Kellough And Nigro: A Thematic Analysis

Paul C. Light’s (2006) article, “The Tides of Reform Revisited: Patterns in Making Government Work, 1945-2002”, has revealed to the readers how the current landscape of administrative reorganization is and how the sphere is gradually being dominated by four major competing ideas, viz. scientific management, the war on waste, the watchful eye, and liberation management. Light (2006), has explained how at the very heart of the American reform policies lays the four tides of reform ingrained with four philosophies. Light (2006) has stated that “the Constitution contains harbingers of all four “tides,” or philosophies, of administrative reform that populate the federal statute books today. It spoke to the logical of scientific management by creating a single executive with tight day-to-day control over the officers and departments of government. It laid basis for future wars on waste by requiring an annual accounting of expenditures and revenue while reserving the appropriation power for Congress.” Light (2006) has also stated that, the Constitution also “emphasized the need for a watchful eye on government excess through an elegant system of checks and balances. And it invented future efforts to liberate government from excessive regulation by vesting all executive powers in the president.” It is noteworthy that, Light (2006) has tried to make the readers understand how in the recent decades, all the four tides have accelerated in pace and intensity and how such acceleration

“Robert Tobias (2010) argues that to be effective, human resource managers need to embrace the possibility of positive and productive relations with labor unions.” (Riccucci pg. 10-11)

As the years pass us by time is not the only element that changes. The governmental system is affected by many phenomena, such as war, policy, law and power. The book written by Donald J. Savoie scrutinizes the overall structure of the public service government. He heavily examines the foundations of government to reconfiguring the organization as a whole. Breaking the Bargain was a very impressionable book; it draws on the alterations the occurred by using charts/tables, published/unpublished governmental documents and interviews with 45 present and former government officials for detailed first-hand perspectives on the system.

Goodsell’s book “The Case for Bureaucracy: A Public Administration Polemic” is composed on the contrary. Goodsell makes several arguments in favor of the fundamental soundness of American bureaucracy. His thoughts are derived from a core belief: the quality of public service in the United States is vastly underrated (p. xi). His polemic is such that the flaws and the faults of bureaucracy in America are far fewer on a proportionate basis than is generally thought. The argument of this book is that a wide gap exists between bureaucracy’s repopulation and its record. Despite endless ranting to the contrary, American bureaucracy does work – in fact, quite well (p. 4). According to Goodsell criticisms of government bureaucracy are based more on myth than reality. Goodsell argues that government agencies actually play a valuable and indispensable role in making our society a better place to live. For instance Goodsell examines studies that show what he argues is evidence of public satisfaction with bureaucracy. His arguments are based on such statistics as “most” citizens believing that police do not accept bribes (p. 27) or that “only” a quarter of welfare recipients waited a half hour or more for service (p. 35). In addressing direct performance evaluation, Goodsell shows that public bureaucracy has witnessed overall growth in productivity from 1967 through 1990. He acknowledges, however, that this cannot be fairly compared to private industry’s experience over the

During my interview with Amy Bean, Human Resource Manager for the Washington State Department of Corrections – Correctional Industries, I discovered the biggest challenge the agency faces is the compression between Union and non-union positions. Recently, the Union for the Correctional Officers was able to negotiate a 10% wage increase over the next three years. Where the compression comes into play is now the supervisors of these positions are facing making less or just a bit more than their subordinates. Thus, HR is having to work with the State Government to allow an increase for these non-union positions in order to keep those position compensated at a level people are willing to expect the additional responsibilities.

Kernaghan, K. 2000. The Post-Bureaucratic Organization and Public Services Values. Interational Review of Administrative Sciences 66. 2000, pp. 92-93.

Making or studying public policy looks like an ocean when being compared with other social sciences because it contains a combination of regulations and laws (Stanford University). Making public policy is very important because the rules and regulations should work for people’s benefits, otherwise, the policies will be considered old or insufficient to fulfill their aims or duties, but, in my opinion, not all public policies are beneficial to people because public policies do not reflect people’s or individual’s ideas, and they are initiated with maybe a sense of humor or feelings of persons, who would like to make that public policy. We study this because it focuses on how to analyze and know the ingredients of it, if it is useful to people, if it is still valid to use, and if people have got the benefits from it.

