[ Music ]
>> James L. Perry: I hope that
cloaking me with this notion
of being your mentor is a good
thing, but Yan [phonetic] --
actually Yan was the first person I
met, just about the first person --
the first student I had when
I got to Indiana University
after spending 11 years at
UC Irvine, from '74 to '85.
And then I went to Indiana
and Yan was in my first class.
And the good thing about Yan being in my first
class was that I spent one semester in Indiana,
and then I went to Hong Kong,
for -- as a Fulbright.
And so Yan was able to show me the ropes
and I've been going, as this indicates,
I also have the affiliation
with the University of Hong Kong
and the Faculty of Social Sciences there.
So, it's a pleasure to be here.
I did actually do one thing
that sort of mimics I think Yan.
I said, "What the heck is a salon?"
Alright, so this is -- we don't
have any of these in Indiana.
Now I don't want to say anything
else about Indiana today but --
it says, "A gathering of people
under the roof of an inspiring host."
Now I assume this is Jack and
Yan but -- or USC as a whole.
"Held partly to amuse one another
and partly to refine the taste
and increase the knowledge of-- ."
Now I don't know whether I'm the
knowledge part or the amusement part.
You'll have to judge that after we're done.
My wife says that I'm worthless
for the amusement part.
So, but given the fact that what I'm
going to say I think is pretty simple
and straightforward, although Yan's saying,
"This is kind of risky for the Editor-in-Chief
of Public Administration Review to be talking
about Vanishing Public Administration."
So, but it made good sense at the time.
Yan said, "Why don't you come and
talk about public administration.
I was trying to figure out
what would make some sense?
And I came up with this title,
"Vanishing Public Administration."
So, let me give you a little quick
preview and the preview is very brief.
What am I going to talk about?
First of all, I'm going to talk a
little bit about good news and bad news
for public administration, fairly briefly.
I'll probably try to spend
more time on the good news.
It occurred to me that if I'm going to be
talking about vanishing public administration,
that I probably want to say
something good to start out,
so I don't sort of destroy all my credibility.
Then I want to define what I mean by
"vanishing public administration."
In the abstract I sent to Yan, I said, "You
know, this is partly a function of my research."
I could be talking for instance about public
service motivation, and that's often one
of the things I talk about and people are
doing lots of research about that these days.
But I also have this role as Editor-in-Chief
of PAR and having been a professor
of public administration, public
affairs for the last 41 years.
So I don't want to leave out
the experience component.
So this is really sort of a combination of my
research, judgments, thinking about the field,
and a variety of other things, including
my recent experience editor-in-chief
of public administration review.
So I want to talk a little bit about
vanishing public administration.
And then I want to talk about
what should we do about it?
And I thought, "Well, maybe it
isn't what can we do about it?
Maybe not what we should do."
So some people may have different
views about what we ought to be doing
about vanishing public administration
if it is vanishing,
but you sort of be the judge whether
I'm using the right language here.
So, let me sort of first of all say
something about the good news and bad news.
Now as Yan said, I'm not trying
to sell memberships in ASPA,
American Society for Public Administration.
Well, they're relatively inexpensive these
days, but you can also get this online
at you nearest university library.
And I certainly recommend that.
The other thing is that people don't
get a chance to see -- I love the cover.
Created it myself with some designers.
And so I sort of like to share it.
But the other thing is, we get ten --
I think 10 or 15 copies each month.
And so, if I sort of leave them sit on
the shelf, all of a sudden, I've got two
or three shelves of 100 journals and
I don't know what to do with them.
So I bring them along and you
know, it's useful for those people
that haven't encountered the journal
directly or gone to the USC website for --
you download your electronic journals, but -- so
I brought those along for you to take a look at.
And there's a 75-1 and 75-2.
But you know, this is a special
year in the history of this journal.
We turn 75.
And I editorialized in the -- with sort
of a happy birthday editorial
of the first issue of this year.
We published something like 3,000 articles.
One of the exercises we've done recently is, I'd
asked the editorial board two years ago as a way
of sort of to recognize the legacy and to
recognize what this journal has published
to select our 75 most influential articles.
That seemed to me to make sense, given
the fact that we were turning 75.
You know, if we -- and we don't
have one article per year.
We didn't do it that way.
But if you look at the journal and
what it's published over the years,
there's a pretty substantial and significant
body of knowledge, literature there.
I like to point out the fact that 4 of
these 75 articles have been written,
authored by Nobel Laureates.
Herbert Simon having done three of
them in the 1940s, '60s, and '70s.
So a period of 30 years.
Some people say to me, "Well,
Simon left public administration."
Well if he left public administration, he
didn't forget to keep submitting his articles
to Public Administration Review
because they kept rolling in
and he kept being accepted and published.
Elinor Ostrom, another one of Yan's
mentors and a colleague of mine,
contributed a significant
piece with her husband Vincent.
It was actually in 1972.
It was '71 or '72 on public choice.
The research for instance on
public service motivation,
the first piece on public service motivation,
I contributed to the 50th anniversary
issue of Public Administration Review.
The most -- probably the most significant piece
on networks and networks are popular these days.
Larry O'Toole [assumed spelling]
contributed in 1997.
So if you look at sort of the
legacy, there's a lot there.
