New Public Management (NPM) recently has been compared and contrasted with public governance (PG) to illustrate shifts in conceptions of public administrations and in reform agendas. The authors develop measures to capture the relevance of NPM and PG in textual discourse and investigate the extent to which they have entered the political debate. Content analysis of electoral programs for the 2005 Italian regional elections reveals that even in this legalistic country, considerable attention was paid to both NPM and PG issues. An important explanatory variable in preference for NPM or PG is party ideology, highlighting often-ignored within-country dynamics. Furthermore, the authors show how a methodological approach adapted from mainly political science and business research can be exploited in the field of public administration.

Collaborative partnerships can be an effective strategy for crime prevention, especially in disorganized communities. Using ordinary least squares regression with 414 American cities, this article finds that police departments with many collaborative partnerships are able to promote informal social control within their communities and capitalize on the resources available to them with the help of other groups. This contention is supported by the effects of collaborative partnerships on crime rates in disorganized communities in comparison to well-organized communities. Thus, collaborative partnerships of public organizations with other groups may insulate disorganized communities from the effects of community disorganization on levels of crime.

Emotional labor has become an important topic in the study of organizational behavior, but no research has examined how it is affected in individuals’ motivational bases. Public administration scholars have started to study this concept, but empirical studies are still in their infancy. Focusing on a particular type of motivational base—public service motivation (PSM), this article assesses how PSM and its three dimensions (attraction to policy making, commitment to public interest, and compassion) affect two common emotional labor activities (surface acting and deep acting). Using data from a survey of certified public management students, the results show that PSM is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting. Among the PSM dimensions, attraction to policy making is positively associated with surface acting; compassion is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting; and commitment to public interest is not associated with surface acting or deep acting.

Predispositions and orientation toward cooperation or competition with other jurisdictions can play a critical role in implementing regional collaboration. By examining collaboration at the micro level, this article investigates how individual factors, including perceptions of cooperation and competition, as well as institutional and environmental factors, are related to regional collaboration. In particular, the authors assert that competitive motivation may support the emergence of regional governance mechanisms. This article explores the relationships between competitive/cooperative motivations and interlocal collaboration networks based on a network survey conducted in the Orlando, Florida, metropolitan area. The authors apply a quadratic assignment procedure regression analysis to examine how dyadic conceptual ties of cooperation and competition, along with the effect of community characteristics, affect policy network structures for economic development. By comparing estimated coefficients with sampling distributions of coefficients from all of the permuted data sets, the regression results indicate the influences of perceived competition/cooperation on the network exchange.

Scholars of public administration in the United States traditionally view the 1920s as a decade when the administrative orthodoxy, emphasizing efficiency and organizational structure, dominated the field. This viewpoint recently has been challenged by arguments that the social justice–oriented views of women progressives and the philosophy of pragmatism also influenced public administration. However, no one has examined how women public administrators implemented exceptions to the prevailing, masculine viewpoints of administrative objectivity and the strict dichotomy between politics and administration during the 1920s. Using Mary Anderson (1872–1964), the longtime director of the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, as a case study, this article examines how her experiences as a woman worker and labor organizer influenced her advocacy of an alternative view of public administration, and how, from 1920 through 1930, she established the Women's Bureau within the prevailing orthodoxy yet also made the government agency a notable exception through its vigorous support of social justice feminism, particularly during and after the 1926 national Women's Industrial Conference.

Although research-extensive universities in the United States produce similar outcomes—research, teaching, and service—they vary substantially in terms of the publicness of their environments. In this article, the authors adopt a public values framework to examine how regulative, normative/associative, and cultural cognitive components affect realized public outcomes by faculty. Using survey data from a random sample of faculty scientists in six fields of science and engineering at Carnegie Research I universities, findings show that organizational and individual public values components are associated predictably with different realized individual public outcomes. For example, individual support from federal resources and affiliation with a federal lab (associative) are related to increased research outcomes, while tuition and fee levels (regulative) explain teaching outcomes, and perceived level of influence in the workplace (cultural cognitive) explains teaching and service outcomes.

This article establishes a framework for explaining the ways in which citizens, as clients of public services, attempt to deal with situations of combined market and government failures. Under certain conditions, citizens are driven to create self-production mechanisms that often are extralegal or illegal. When faced with such social initiatives, politicians often support them, either passively or actively, by institutionalizing the new mechanisms. The article explains the evolution of the self-provision model and its implications. The analysis includes a theoretical framework and a practical intervention scheme.