The public administration research community is obsessed with serving an imaginary image of public administration practitioners, according to Professor Muhammad Azfar Nisar writing in Administrative Theory & Praxis. He suggests that researchers should stop trying to serve the imaginary practitioner, and instead engage directly with the public. I have a different suggestion; that researchers should engage with real practitioners, rather than imaginary ones. See how and why in my paper at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/db7pt/
Author: David S. Reed
David S. Reed is a public administration expert, founder of Center for Public Administrators, and a former civil servant.
Police Performance Rankings Depend on the Functional Form of the Index
Bearfield, Maranto and Wolf (2020) advise policy-makers to measure policing outcomes using a metric that includes rates of homicide, police-related civilian deaths (PRCD) , and poverty. They present such an index, which they call the Police Performance Index (PPI). But alternative functional forms that are equally plausible can lead to different rankings of police departments, and therefore different policy conclusions. My comment presents one such alternative index, under which changes in police-related civilian deaths have a greater potential effect on a city’s ranking: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/r8yst
Webinar on Promoting Ethical Conduct in Organizations
The ASPA Section on Democracy and Social Justice webinar on Promoting Ethical Conduct in Organizations is now on YouTube. It was great serving as a panelist. https://youtu.be/1U4lYwL0p5Q
Our how-to is a top 10 download on SSRN
My how-to on Public Administration Practitioners at Academic Conferences hit SSRN’s top 10 download list for PSN Educator: Public Administration. I hope it encourages more of us practitioners to engage with research. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2765800
Promoting Ethical Conduct in Organizations
I’m excited to be on the panel for the webinar on Promoting Ethical Conduct in Organizations, organized by the ASPA Section on Democracy and Social Justice. It will be Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 1:00 PM EDT. Zoom in and join us! https://lu.ma/7jrra194
Our paper gets cited: Increasing Citizen Engagement and Access to Information
David Reed’s paper, Technology: Increasing Citizen Engagement and Access to Information, has been downloaded from SocArXiv over 600 times, and has been cited in two works listed in Google Scholar. The paper’s recommendations are:
- Welcome the Civic Hackers
- Eat Your Own Dog Food
- Don’t Panic about Guerrilla Government
The paper is at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/hws4f/
Resources for teaching: Non-Hierarchical Ethical Conduct by Public Sector Workers
David Reed will be a panelist for the ASPA DSJ webinar on Promoting Ethical Conduct in Organizations, on September 22, 2020. The annotated list of resources that he will be sharing at the webinar is at Non-Hierarchical Ethical Conduct^J for ASPA DSJ webinar
Project on Annotated Work Instructions
Our open source project on Annotated Work Instructions is at
https://groups.google.com/a/pubadmin.org/forum/#!forum/annotated-work-instructions
It’s under construction now, but we welcome anybody who wants to participate.
Dear Bureaucrat: The advice column for people who work in the public sector
Readers ask, and Dear Bureaucrat answers, based on scientific research and real-life experience. Some of the columns are:
- My job wants me to lie!
- How can I get my boss to stop micromanaging me?
- My subordinates are revolting!
- I want my job to give me rules. Am I crazy?
- What kind of boss will let me innovate?
- My agency’s computer system is useless! (Our most popular column.)
Or browse all the Dear Bureaucrat columns in Federal Times.
Private screening: New Movies about Government Workers’ Side Projects
Filmmakers in the U.S. and Canada have released documentaries about the creative side projects of government workers. Center for Public Administrators and the ASPA National Capital Area Chapter, held a private screening of both films, and discussion with the U.S. filmmaker and stars, on May 15.
The American production is Creative Feds, which features two government workers who are musicians on the side. It shows each performing with their bands at festivals, dances, and in one case a National Public Radio show, demonstrating that these side projects are not mere hobbies, but serious commitments that have met with some success. (Screenings of Creative Feds are listed at http://creativefeds.com/screenings/ )
Jennifer Cutting in Creative Feds
The Canadian production is a web series entitled The Secret Lives of Public Servants. Three episodes have been released so far, featuring government workers who on the side are an artist, a comic book creator and a cosplayer. All the episodes touch on the tension between the workers’ creative side projects and the conformity expected in their government jobs. This is particularly the case for the artist, Marc Adornato, whose art is explicitly political and triggered a police investigation of one of his public performance projects. (The police report concluded that performance art is not a crime.) The episodes are available at http://amenjafri.com/2017/11/19/the-secret-lives-of-public-servants/
Marc Adornato in The Secret Lives of Public Servants
The filmmakers for both of these projects said part of their motivation was to show the public that government employees are full human beings, rather than the stereotype of faceless bureaucrats. But there is a more important message for public sector workers ourselves. We do not need to wait until we can afford to leave secure government jobs before seriously pursuing our ambitions, whether they are artistic careers like the people portrayed in these documentaries or any other aspirations. A government job puts some constraints on our side projects, in terms of time, conformity and otherwise, but the documentaries show that we can work around those constraints.
Center for Public Administrators 