And the good thing is, for those of you
that are doctoral students or simply want
to assign articles to your doctoral
students, you can go to this website,
www.Publicadministrationreview.org, find
the names and titles of all 75 articles,
click on and read all the articles.
One of the -- and one of the things we've
been doing this year is we've been publishing
retrospectives on some of the articles.
For instance, the most cited piece in the
history of Public Administration Review,
many of you are probably familiar
with it, is Charles Lindblom's,
"The Science of Muddling Through."
I was able to engage Jonathan
Bender from Stanford Business School
to write a retrospective on what was it
-- you know, what difference did it make
and where do we go forward from here with
respect to decision-making [inaudible].
Bender got this brilliant idea.
He said, "Why don't I sent this to Ed?"
Ed is the sort of the name by
which Charles Lindblom goes.
Most people think Charles Lindblom is dead.
As least or last I checked, he wasn't.
But Lindblom is 97 years old, and lo
and behold, he responded to Bender
with a beautiful email complimenting
him on the article.
So it's -- unfortunately, we don't
have all of our authors still with is,
but Lindblom among others, is with us.
So we've been trying to -- and Janet
and Bob contributed a piece on you know,
revisiting the new public service.
And so we've got a number
of articles that are coming
out in our 75th, to recognize
some of the pieces.
Only about 10 of the 75.
But -- so significant contributions
to literature over time.
So, I'm very proud and pleased to be the
editor-in-chief of Public Administration Review
that happens to be the 75th year.
But looking back at it, and of
course we're also looking back and --
I'm not trying to justify 40 years in
public administration, but you know,
looking back at the journal, I've had my
love-hate relationship with it over time
and all of you that may have
contributed or read PAR from time to time,
probably have had your love-hate
relationship with the journal.
But there's really a lot there.
And sort of a rich history of the --
the intellectual history of the field
in public administration review.
Now the other thing I ought to note, and
some people have asked me this already but,
we have lots of good, young scholars,
in the field of public administration.
I had a conversation with one
of your colleagues yesterday.
He said that you maybe came up
with a failed search this year.
I think the good news was that it failed
because you didn't [inaudible]
the guy from Indiana again.
So we're happy about that.
But you know, the question
is, "How deep is the bench?"
One of my recommendations was
that you ought to be looking --
as far as a bench, you ought to maybe
look beyond the confines of America.
I helped place a young scholar who's a
graduate of Seoul National University
at an American university this last year.
I think, for many years we've been
training people and sending them abroad.
I think we may be in an era where people
are being trained abroad and coming here.
We've got a lot of marvelous young
scholars and I didn't sort of try
to put together any numbers about that.
But in terms of good news, they haven't vanished
from places like University of Utrecht and --
or the Erasmus University and
a variety of other [inaudible].
And Aarhus University that I visited
last - in Denmark - last June.
We've got a lot of great
scholars around the world.
So those are all pieces of the good news.
Now let me get to the bad
news that I want to talk about
and that is vanishing public administration.
And the slide here, and I'm not sure if you can
read it -- see it over there, but refers to,
you know, in the U.S., we have
these continuing conversations
about how public administration is vanishing.
Now I think there was an era maybe in the 70s
or 80s where people were hoping it would go
away completely, but that's not the case.
But -- so what do I mean by
vanishing public administration?
Well, let me -- I want to
talk about three senses
in which PA has been projected
or could be seen as vanishing.
And I said, PA, that's my
shorthand for public administration.
Real erosion of administrative capacity, which
here I'm called substance or substantive.
The abandonment of public administration
by leading higher education institutions,
institutional, which would -- with which I've
had a little experience myself having been a UCI
professor in the days of the graduate
school of administration when we had --
and graduate school of management
when we offered both a BA --
an MBA, an MPA, and at one
time did those two jointly.
And then erosion of ideas to address
or challenges of public service,
which I'm referring here as ideational.
So the question is you know, "What are
the arguments associated with each one
of these forms of vanishing
public administration?"
And the other thing I want to talk about
is to what extent do I give them or judge
that they have credibility
or are they sort of --
have some legitimacy behind
them, some strength behind.
Let me start with the first one
and for those of you that aren't --
most of you are probably familiar
with Paul Volcker who was the Chair
of the Federal Reserve Board, Board of
Governors, in the late 1970s, early 1980s.
He was the person that helped put the
chokehold I think, on inflation in the period
of stagflation where we had low growth and high
inflation and where I think I left California
or left Fountain Valley and moved to a home
in Irving I had a chance to
pay at 11% interest rate.
Some of you may remember those days sadly.
But fortunately we didn't --
it didn't survive forever.
But Volcker, who we gave a
lecture at Woodrow Wilson School
in what they call the Good
Governance Lecture Series.
It appears in PAR in the July/August issue of
last year which was really the announcement
of something called the Volcker Alliance.
The Volcker Alliance is all about you're trying
to sort of serve as a corrective for our -
what Volcker would probably say - is our failing
governance structure in governance system.
The question he tried to
answer in that lecture was,
"Are U.S. governing bodies
meeting the needs of our citizens?"
And his answer was very interesting.
He said, "This can be a short speech.
The answer is no."
Not very promising, but he said quite simply
that they are not meeting
the needs of our citizens.
