Administration & Society

The recent entrepreneurial movement represents the latest in a series of attempts to define appropriate principles of public administration. Current entrepreneurial reforms, such as reinvention, aim explicitly to moderate the excesses of bureaucratic organization, but they also carry an implicit mandate to continue the assault on particularism begun by Progressive Era reformers. The authors contend that public administration theory should consider particularism a legitimate ethical principle and explore ways of integrating particularism with ethical principles central to the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial approaches to public administration. The authors analyze the manner in which the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial approaches detract from our understanding of particularism in public administration and explore ways that a better understanding of particularism can enhance public administration theory.

In hazardous industries, regulatory agencies confront the dual mission of enforcing regulations while learning from experience. This research examines how incentives, designed for rule enforcement, influence the gathering and interpretation of hazard-related information that is essential for learning. It explores a high reliability theory argument that strict adherence to standard operating procedures can coexist with organizational learning from mishaps. Drawing on interviews with participants in aviation safety monitoring systems, the research analyzes archival data. The findings suggest that incentives for compliance alternatively decreased or increased the availability of hazard-related iinformation, depending on the design system. The research supports a political theory of organizational reliability.

The 21st century promises a more diverse public workplace in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, age, and disabilities. In light of the shifting composition of public organizations, this article applies three different paradigms of diversity developed to understand private organizations and analyze practices in and research about public organizations. Building on these paradigms, this article proposes a new process for managing diversity that facilitates the development and promulgation of a multicultural organization. This paradigm of multiculturalism cultivates a climate in which individuals from dominant and nondominant cultures coexist and thrive. Consequently, agencies will be more effective in recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce, structuring internal processes, and serving clients.

The idea of citizen service has been given increasing attention as a remedy for problems of civic disengagement. This study reviews 37 empirical studies about the relationship between service and citizenship. A formal model of change is used to guide the review. Six types of citizenship outcomes are discussed: citizenship-related cognitive understanding, citizenship attitudes, citizenship skills, institutional change, philanthropic and civic behaviors, and political behavior. Based on the review, several conclusions are drawn about what is known about the service-citizenship relationship.