Steve Barrett is the Executive Director for Human Resource Operations for the Minneapolis Public Schools District. According to S. Barrett, he has worked in his current position for seven months (personal communication, January 20, 2015). Previously, Barrett worked as an adjunct professor at the Metropolitan State University for 25 months, and as an Executive Director for Employee Relations at Minneapolis public schools for 20 months. Later, he worked as the Labor Relations Director at Osseo Area Schools for three years and four months, and Labor Relations Specialist at the City of Saint Paul for six years and one month (S. Barrett, personal communication, January 20, 2015). Barrett earned his master’s degree at Hamline University, where he graduated with a Masters of Arts in Public Administration. In this report, I document the interview I had with Barrett on January 20, 2015 to discuss human resources management in the school district.

The increased of industrialization in American cities brought a new social demand to public officials who were unprepared to target the existing issues of society. Administrative officers started to gaining power to conduct intervention programs or institutions. However, people started to distrust public administrators and institutions for their inefficiency and incapacity they gave to the treatment of social issues. The author

Civil service in the United States has a long and complex history. Civil service rules govern how public employees are hired, promoted and fired. This paper will focus on the selection politics of public personnel systems as divided in three time periods, the spoils era, the reform era, and representative bureaucracy. It will discuss the major civil service reforms throughout history in the Unites States and examine the role that politics and the environment play as an element of civil service reform in the public sector organizations. The paper will also touch on a number of institutions and players that play a role in the formulation of public personnel policy and some implications that they bring in the long run. Some of the

The workplace is a delicate environment filled with different personalities types. These differing needs of feeling safe and comfortable create many challenges in the workplace. The creation of the Human Resource Department has helped create a safety net for all employees to fall under and create a stable environment for employees to feel safe and secure. Regulations such as Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor have in some ways removed the common sense and compassion in the workplace and replaced it with litigation. The effect of these regulations have balanced the workplace and created a more

3-4). According to the website gao.gov, “In order for federal agencies to meet 21st century challenges, the federal government must (1) align agencies human capital programs with their current and emerging mission and programmatic goals and (2) develop long-term strategies for acquiring, developing, and retaining staff to achieve programmatic goals” (Key Issues: Best Practices And Leading Practices In Human Capital Management, 2017). This statement can be summed by concluding the government should act more like a provider organization concerning human

Public Human Resources Management operations include four fundamental functions that reflect the activities needed to manage HR. those functions are symbolized by the acronym PADS (planning, acquisition, development, and sanction) which is used in public, private, and non-profit organizations. Among with those fundamental functions, HR management is strongly influenced by the four traditional values linked to the four traditional public systems (political responsiveness/representation-patronage/spoils system, efficiency-civil service, employee rights-civil service merit, and social equity-affirmative action). Though those functions, values, and systems, HR management reflects the interactions between political influence and public agencies as well as public organization’s level of responsiveness to the citizens needs through effective and efficient delivery of goods and services.

In the following paragraphs, I will explain the dominant theory in public administration practice and elaborate on the major theoretical assumptions of the Old Public Administration. As stated in the question, the world has transformed through globalization, information technology, and devolution of authority since the latter part of the last century. The dominant theory in public administration has been replaced from the traditional rule-based, authority-driven processes of the Old Public Administration with market-based, competition-driven tactics in the New Public Management, beginning in the 1980s (Kettl, 2000, p. 3). This was an effort to privatize government and streamline public administration to maximize efficiency and productivity. Heavily relying on market mechanisms to guide public programs, public administrators in the New Public Management are encouraged to “steer, not row,” meaning they should not bear the burden of delivering services, but instead define programs that others will carry out, through contracting or other means (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2011, p. 13). Core values of the New Public Management include using private sector and business approaches to the public sector, squeezing as many services as possible from smaller revenues, market style incentives, providing customers more choices, and focusing on outputs and outcomes instead of mainly processes.

The liberal democratic state has been in retreat due to its fragmentation and diminished accountability caused by the internal reform: new public management (NPM). NPM is an attempt to reform the public sector through the application of management techniques used in the private sector. In reality, NPM is a loose concept, consisting of different economic reforms. (Osborne 2009) While the adoption of NPM has had many advantages, there have been substantial unintended consequences from this implementation. This internal reform has resulted in a fragmentation of the state that has led to blurred and diminished accountability. Rhodes explains that within the UK civil service “the role of officials is increasingly constrained by new management systems and political controls. The obvious outcomes of these changes are fragmentation and diminished accountability.” (1994: 151) This