Now, what's the indictment here?
I think the indictment, sort of
distilling and boiling it down,
is government's lost its capacity to execute
public policies and implement programs.
Now, if you look at the language, some of the
language is interesting because they don't want
to necessarily abandon the public policy
schools and the conversation here,
but they refer to rather than the old
language we might have used at one time
as program implementation or policy
implementation, they refer to policy execution
as a part of -- partly as a way of
sort of calling attention to the people
who are interested in policy to say, "Hey,
there's more to policy than
designing the policy.
There's really the execution of the policy."
And we're not doing very good at that.
We've lost our capacity.
Volcker basically says, "How much attention
is being paid to how to get something done?
To practically implement big ideas?"
We're not paying much attention to that.
So that's sort of the core of this argument
about vanishing public administration
with respect to the substantive case.
That is, the loss of capacity
for policy execution.
Now, Volcker refers to a
lot of cases or anecdotes.
I've listed some here.
One that we're all familiar with,
www.Healthcare.gov implementation
where we couldn't get the website right.
The sort of the federal exchange system
was just not working and operating.
You would think after several years of trying
to implement this piece of legislation,
they would have been able
to get at least that right.
If we got nothing else right, they
would have been able to get that right.
But that was something for which we had
a long lead time, we didn't get it right.
An example of failed capacity to
successfully execute our public policies.
Another example, FEMA's - I put in parentheses
here - lack of response to Hurricane Katrina.
Gulf of Mexico offshore oil spill.
Another one near and dear to Volcker's
heart because of his involvement
in the Federal Reserve was financial regulation
and supervision leading to the Great Recession.
Volcker loves to quote Edison, where Edison
sort of wades in on this policy execution issue,
saying, "Inspiration with," it
should be without -- without, oh.
Okay, see I found an error.
"Without execution is hallucination."
You know? So, you can be inspired
as you can in a salon, right?
But if you can't execute
it, you're in deep trouble.
Now, the second sort of -- and I want to sort
of flow through each of these before I sort
of make some judgments about
their legitimacy or credibility.
Public administration -- the institutional
argument is, public administration has fallen
out of favor, replaced by
glamorous public policy programs.
Now, I don't want to overstate that.
Those of who were -- I'm a Maxwell graduate,
circa 1974 and about this time I left Maxwell,
we had sort of the rise of the policy programs.
And there was -- would be
called dissing I guess.
So they would be sort of dissing of the PA
people by the policy people and maybe silence
on the part of the PA people about
the perspectives of the policy people.
In any event, you know, there
was sort of this divide.
The policy folks were going
to ride to the rescue.
So public administration
programs had fallen out of favor.
There's a point though that Volcker
also makes as he's a Princeton graduate.
The Robertson family sued Princeton
University largely because of their gift
from a 1961 endowment, based on the sale
of A&P Supermarkets or grocery store --
I think about them as supermarkets,
grocery stores.
To train students for careers in government.
And the Robertson family went after
Princeton University and said,
"You're not training people for government."
They eventually settled the suit.
Nobody -- there's no distinction
here of who won or who lost,
although I think the Robertson
family would say they won.
I think the other -- this is no relation, huh?
No. Our future is safe if Peter could
sort of say, "Oh, that's my family."
So, but Princeton still walked away I think
with at least $700 million
that were continuing proceeds.
But they created a new foundation.
Princeton had to pay the court
costs for the Robinson family.
It's sort of an indication, very
concrete, of people saying, "Yes,
the policy schools have abandoned
attention to public administration.
The family who had gave the money
to Princeton, has said, "Hey listen,
you're not training people for government.
You're training them for doing a variety
of diffuse things, maybe on the fringe
of government, but not of the core enterprise
of what the execution of public policy
and public programs is all about."
And then we can sort of point to a
variety of prestigious universities.
And here I listed - and I don't see somebody in
the audience - but I list added Michigan here
because I wanted to make sure I -- if
I left your university out, excuse me.
But you know, Berkeley, Chicago,
Harvard, Michigan, and Princeton,
they're all among the policy schools.
And we've had the ASPA Conference
in Chicago recently
and I met the dean of the Harris School.
I'm a graduate of public affairs from -- as an
undergraduate, from the University of Chicago,
and I was the 20 years preceding
the creation of the Harris School.
I was a public affairs graduate in 1970,
and they didn't create the Harris School
until I think sometime in the 90s.
And so I sort of identified
with the institution but I --
the dean is a game theorist
and he was happy to sort
of welcome the public administration
folks to the conference.
And we actually met at 1313 East
60th Street which is called --
at one time was called the Public
Administration Clearinghouse.
And the Public Administration Clearinghouse
was where the American Society for --
was created by Louis Brownlow of the Brownlow
Commission under you know, Franklin Roosevelt.
Was the home of -- the first home of the
American Society for Public Administration,
the home of the International City
County Management Association.
It's the place where Clarence Ridley worked
with Herbert Simon in developing their sort
of famous paper on efficiency
that they published in 1937.
But there's not much presence, and again, this
is maybe sort of a concrete manifestation,
maybe the separation between policy
schools and public administration.
The first editor in chief of Public
Administration Review, Leonard White,
Chaired Professor at University of Chicago.
