Public administration

The purpose of this study was to determine if individuals who are professionally committed to careers in public education possess public service motivation. The participants in this study were a sample of convenience selected through their enrollment in graduate education programs within three East Coast universities. The sample was stratified into three groups based on their education roles as teachers, aspiring leaders, and school district administrators. Based on the 258 education sector participants, the majority were Caucasian, female, and under the age of 30. All respondents held at least a bachelor's degree and the majority held up to ten years tenure in education. Utilizing an abridged version of Perry's (1996) multi-dimensional scale that was modified for the education sector, the public service motivation (PSM) construct was measured using an Internet survey approach. Three of the public service motivation dimensions and two commitment items were used to operationalize the PSM and professional commitment of education professionals within their current roles. Correlation, regression, ANOVA, and t-test analyses were conducted to examine the data collected. Study findings concluded that education professionals possess public service motivation and are professionally committed to their careers. In addition, results indicated that school district administrators possessed higher levels of public service motivation than teachers. Furthermore, demographic characteristics indicated that educators who are older, more experienced, and highly educated possess higher levels of PSM. Perhaps the most critical discovery was that when comparing education professionals to their public administration counterparts, educators possessed higher levels of public service motivation. These findings have several important implications for education institutions, academic scholars, human resource managers, and leadership preparation programs that would all benefit from all

References to accountability are common throughout public administration literature. However, a clear model to assess accountability in government programs is not fully developed. This research fills this gap and provides policymakers with a tool they can use to assess accountability in both public and contracted programs and enables them to make more informed contracting-out decisions. In addition, the Integrated Accountability Framework introduced in this research will serve as a guideline for how public administrators can improve accountability in the programs they administer and oversee. For the public and private health care programs analyzed in this study, the findings indicate that the publicly delivered programs provided more accountability to the vulnerable populations served than the contracted-out health care programs.

This study investigates the relationship of executive fire officers' use of strategic thinking skills and their proficiency using information and communication technology. A non-experimental quantitative study design was employed. The study consisted of 400 graduates of the National Fire Academy's Executive Fire Officer Program. The use of strategic thinking skills was measured by the Strategic Thinking Questionnaire (STQv6) (Pisapia & Reyes-Guerra, 2007). The use of information and communication technology tools was measured by the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Fluency Questionnaire (Hilberg, 2007). The EFOs' strategic thinking capabilities of systems thinking (3.58 +/- .447) and reflecting (3.82 +/- .445) compared to previously reported samples from the literature, both empirically and theoretically. Depending upon the sample, some means were significantly higher and others were significantly lower. The strategic thinking questionnaire and the ICT fluency questionnaire were not directly correlated to one another ; however, there were some strong correlations within their subscales. ICT fluency and ICT comfort were highly correlated (r = .516), as well as systems thinking and reflecting (r = .688) at the 0.05 level. There was a significant correlation between age and ICT comfort (r = -.235), as well as between years of experience and ICT comfort (r = -.203) at the 0.05 level. Age moderated the relationship between systems thinking*reflection, and ICT comfort. Race moderated the relationship between systems thinking*reflection, and ICT education/training. This research was significant because it was the first time that Executive Fire Officers have been studied regarding their strategic thinking capabilities and their information and communications technology fluency.

Public administration scholars have raised serious concerns about loss of democratic accountability when government services are outsourced to private forprofit businesses because of the very different values and missions of the two sectors. Particular concern for democratic accountability arises when administrative discretion is delegated to governments' private sector agents. Furthermore, if contractors may adversely impact individual rights or interests, or may adversely impact vulnerable populations, special democratic responsibilities arise. It is these three features of outsourcing transactions that constitute the elements of the proposed framework used in this research in order to assess need for heightened attention to democratic accountability. Some scholars argue for application of constitutional and administrative law norms to some government contractors.

Public administration addresses issues that competing and aligning groups determine to be meaningful enough to address. However, there seems to be no shared universally objective ways of remedying anything. Everything is up for argument. Additionally, attempting to solve one set of problems often creates other connected problems and/or unintended consequences. So, public work ever [sic] never ends. This dissertation's purpose was to contribute a new theoretical understanding of the experience and practice of public administration. Its research addressed if and how a grounded existential theoretical framework could emerge that would help practitioners and scholars understand and describe public administrative efforts and experiences. Currently, there is no existential theory of public administration. This dissertation sought to initiate work in that direction. This dissertation employed a grounded theory methodology to collect information from Senior Executive Service (SES) members, to analyze the information for emerging concepts and theoretical relevance through constant comparison, and to discover/construct a theoretical framework for understanding public administrative efforts and experiences. "The grounded theory approach is a general methodology of analysis linked with data collection that uses a systematically applied set of methods to generate an inductive theory about a substantive area" (Glaser, 1992, p. 16).