School of Public Administration

For years, scholars have investigated the effectiveness of aid dollars. Some
scholars measure aid effectiveness at the country level in terms of achieving good
governance, promoting democratic accountability, accomplishing growth goals, or
attaining macroeconomic goals. This study looks at the aid flowing through nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs). It posits that effective aid consists of resources and
processes that promote sustainability. It attempts to uncover the meaning of
sustainability for the NGOs and recipients that are involved in agriculture while
surveying how the aid process works. It looks at NGOs and recipients, resource flow, and
activities, and sought to understand the elements that could render aid more or less
effective in achieving sustainability in agricultural sectors. This study uses a qualitative
case study research strategy that focused on developing theory/hypotheses grounded in
the data and the literature (Agranoff, Radin, & Perry, 1991). This approach is adopted because (a) the
meaning and promotion of sustainability is a complex topic, (b) aid effectiveness is a
multi-faceted puzzle, (c) NGOs represent a diverse group, (d) the collaborative process is
complicated, and (e) the context (Haiti) is a challenging place. It uses a data triangulation
process (Denzin, 1989, 1997) by combining different types of data and sources (personal
interviews, observations, and documentation) to arrive at a convergent understanding of
the elements that are more or less likely to influence the NGO aid process in the
promotion of sustainability in agriculture.
This study finds that most NGOs and recipients focus on one or two dimensions
of sustainability (economic or environmental); the social or cultural dimensions are
somewhat neglected. I also find that funding and funding horizons are two of the major
issues that impede the promotion of sustainability in addition to communication and
collaboration in the design of the plans, execution, and follow-up. Recipient education,
paternalistic attitude, and poverty levels also play a major role in promoting
sustainability.

The most important asset of any organization is its people (Danish & Usman,
2010). Whatever the market segment, they are the driving force behind creating and
delivering on the organization’s strategic and financial objectives. The ability to attract,
retain and motivate the necessary workforce, through use of financial rewards, is a main
determinant in the degree to which these objectives are met (Fong & Tosi, 2007; Gomez-
Mejia & Balkin, 1992b; Newman, Gerhart, & Milkovich, 2016). While there are many
approaches to pay strategy, a key aspect, and the focus of this dissertation, is the market
positioning of cash compensation. Specifically examined was the stated policy narrative
of market positioning compared to actual pay practice.
While compensation practices in the private sector have received significant
research attention, much less focus has been given to pay in academia. This work seeks
to address this apparent gap and extend our knowledge in this area. Utilizing faculty pay at Florida’s ten major public universities, this dissertation analyzes consistency between
the narrative and practice at the levels of university, department, rank, size and region.
The findings demonstrated a significant difference between pay and university but
inconsistencies across all levels with the stated narrative. Additionally, the results
indicate a widening gap between actual pay and the market average between the 2005-
2006 academic year to present.

The term profession is found throughout the scholarly literature; despite frequent
use of the term, there exists little or no means of providing a common conception of the
term. Consequently, calls for increasing professionalization of public administration
appear to be premature. Therefore, this dissertation utilizes inductive research to generate
theory, which synthesizes the inchoate concept of the professional public administrator.
The motivation to pursue this line of inquiry stems from a personal need to weigh
in on the perennial debate about what skills, knowledge, and information should be
communicated to future generations of public administration thinkers and practitioners.
To that end, this research will provide a theoretical framework grounded in the literature,
which federates the term professional and the professional concept in such a way that
purposeful debates can be had. It is, as will be shown, an attempt to link understanding
and interpretation.

This dissertation examines task specialization in the public administration
profession through studying the job tasks that a public procurement practitioner
performs, manages, and both performs and manages. The purpose of this
dissertation was to establish a baseline to benchmark what these practitioners
actually do on their jobs. Factor analysis was used to study a data set of 2,549
respondents that were administered a survey by the Universal Public
Procurement Certification Council (UPPCC) in 2012. The research question to be
answered involved addressing what job tasks public procurement practitioners
perform, manage, and both perform and manage. Hypotheses were examined
that predicted task specialization existing within public procurement to the extent
that practitioners in more senior job positions display more task specialization
and that practitioners from larger organizations also display more task specialization. A review of literature discusses the alternative perspectives on
what constitutes professionalism in the public sector. The reasons for focusing on
public procurement professionalism were subsequently presented through the
literature. The various views of what entails professionalism in public
administration were discussed as to responsibility (Stivers, 1994), sociological
issues (Simon, 1947), constitutional issues (Lowi, 1995; Rohr, 1986), technical
specialization and empirical rigor (Parsons, 1939), as means of contextualizing
the nature of public administrators’ roles and responsibilities in conjunction with
the job tasks that are executed.
Factor analysis was conducted on 75 job tasks in order to identify
relationships between practitioner job tasks for the purposes of finding out what it
is that public procurement practitioners actually do for their work. The job tasks
found to share relationships may be grouped together for further inquiry into the
nature of the relationships between job tasks and overarching competency areas
of related job tasks. Additionally, factor analyses were conducted to identify
relationships between job tasks in public procurement and control variables such
as organization size and job position, which were predicted to impact whether or
not practitioners perform, manage, both perform and manage, or do neither, for
each of the job tasks surveyed.