Herbert Simon studied at
the University of Chicago.
Thirteen-thirteen was created there.
But now there's really sort of a --
almost a complete separation
between what the Harris School does
and an interest in public administration.
Certainly, this is part and
parcel of Paul Volcker's argument.
You know, Volcker, not only is talking about
the loss of capacity to execute policy,
but he's also talking about
who's responsible for that?
And Volcker to some extent, lays that at
the feet of some of the policy schools
for diverting attention from
the study, research,
and a valuing of public administration.
Again, these are the arguments for
vanishing, not the arguments against these.
But I'll get to that in a minute.
So, that's the institutional argument.
The third is what I call ideational.
And I hope I have the term
-- terminology right here.
But theory and scholarship about
public administration has not kept pace
with the challenges of public service.
We probably can have a conversation
about that as we proceed,
but I have sort of a couple
of elements to that case here.
First, as an interdisciplinary field,
public administration has bounded
itself from the disciplines.
And by that I mean, is to some extent we've
become a silo -- an interdisciplinary silo.
Now some of this is based on my experience
as editor of Public Administration Review.
Somebody comes to me and says, "I
did a literature review on networks,
but I didn't find anything in the
public administration literature.
Therefore, there's nothing been done on this."
And I say, "Wait.
Did you read social networks?"
"Oh, no. No.
That's not public administration literature."
So my concern is that we've sort of bounded
ourselves looking inward, and sort of ignoring
that which is going -- it's an interdisciplinary
field but we've become so highly developed
with our own set of journals, and again,
Public Administration Review was just
about the only ballgame in
town in 1970, certainly 1980,
beginning of 1990 although
we had other journals.
But, ARPA's has been around for a while
in a couple of different manifestations.
But we have for instance, we have you know,
American Review of Public Administration,
the International Public Management Journal,
and Journal of Public Administration,
Research and Theory, and
[inaudible] and on and on.
Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration.
And we can well sort of stay within
that boundary, never get out of it,
and then the question is, "What are
we losing in terms of knowledge?"
Now my argument would be that we're
losing a lot and that that's --
one reason why we're not keeping pace
with the challenges of public service.
Now the other part of it is, the
other argument I'm making here is,
recent lines of research have been marginally
useful, especially for the ultimate goal
of executing complex policies and [inaudible].
That's a little bit less well-grounded.
But one of the -- Yan and I talked about this.
Don't let it outside the room.
You know, I've done research on collaboration,
but others have done research on collaborate --
the most cited paper I think, at least in terms
of Google Scholar, is on
collaborative governance.
And I'm looking at the -- all the places
that cite and connect with that paper.
And what I find is there's
very little substance flowing
from that original paper on
collaborative governance.
And part of the reason I think is that it's
sort of a -- like a [inaudible] association.
There's sort of -- there's a
connection to collaborative governance,
but there's really no knowledge
development underlining though.
One of the questions that I pose to
you perhaps for conversation later is,
to what extent has the sort of the new
knowledge or new directions we've taken
over let's say the last 20 years, including
collaborative governance, sort of moved us
or the hollow state or a variety of
other things, moved us in a direction
that have generated any useful new knowledge
or lines of research that are increasing
out capacity to generate useable
knowledge for public service.
I'd love to hear that we've got some
things out there, but my argument would be
that we're probably a lot thinner
than we should be, and that --
and part of it is maybe a
statement about the inability
to generate cumulative research readily
in this sort of a field where herding --
that's much close to herding
cats in terms of trying to sort
of move people in the same direction.
We get some collective contributions
as opposed to --
and the other argument here is the
disciplines have been bystanders,
bounded from public administration
by the wrong mix of incentives
and disinterested in problem centered research.
Now that again may be an overstatement,
but I'm not sure it's a big overstatement
and I'm certainly happy to
hear arguments to the contrary.
Part of my experience here is also
based on, again as editor chief
of Public Administration
Review, I get notifications
when somebody cites some of my research.
And I've been recently getting notifications
of economists citing my research.
And I say, "Hey, I'd like to publish
that in Public Administration Review
because I think it's going
to add to the debate."
They said, "No, no, no.
We can't do that.
We need to publish in an econ journal
and I've actually solicited job talk
papers that are very good experiments.
That mesh much better with the collective
knowledge that's been an interest in problems
that are developed in public administration
than they do in the mother field like economics.
And they say, "No."
And a matter of fact, I can't
even get an answer to an email.
Now, I take that as sort of
saying, "Here, this is --
it's not worth sort of having a conversation
with these people about what I'm doing,
because what's important is publishing in
an Econ journal and capturing that audience
and getting that assistant
professor job in economics.
And sort of -- that I sort of interpret
as troubling, but it adds significantly
to this vacuum that's created partly from
public administration looking inward only.
And the disciplinary journals
being bounded by their own fields,
and not sort of trying to crossover.
So that's clearly I think one of
the -- a potential problem we have.
And in terms of vanishing public administration,
that's sort of the final piece of this sort
of ideational argument of what
I associate with vanishing --
now, let me talk a little bit about judgments
about each one of these three sets of claims.
Administrative capacity is a
plausible explanation I think
for some high profile failures,
although probably far fewer.
You know, I think about www.Healthcare.gov.
