Administration & Society

The rapidly expanding literature on accountability reveals a centrally important paradox: Responsible interpretation and application of external accountability demands depends on the cultivation of the virtues that support good administrative judgment, but the institutions and mechanisms that are used to communicate these external standards, and that monitor compliance with them, often threaten the very qualities that support responsible judgment. Consulting a rich and varied literature, this paradox is explored as it emerges in both the more familiar compliance-based accountability processes and the less well-understood performance-based processes associated with reinvention and the new public management.

This article discusses how Aristotle’s thought on rhetoric can help public administrators deal with situations that involve conflicting and irreconcilable values. We argue that Aristotelian rhetoric can be helpful to public administrators in dealing with value conflicts, because it promotes a greater self-consciousness among administrators about their own values, encourages them to seek ways of accommodating their values to the values of others, discourages any sense of finality in resolving value conflicts, and requires that administrators take account of the concrete specifics of particular practical situations in dealing with value conflicts.

This article addresses the strategies and tools that public administration scholars use to understand phenomena of interest. The range of qualitative methods used has been limited, and the kind of rigor generally associated with quantitative methods has largely been absent in the application of their qualitative counterparts. Two conclusions are drawn from an analysis of articles published in two respected journals: Training on research methods in Ph.D. and M.P.A. programs should be expanded to include a broader range of strategies and tools, and the rigorous use of a broader range of research tools promises to better position the field of public administration to identify, examine, and answer the many big questions that it now faces.

Rational planning is widely regarded as difficult because of the technical problems of obtaining and interpreting relevant data and the political problems of rivalry between planners and service deliverers. Provided here is the first empirical test of these traditional hypotheses on the problems of rational planning in public agencies. The context of the empirical analysis is a recent attempt by UK local authorities to introduce a new planning system. The statistical results suggest that the problems of rational planning are largely technical (lack of resources and expertise) rather than political. Potential explanations for these results are identified, and the implications for theories of rational planning are considered.