This dissertation examines how different United States Department of the Interior
(USDOI) employees’ perceive fairness and support for diversity. The USDOI is an
agency with numerous STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) employees
who have the opportunity to influence future generations through their STEM internship.
Specifically, this dissertation examines the relationship between: (1) the perceived
fairness of performance appraisals and the empowerment index, demographic
characteristics, satisfaction, accountability and recognition; and (2) the perceived support
(or lack thereof) of departmental programs and supervisors to foster diversity in the
workforce and the empowerment index and demographic characteristics.
This dissertation accomplishes several things. First, it provides a review of
literature relating to gender diversity. Second, it provides a brief history of organizations
that were created and acts/executive orders that were passed in order to support women in their fight against gender discrimination. Fourth, it provides a review of the USDOI’s
recruitment, promotion, and employment policies. Finally, it presents an analysis of how
USDOI employees’ perceptions of diversity differ by gender.
This inquiry utilizes a theoretical framework based on Thomas and Ely’s (1996)
and Selden and Selden’s (2001) four diversity paradigms; “discrimination and fairness,”
“access and legitimacy,” “learning and effectiveness,” and “valuing and integrating.”
These paradigms suggest that the true benefits of diversity can only be realized in the
valuing and integrating paradigm where employees’ individual differences are used for
the betterment of the organization.
It is found that women tend not to perceive that their organization supports
diversity. It is also found that the empowerment index, federal tenure, pay category,
satisfaction, accountability and recognition are important in explaining employees’
perceptions of fairness and that the empowerment index, federal tenure, supervisory
status, gender, and minority status are important in explaining employees’ perceptions of
support for diversity.

Addressing the current homeland security challenges requires scholars,
practitioners, elected officials, and community partners working in unison to mitigate the
hazards confronting first responders. Built on public choice theory, this research
addressed a specific component of the emergency preparedness matrix: the most
preferred fire service organizational design. The fire department organizational designs in
this study included a Florida county, city, and independent special control fire district
(ISFCD) that serve residents on a full-time platform. The concurrent embedded
methodology used attempted to unearth which organizational design achieves economies
of scale based on quarterly emergency service calls: the centralized county model or the
decentralized city/ISFCD models. This study was an inquiry into the centralization versus
decentralization argument, with emphases on fire service scale economies and inter-local
service agreements Using multiple linear regression modeling accompanied by face-to-face
interviews with the respective fire chiefs, this research showed that the county and
ISFCD achieve scale economies over 44 quarters, fiscal years 2004-2014. Moreover, the
interviews uncovered that response times were the driving factor behind instituting
voluntary inter-local service agreements between the three fire departments. Other
positive benefits from the service agreements include an increase in personnel and scene
safety, dispatch center protocol enhancements, multi-company/jurisdictional training,
overtime savings on large-scale disaster incidents, and trust building.
The implications of this research for the scholarly and practitioner community
include a better understanding of the technical and allocative efficiencies within the fire
service arena. Melding public choice theory with strands of inter-local service agreement
literature provides policymakers and scholars with a template for uncovering the fire
service production/provision narrative. Though the centralization-decentralization
argument is not solved within the research scope presented, the future narrative as
uncovered in the research requires a citizenry inclusion. The future public choice
prescriptions regarding fire service consolidation requires not only statistical modeling,
but a normative democratic ethos tone incorporating multiple stakeholders with the
citizens’ concerns at the forefront.