Now I'm not quite sure what went wrong there.
I'm sure the Kennedy School will come up with
a case study for us, and explain it all, right?
But you know, I think we can
probably look at that and say, "Yes,
there were some failures there," whether
it was in the procurement process,
whether it was people talking with one
another, people willing to sort of cut
across organizational boundaries, but that may
have been a problem of administrative systems,
infrastructure leadership
that we may well associate
with the people high up in that organization.
But, Hurricane Katrina, that may
have been well beyond our capacity.
I'm not sure that Brownie and FEMA
were the only sources of problem there.
Clearly some of the other issues
that Volcker and others point to,
I think have maybe a partial or a peripheral
connection to public administration,
but not a deep association with the
workings of public administration.
As I suggest here in sort of the second
piece, the administrative capacity is only one
of many causes of governance failures, and of
course, you all probably have your theories
about governance failure and
who's responsible for that.
But I suspect, if we were having a seminar
now rather than a salon, that you know,
we could sort of list out a whole series
of things that were consequential --
that are consequential to
our governance failures.
And you probably are familiar with a
variety of other contributions in that area.
Now the other thing is that
-- and I was going back.
Jim Farris [assumed spelling] reminded me of
a piece that I think maybe I had consulted
in preparing, but it's a 1967 paper
in the Journal Policy Analysis
and Management by Don Stokes.
He wasn't then the dean of
the Woodrow Wilson School
but he had been the dean of
the Woodrow Wilson School.
A well-known scholar, influential
in public affairs.
And you know, one of the things I think stokes
pointed to is that we really have a sort
of a federal fetish, a federal fascination,
but there's a lot of other things
besides the federal government.
One of the books that we
commented on at the Academy
of Management last year was Richard
Wilson's book on public administration.
Wilson is a retired city manager of Santa
Cruz, and Wilson basically said, "You know,
we need to get reacquainted with management."
But the problem was not so much local
government, which is probably relatively --
at least Wilson would argue, relatively
well-served by the city management movement.
And of course, I have this identical twin
brother who is a 37 years city manager so I get
to hear all I want to hear
about city management from him.
He doesn't believe it's a
local government problem.
But so, when we look at public
administration, we need to say, "Well,
where are these problems occurring?"
Most for instance of Volcker's
anecdotes or examples are Katrina,
which actually was an intergovernmental
failure to the extent it was,
but some of those were certainly federal
or the Gulf Oil spill, another sort of one
that might be laid at the feed of the feds.
And then the other point I think that's
worth making here, is the substantive claim,
maybe another example of what I call
American exceptionalism although I looked
up what American exceptionalism is, for those of
you that are experts on American exceptionalism.
But it says, "Usually used in a positive way."
But I'm not using it in a
positive way here, right?
I spent too much time in Hong
Kong, too much time in China,
too much time in Korea, too
much time in Denmark.
I go to Denmark for instance and you know, not
only do they run government pretty well there
but they also can do a lot of good research.
And so, when I sort of look at some of these
other places, the results are a lot different
and people are wringing their hands less
about for instance the substantive
ability to execute public policies.
So, those are some sort of general
comments about the substantive claims.
Institutional claims, blaming the policy
schools ignores the small proportion
of degrees they grant relative to the
MPA, even after four decades of MPP.
Now, I may be misstating that and
I think I may be using numbers
that only refer to accredited programs.
But you know, I'm looking at the
NASPA charts, the bar charts,
and the bar for the MPA is something like this,
and the bar for the MPP is something like that.
Now maybe we need to believe that the
MPPs coming out of Princeton and Chicago
and other places are so much more consequential
in their organizations than the MPAs.
I'm not believing that.
I know some MPPs from Chicago who are
not working in the public sector anymore.
Not consequential.
But, this is one thing that struck me.
I was involved in the first
Volcker Commission in the late 80s,
where U.S. federal employment is something
like 2 million people at the time.
The number of MPAs, MPPs, in the federal
government in the late 1980s, 11,000.
So we're talking about a, you know,
small wart on the whole body there.
It's just a small -- I shouldn't
call it a wart though, should I?
Just small numbers.
And so you know, I'm not sort of -- I'm not
believing the argument that our capacity
or ability to sort of -- that we've been sort of
taken down the wrong path by pursuing the MPP,
partly because we're not placing so
many students with either MPA or MPPs.
Now again, that's the federal government.
Local governments may be different and we
certainly need to be sensitive to that.
But I'm also thinking one of the other things
that I think about but have not acted is,
how many lawyers do we have in the federal
government or any other level of government?
We've got more lawyers, many of
them who are not working as lawyers,
but people with legal training in our public
organizations, at all levels of government,
than we have people who are graduating
with specialized training in public service
or public administration, public affairs.
So I'm suggesting here that I wouldn't attribute
the performance failures in any way, shape,
or form to the graduates from these programs.
And then, governments with high representations
of public administration professionals
are most -- now I may be overstating that,
but I like to think that to the
extent that local government is seen
as our most effective level of government.
It's probably also the most highly populated
with people who are professionally trained
from [inaudible] programs whether it
be USC, or Maxwell, or National --
Northern Illinois University, or
University of Kansas or any other place.
