Administration & Society

Through interviews with coordinators of faith-based mentoring programs, a statewide study examined publicly funded efforts to widen the involvement of religious groups in welfare service provision. Analysis focused on front-line implementers' ability to function as boundary spanners in a complex, unsettled environment. The study identified three salient factors affecting implementation in this new faith-friendly arena: the employment background of the programcoordinators, the rural or urban setting of the program, and the limitations of a constrained state welfare apparatus. The experiences of these so-called early adopters of charitable choice indicate the scope, strength, and surmountability of institutional barriers confronting implementers.

An unresolved issue in American constitutional governance is the role of public officials in a Madisonian scheme of separated institutions sharing power. Proposed answers range from broad delegation with reliance on expertise and professionalism to minimal delegation with formal checks on official discretion. In between are various pragmatic or realist views that accept discretion as both necessary and inevitable and offer normative principles of administrative conduct to guard against official abuse of power. None of these answers, however, satisfies criteria of constitutional legitimacy. The authors argue that such criteria can be derived by combining insights from traditional, normative literatures of public administration and from positive political theory and political economics. If the role of public managers is defined as maintaining a credible commitment to performing their duties pursuant to a precept of managerial responsibility that incorporates accountability, judgment, balance, and rationality, then, the authors argue, the Madisonian scheme of government embraced in the Constitution is complete.

We live in a world of numbers, but numbers have become so dominant that we consider nothing to be real unless it can be measured and mathematized. How did we come to live by the numbers? An answer is offered by Edmund Husserl. By constructing a history of mathematics rooted in the geometry of land surveying, it is possible to point to breaking points showing how it came to be that man is no longer the measure of all things. This provides indicators of typical misuses of measurement to be avoided in management.

University-community partnerships are a new organizational form that has emerged out of the economic crises that characterized urban landscapes in the 1990s. Based on an 18-month, multimethod, qualitative case study of one university-community partnership, the authors find that when participants have contradictory interests and work within an ambiguous organizational structure, the organization will tend toward persistent failure. This effect will be particularly problematic in organizational hybrids that feature partnerships among groups from systematically unequal social positions. Thus, the findings suggest that these organizational hybrids are predisposed to nonrational tendencies and permanent failure.

Normally, one would think of conflict in administrative ethics as something to be avoided or resolved. This article, however, explores the possibility that conflict in ethics is essential and productive. Great art is beautiful precisely because of tension, not in spite of it, and the authors argue that administrative ethics is more like art than science. Therefore, the authors adopt an aesthetic point of view that examines tension and balance and reveals a wide range of types of conflict in ethics. In fact, the authors articulate 15 types of conflict and argue that the recognition of conflict is necessary for its proper management.

The preceding article by Neil Brady and David Hart explores the issue of whether conflict in administrative ethics should not be viewed as a problem but welcomed as necessary to good management. They compare the situation to the arts, where they see a similar presence of unresolved tension having favorable consequence. The present commentary points out that three quite different forms of separation are involved in their analysis and argues that conflating them into the single term conflict leads to significant misunderstandings. These forms are contradiction, competition, and contrast.