Recent concern in the United States about human trafficking has been directed
primarily on the foreign victims that are brought into the United States rather than on U.S.
citizenship who become involved. However, the topic has broadened and has significant
impact on the daily lives of U.S citizens. Taking a human rights perspective, this
dissertation explores how human trafficking has been used as a “brand” to achieve
political and/or economic objectives. Human trafficking has taken away the human rights
for individuals and threatens their security. This dissertation is grounded in Critical Theory
and uses narrative analysis as a methodological framework. Using 99 public documents
from Global Report on Trafficking in Persons by the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime, International Labor Organization, and Office for Victims of Crime and other
Departments of the U.S working on human trafficking issues, with the support of Nvivo
software, the dissertation insists that human trafficking violates human rights, has no
capacity to support human emancipation, and causes human beings to be treated as animals or objects or commodified a brand. Even though a brand is a mark and logo in economic
development and refers to objects, not human beings. Human development is the objective
that everyone wants to achieve. Regardless of development, the welfare of all human
beings must be the chief concern; every effort to halt all human emancipation must be
initiated immediately.

The purpose behind this dissertation is the creation, development, and
illustration of a new strategy of inquiry in public administration. This new strategy
of inquiry is a utopian/dystopian thought experiment. A utopian/dystopian thought
experiment should provide its user with a way to develop a new/different viewpoint
with which to examine an administrative activity. A researcher begins with an
original viewpoint and should then develop a new/different viewpoint, a
utopian/dystopian viewpoint, by engaging in a utopian/dystopian thought
experiment. A utopian/dystopian thought experiment is developed in this
dissertation by bringing together elements from utopian literature and scientific
thought experiment literature using a public administration point of view. The
research approach used in this dissertation is a three-phase process that involves reviewing and connecting pertinent literatures, using imagination and the process of
writing to create a utopian/dystopian thought experiment, and illustrating and
examining a utopian/dystopian thought experiment in public administration. In this
dissertation, I seek to create a utopian/dystopian thought experiment as a new
strategy of inquiry that is developed specifically for public administration. A
utopian/dystopian thought experiment should provide an additional tool to the
researcher who is seeking to expand the viewpoints through which the researcher
can examine administrative activities.

Public administration emphasizes the importance of diversity (Rice, 2004), representation (Selden & Selden, 2002), ethics, and professionalism, to ensure fairness and equity for all citizens (American Society for Public Administration, 2013a; Cooper, 2012). Research has shown a link between the teaching of ethics and values in leadership courses, and the establishment of consensus for espoused social norms and standards of practice (Begley & Stefkovich, 2007). Through the discourse within classrooms, and the scholarship of public administration, we create and advance the boundaries of social consensus in areas such as diversity (Hewins-Maroney & Williams, 2007; National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, 2014a). MPA ethics courses are perfectly situated to espouse and reinforce public service diversity values and educate future public servants. This dissertation uses ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of 48 syllabi from 40 NASPAA accredited universities in the United States (U.S.) dated 2012-2014, to interpret how, or whether, Master of Public Administration (MPA) education addresses or contributes to gender inclusion. The analysis uses feminist theories to reveal if, and to what extent, gender, diversity, and social equity topics have been incorporated into master's level graduate public administration ethics courses, through an examination of ethics course syllabi. This research shows that gender is incorporated into MPA ethics syllabi directly through the gender of professors, authors of course materials, discussion topics, and gendered language. Gender is also demonstrated in the syllabi through images and sub-textual tones that express social norms for gender roles. Gender inclusion is addressed indirectly in the syllabi through course policies and pedagogical choices designed to increase opportunities for participation by students of both genders. Ethnographic content analysis across various stages of this interpretive research study led to the creation of a four-part Gender Inclusion Model. Each tier of this model is made up of inclusion markers influenced by themes in feminist pedagogical literature. The Gender Inclusion Model can be used for future research to examine whether, or how, minorities and diversity are incorporated into higher education curricula. The research compiles a list of best practices, along with a mock syllabus, guided by recommendations from feminist literature.

This dissertation examined the literature of cutback management in the context of the Great Recession. Specifically, it studied the relationship between cutback management policies used by county governments during the recession and revenue changes. The purpose of this dissertation was to test whether or not the percent change in revenue had an impact on the probability that cutback management policies were used in the recession. According to the cutback management literature developed in the 1970s and 1980s, there should be a relationship. The theoretical framework used for this study was the rational-approach framework, which proposes that every expenditure reducing and revenue increasing policy is enacted based on the percent decrease in revenue the government faces. This suggests that the cutback management policies are a proportional response to revenue decline. The framework was operationalized by using a binary logistic regression that used policy en actment as the dependent variable and the percent change in revenue as the independent variable. Eighty-six counties were sampled and 7 years of each county's budget book were examined for policies and financial data. The research found that eleven expenditure policies and three revenue policies had a statistically significant relationship with the percent change in revenues. This resulted in the conclusion that the framework and, therefore, the cutback management literature were useful in explaining primarily expenditure policies.