But the proportion of professionals,
public professionals, in those --
the local government context, may be part of
the explanation for why they do better overall
with respect to executing policies,
designing programs, and doing other things
that we associate with public administration.
Now let me get to the third.
Judgements about the ideational claims.
This is the one that I sort
of put the most stock in.
Interdisciplinary silos, create
barriers to knowledge advancement.
Very annoying for me as the editor in chief of
Public Administration Review to confront authors
who don't want to look beyond
the interdiscipline.
Who think only in terms of the
public administration literature.
Now, one way I learned that was because
when I started my research career,
I was studying public sector
collective bargaining in the 1970s.
There was about zero literature on public
sector collective bargaining in the early 1970s.
That was an easy literature
review to write, right?
But you know, my chair didn't sort of lead me
with that as sort of the simple end [inaudible].
Well, there's game theory.
There's conflict theory.
There's sociology -- there's a whole bunch
of stuff going on in the disciplines,
that need to be integrated into the research
on public sector collective bargaining.
And ultimately, that -- the piece out
of that dissertation was published
in the American Political Science Review.
So, it wasn't like -- so
what was done there sort
of ignored entirely what was
going on in the disciplines.
Obviously, had to one of the reasons
why it had some currency in one
of the leading disciplinary [inaudible].
It was also a sure way never to
-- or it was a sure way to know
that that article would never be cited again
because putting a public administration piece
in the leading political science journal, which
was far less obscure in 1976 than it is today,
or at some period in the interim.
But in any case, that's sort
of another story probably.
Disciplinary [inaudible] further
limits knowledge advancement.
And then here's a sort of a summary
across the three all -- again.
Narrative summary.
Governance failures can seldom be placed
at the feet of public administration.
Policy execution and implementation flourishes
where professional public administration
has flourished rather than vanished.
And the finally, in the broader
public administration community,
we've failed in arena of ideas and evidence.
The arena, over which we have the most control.
That is, if we want to sort of get a closer
connection between practice and theory
and knowledge, we can control that within
our schools of public affairs administration
within our promotion and tenure processes
within our journals and the like.
So that I think is sort of
a critical consideration
for thinking about where we go next.
Now, what should we do about it?
That is, I'm basically saying, the
substantive to me is not a compelling argument.
If we're having -- if we have
serious governance failures,
those to blame for those serious governance
failures needs to be spread broadly.
And I personally tend to start with our
political institutions, but what would I know
about governance failures in political
institutions when I'm from the state of Indiana.
But, my sister-n-law used to be the -- was
the commissioner of education for Kansas.
So this sort of runs in the family, you know?
Crazies in Kansas.
Crazies in Indiana.
So, but we know craziness when we see it.
First of all, one argument I would
make, and these are some broad arguments
and we can certainly talk about details,
we need to define research more broadly
as discovery integration and application.
Now, I think that's an issue
in public administration
and not merely in the disciplines.
That is that - and let me take the other premier
journal or the other almost premier journal,
the Journal of Public Administration Research
and Theory - they sort of prize themself
on this notion of discovering new knowledge.
Is there a lot of attention there
to integration or application?
I don't want to say there's none, but I
would say those are sort of two dimensions
where the public administration
research isn't engaged
in the context of that particular journal.
I think as a field, particularly as a field that
aspires to be applied or practical in some way,
that doesn't negate I think, the utility
of theory or what is suggested is we need
to find ways of marrying theory and our more
rigorous and sometimes fairly esoteric research.
The other issue that I think is a real
critical problem, that's integration.
We've generated so much knowledge with all
these new journals that we're sort of falling
over one another to produce these fairly
narrow pieces of research without taking stock
of what we've developed and what we know.
And I think that's critical
-- I see doctoral students
around the room saying, "Yes, yes, yes, yes."
Clearly would make your examination
process easier, wouldn't it?
But you know, I've always sort of prized
myself and my own personal career about trying
to integrate the research
that's come before what I do.
And I think that's absolutely
critical going forward.
We try to do some things at PAR that
sort of advance that process, but --
now, the terminology I used here,
"discovery integration application,"
isn't my own terminology.
The president of the Carnegie endowment
for teaching came up with an --
produced an article about 1996 or '97,
called "Scholarship Reconsidered"
or "Scholarship Refined."
Something along those lines.
Basically the fourth form of scholarship he
talked about was a scholarship of teaching,
which I don't -- haven't put up here.
Obviously that might be a relevant scholarship.
But the important point is that
scholarship is not merely discovery.
It's also integration of
ideas and prior research,
and it's also the application of those ideas.
And I think that's absolutely critical
for a field like public administration.
Structure and motivation for our scholarship.
I sort of see public administration
and the disciplines as sort of being
in two different extremes, and somehow
we need to find a middle ground.
Excuse me.
We need to be less exclusively problem
driven in public administration.
Now, when Public Administration Review
drove me crazy in the 70s when I was sort
of a developing scholar in the 70s and 80s.
It drove me crazy in part
because what was important
to be published, was the latest problem.
Somebody had a problem, let's publish it.
We need to get this out for the practitioners.
Now, that problem may be gone tomorrow and may
have no longevity, but that was irrelevant.
So sort of the question is you know, "How
do we create some continuity in the research
that we -- in the knowledge that we developed?
