The American Review of Public Administration

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks stunned Americans. They also created new and unprecedented challenges for public administration, in theory and practice. A careful look at these challenges, however, reveals a familiar core: At its foundation, homeland security is about one of public administration's oldest puzzles—coordination. Although the field has a great deal to say about solving this puzzle, homeland security introduces new and especially difficult dimensions: matching place-based problems with functionally organized services; defining and achieving a minimum level of protection that all citizens ought to receive; building a reliable learning system for problems that, with luck, occur only rarely; balancing the new homeland security mission with existing missions that remain important; and meeting citizens' expectations in a fragmented governance system. These challenges demand a new, more effective system of contingent coordination, one that flexibly develops and matches government's capacity to new and unpredictable problems.

This article offers a psychodynamic exploration of the organizational commitment to diversity. Based on a brief review of organizational rhetoric, two themes are identified. The first is the denial of hatred, which is argued to express the operation of a fantasy of the organization as the peaceable kingdom. This fantasy imagines the organization as a home for those with strong originary group identifications, while refusing to consider how attachment to group identity can foster hate and exclusion. The second theme is the equation of knowledge useful to the organization with life experience connected to group identity. The emphasis in the rhetoric of diversity on the value of experience is linked to a strategy for coping with loss that seeks to make the experience of loss a source of strength. The importance of acknowledging the reality of hate and of coping with, rather than denying, the consequences of loss is emphasized.

Amid the focus of public management reforms on improving the performance of public organizations and their managers, there has been little empirical attention to the links between performance and management systems and activities; little attention has been paid to how and under what circumstances `management matters.' This study reports data from the Government Performance Project (GPP), with information of all 50 states. The GPP model argues that fundamental management systems are not only amenable to comparison across states but can provide critical components of the capacity that is basic to longer term effectiveness and performance. This article considers the extent to which capacity facilitates performance in financial management, analyzing the factors that contribute to the maintenance of rainy day funds (RDFs). The authors argue that arriving at positive performance for such indicators requires not only administrative capacity but also rules that shape political behavior that will support performance.

Based on the results of a review, synthesis, and comparative analysis of existing international data and research, it seems that the role of privatization—as a means of reforming the public sector—has expanded internationally in scope and at such a rapid pace that, in many cases, the importance of objective and balanced measures of its overall effectiveness and impact on the affected communities need to be reexamined. The results of this research reveal that the negative consequences of privatization are often masked or go undetected because the effectiveness of privatization is based primarily on economic performance. I recommend that those responsible for planning of future privatization activities should refocus the present economic emphasis and strive for a balance of economic and social performance to improve long-term benefits for all sectors of the affected communities.