Administration & Society

There has been much debate about the change Barack Obama represents. This article considers this question by using Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to explore the underlying governmental rationality of his administration’s policies and management practices. Obama’s governmentality is examined via the Open Government Directive, arguably the central initiative of the administration. The article concludes that this governmentality may be viewed as a mutation within neoliberalism, which the authors call info-liberalism—one that deploys a novel, integrative conception of social government. Info-liberalism is examined in conjunction with the contemporary usage of the term governance to analyze more broadly the dynamics of government and citizen participation today.

This study examines the effects of capacity-oriented and institutional-based factors on the proliferation of prison privatization by extending the first generation of empirical research. This study found that correction expenditures, prison capacity, and regional identity are factors that significantly affect the magnitude of prison privatization, whereas political pressures, government ideology, and unionization were found not to have a significant influence on the growth of private prisons. The results imply that, once adopted, prison privatization became institutionalized over time and suggest that state governments should develop well-structured evaluation systems for private prisons to ensure and maintain effective correction management.

Remedial law involves the use of litigated reform and injunctive relief to bring misfeasant state and local bureaucracies in line with federal law. This article highlights the need for further scholarly engagement with remedial law. It also indicates that within each stage of the remedial process lies a series of important research questions, making the area fertile ground for the very type of administrative expertise and agency-centric approaches that are lacking from our scholarly discourse. Attention to remedial law would not only strengthen the management of rights-driven reform but also contribute to the ongoing legitimacy of the public administration field.

Two ongoing debates in regulation research concentrate on public-interest versus private-interest theories, and actor-centered theories versus institutionalism. The first controversy is about the origins and goals of regulation, and the latter is about the analysis of regulatory processes. A theoretical framework that combines these four concepts is suggested. Four patterns of regulation are presented; each addresses a regulatory goal as well as a regulatory process. Each pattern is associated with a different type of regulator: the selfish, the manipulative, the combative, and the coordinating. The author argues that by employing institutional considerations and tools, the coordinating regulator best serves the public interest.

With direct or indirect reference to neighboring countries, this article presents an investigation into how changes in South Korean emergency management culture have evolved via three components, namely, (a) emergency and its impacts, (b) emergency management education, and (c) technological development against emergencies, during three periods: the 20th century (1900-1999), the decade from 2000 to 2009, and the decade from 2010 to 2019. The major tenet of this study is that South Korean culture, initially and later, changed rapidly with the coherence of the above-mentioned three components during the periods covered, going through the stages, in chronological order, of emergency numbness, emergency awareness, and a more rational response. Thus, Koreans need to wisely maintain the momentum of this change by learning from the three stages toward achieving the goal of emergency management.