And so, even as an applied professional area,
we need to be thinking about how we've sort
of established the foundations
for continuity over time.
We've not been very attentive to
that in public administration.
Now on the disciplinary side, we need
to find ways of infusing more questions
of practical importance into the disciplinary
journals to sort of try to create some balance
between that -- you know, the disciplines which
may focus on their concepts, rigorous research,
and maybe fairly esoteric stuff
particularly for practitioners.
And on the other extreme, the tendency of some
people and many public administration scholars -
I should say many but, in the old days may
be [inaudible] - people who have since passed
or retired or whatever, that we're sort of
focused on the latest problem when dealing
with the latest problem was not a way of sort
of creating knowledge that would be useful
to you know, future scholars,
future practitioners.
We need to find some ways for crossover between
public administration and the disciplines.
One of the things we do now at Public
Administration Review are systematic reviews.
Although I told somebody at lunch today,
"We're interested in meta-analyses."
Meta-analysis is a technical and
statistical review of prior research.
The last meta-analysis that public
-- in 1985, I wrote an article, said,
"We need to do more meta-analyses."
That appeared in Public Administration Review.
Since that 1995 -- 1985 article,
Public Administration Review has
published one meta-analysis in 30 years.
I'd like to make that routine, you know?
You can't go into the medical research
these days without seeing a meta-analysis
of let's say, studies of breast cancer or
whatever and treatments of breast cancer
or a variety of other interventions of
practical importance for patients and doctors,
professionals in the medical profession.
We need to sort of think about
ourselves in the same way
and how we can embrace that
integration of material.
We're also interested in systematic reviews.
But the purpose for the systematic
review is to say, and the example I use
of collaborative governance and if I -- I
probably won't offend you on this but the --
JPAR published a piece in 2008, alright,
that has tons of Google Scholar hits on it.
The most successful issue in the history of
Public Administration Review was the issue
on collaboration which your [inaudible]
used some of the content from that
in his dissertation, which was published
in Public Administration Review in 2006.
Very successful.
Matter of fact, 4 of the Top 75 articles in the
history of the journal, come from that issue.
Interestingly, not one of those articles
or any other article from that symposium
in 2006 is cited in the 2008 article.
How is that possible?
I don't know, it's the vanity of one journal
versus another or what, but it's problematic.
That's one reason why I think why I
read every article before we publish
in it Public Administration Review.
And I'm on the lookout for gaps.
Of course our reviewers are too.
You know, sometimes the reviewers may not
be aware of certain gaps that I'm aware of,
but clearly, I think we're letting the whole
profession know, we're letting our colleagues
down if we don't sort of integrate
this research into the process
when we're doing our new studies.
MPA scholarship must become less [inaudible].
No, I think there are a lot
of ways of dealing with that.
For instance, you've got a PhD program.
Do you have a requirement for an outside minor?
[ Inaudible audience response ]
Oh, okay. So our public affairs PhD
at SPIA [phonetic] has a
requirement for an outside minor.
You know, if we want students to be
crossing over from the inter-discipline
to the discipline, we probably have to have
some conversation between public administration
and sociology or political science or --
and one way to get it is in
the design of the PhD program.
Now I'm not sort of critiquing yours.
I was just -- I thought you
were going to say yes.
But, now one of the things I do know
about USC is you hire a lot of people
in the disciplines, which is good.
That's another way of making sure that your
doctoral students are not sort of simply talking
to those of us who have been trained in PA,
but you're talking to someone who's trained
in economics or sociology or elsewhere.
So there are a variety of ways of
sort of making that connection.
The general point is though, we need to
find ways of reducing the insularity.
We also need to be thinking about building and
strengthening practitioner-researcher ties.
One example of that that I'm very pleased with,
proud of, and it a piece that involves one
of your faculty, former Indiana
University professor Bill Resh.
That's coming Public Administration
Review May-June.
I suggest you read it.
But it's on the Federal Employee
Viewpoint Survey.
And the Federal Employee Viewpoint
Survey actually dates back to 1979.
Why do I know that?
Because I was using the survey in 1979 when it
was called the Federal Employee Attitude Survey
and it was created by Scotty Campbell when the
Office of Personnel Management was created.
It morphed into the Federal
Human Capital Survey.
Now it's the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.
And the feds are using it --
beginning to use it extensively
for the management of federal organizations.
Enhancing employee engagement,
a variety of other things
that are now mandated for federal executives.
The survey unfortunately, and the
logic behind it and its integration
between the practitioner and
the scholar is very poor.
Forty studies, as the article you will read
that will be online in the next two weeks,
when you read it, will point out 40 peer review
articles have been published from that database.
Most of them in the last ten years.
That's a fair bit of literature.
Forty studies on one database.
The Office of Personnel Management
didn't know about one of them.
Didn't have a clue.
So here we've got the feds generating all these
survey data, using it primarily for practice,
including designating the best places
to work in the federal government,
but ignoring completely the scholarly community.
And so part of our purpose for commissioning
the article from Bill and his collaborators,
was to put out the scholar perspective,
saying, "We can do a lot better."
Of course, the thing I knew in
1979 was a lot of the survey items
in the survey were not highly valid, right?
So, one thing you don't want to do
with surveys is use invalid items.
They don't give you -- sort of like
garbage in, garbage out, right?
