The American Review of Public Administration

In the United States, the constitutional constraints and administrative law requirements imposed on government agencies generally have no applicability to private entities performing outsourced public administrative activities. In this article, the authors broadly explore the issues associated with outsourcing constitutional and administrative law norms along with government work by imposing them on private contractors. The authors seek to help frame these issues more cogently for the public administration community in an effort to promote more comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of outsourcing and a greater role for public administrative expertise in determining when and how to apply constitutional and administrative law norms to government contractors.

This article examines the extent of managerial autonomy middle managers in Canadian governments report in financial and human resources management areas. It analyzes whether during a period of intense government restructuring middle managers’ autonomy has increased or not and whether there are any environmental or structural factors that could explain the variation in the extent of managerial autonomy reported by them. Managers reported the most autonomy regarding quality and client consultation issues and relatively high levels of autonomy for performance management, training and development, and staffing decisions. The extent of perceived managerial autonomy was found to be statistically significantly related to being a manager of a work unit in the periphery, managing a small unit, leading a corporate unit, and having greater emphasis on results.

Electronic government expansion is creating the complex challenges of managing an effective information technology (IT) workforce in the public sector. Survey questionnaires were sent to IT employees working in the central IT departments of two state governments to analyze how job characteristics, work environment, and human resource management practices influence their turnover intentions. Results show that work exhaustion, an emphasis on participatory management, and opportunities for advancement were statistically significant variables affecting state government IT employee turnover intentions, and that salary satisfaction was not a statistically significant factor. Suggestions are offered for improving IT employee retention rates in government agencies.

Strategic human resource management enhances productivity and the effectiveness of organizations. Research shows that when organizations employ such personnel practices as internal career ladders, formal training systems, results-oriented performance appraisal, employment security, employee voice and participation, broadly defined jobs, and performance-based compensation, they are more able to achieve their goals and objectives. Using ordinal regression analyses of data from a survey of North Carolina county social service directors and supervisors, this study examines the extent to which strategic human resource management is perceived to affect outcome assessments (or performance measurements) for welfare reform. Although strategic human resource management practices are perceived to be present, with training and employment security having notable impacts, they clearly are not a predominant feature in North Carolina counties.

Theory offers a vast quantity of normative prescriptions concerning citizen participation in budget decisions. Yet cities struggle with this activity and report unsatisfactory outcomes. Why does this occur? It may be because, similar to the parable of the blind men describing the different parts of the camel, the extant literature suggests so many variables but does not integrate what we know to see the whole picture, nor does it eliminate variables having little explanatory value and there has been limited systematic testing of hypotheses in this area. To manage the complexity caused by a multiplicity of variables, the authors test a causal model with four different factors (structure, participants, process, and mechanisms) thought to influence effective citizen participation outcomes on cases of two midwestern cities. In this limited application, the model shows promise for predictive validity.