Not only have those items not changed
since 1979, they'd be written into statute.
Something like 45 or 47 items in the
Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey,
are required statutorily.
Now the reason for that I think is probably
because of the National Treasury Employees Union
and other employee unions saying, "If
you're going to be asking questions
of federal employees, we want to make
sure you get questions in there like,
"How satisfied are you with your job?
How good is your supervisor?"
So that those things can be tracked.
The other thing we discovered that's also --
that's revealed subtly in a commentary by
the research director at OPM was that --
how many of you are familiar with the
Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey?
Okay, cross-sectional -- annual
cross section survey or panel data?
>> Cross-sectional.
>> James L. Perry: Cross-sectional.
>> Cross-sectional.
>> James L. Perry: Cross-sectional.
Cross-sectional.
Not true. Not true.
The OPM has identifiers on all the respondents.
You can put together a panel.
Until Bill and his colleagues wrote that
in the article, OPM didn't say a word.
Now there are a variety of reasons whether we're
going to be able to get the panels out of it,
but when I had the conversation about
commissioning this article I said,
"You have to press on the panel thing."
Why? Because that's going to get us good data.
It's going to get us the opportunity
for instance to track people over time
to know what difference interventions
to improve leadership programs
and develop senior executives
make in the federal civil service.
So I'm hoping that sort of putting all
this in the light of day is going to sort
of bring together practitioners and scholars.
The other thing it's going to do is that if
we can get -- systematically get a panel,
we're not going to have only public
administration scholars or the people
within the public administration's
community to be doing that, but sociologists
and psychologists and a variety
of others will be using it.
Yes, Ron?
>> So in principle, it could be
a panel but it's not in practice?
>> James L. Perry: No, it's not in practice.
Not yet. But the research
director from OPM referred
to the panel in her comment on the article.
[ Inaudible audience response ]
Yes, yes. Okay, sure.
But you know, building Rome starts
with you know, the first block right?
So, like I said, they're still using
the survey [inaudible] from '79.
It goes back a long way.
And then creation of forms that advance mutual
interest between practitioners and scholars,
I suspect we have those, but we
probably don't have as many as we need
and I don't have any specific suggestions there.
But certainly that's something
we need to be thinking about.
In a conversation over lunch, you know
part of my or one of my comments was
that I see Public Administration
Review as a sort of a big tent.
And it's owned by the American
Society for Public Administration,
but I'd like to see many practitioners,
whether it be International City County
Management Association or National League
of Cities to look to PAR at least in part,
for answering questions that are important
to them and their constituencies.
One of the things we have tried to do, given
the affinity between ICMA and the Journal was --
and the fact that I'd like to have this
identical twin brother who is a city manager,
so I had to do something for him, subtly.
He'd never done anything for
me but -- yes, he's a good guy.
Mark met him.
Yes. Was to do four articles in honor of
the 100th anniversary, trying to sort of lay
out some details about you know,
future research and the like,
and sort of synthesizing some
information that might be useful
for the city management profession.
I'm almost done.
Filling gaps between research and our education.
Now this goes back to the [inaudible] chart.
One of the interesting things,
I went back to this yesterday
after Jim Farris [assumed spelling] mentioned
it to me, Stokes talked about five waves
of public administration, public
management, public policy.
The fifth wave and this is 1996, he talked
about five areas, financial management,
political analysis, legal analysis,
ethical analysis, and negotiation.
Now two areas I think we have maybe
a pretty good grasp of, negotiation,
although we don't talk about it a lot
and with a distinctively public
context, and financial management.
The other -- some of these other
areas like political, legal,
and particularly ethical analysis, I
think we've been essentially moribund,
particularly with regard to ethical analysis.
As the editor of PAR, I've repeatedly tried
to solicit high quality research on ethics.
It's being done in other fields, but we don't
have anybody sort of putting together both sort
of a normative foundation, nor an explanatory
foundation for understanding and thinking
about ethics research and
practice in the public sector.
The other thing I put that sort of next to is
we published an article last March, or last May,
on corruption and the financial
effects of corruption.
Since between May 1 and the end of December, we
had 25,000 downloads on that one article alone.
Now the other thing I didn't mention
that I'll mention in passing now is
that Public Administration Review in 2014,
passed the one million download mark.
That is, in that year, we had a
million downloads of our articles.
That's a fairly robust attention to
what we've published over the years.
Part of it's saying that you know, the
Simons and the Lindbloms and others,
are still consequential and important to folks
either in teaching or thinking about the field,
but it also says something about -- this
corruption piece I think says something
about how the public sort of values
attention to good government,
which was sort of the foundation of public
administration, going back to the 1930s.
And I don't think we've escaped that today.
Another area I think we are very under
researched on is public leadership research
and it's been confined mainly to mimicking
and replicating corporate research.
If you look at our 75 most influential articles,
although again, Janet may, I won't say disagree
but may -- you may have another take on
this and it might be useful to hear that.
We don't have a lot that's leadership per se,
although let's say the new
public service may have --
there may be spinoffs or
ideas related to leadership.
I commissioned an article to sort of look at the
leadership research for the 75th anniversary.
And also to try to lay out a research agenda.
It's one of the two of the 12 articles I
commissioned that the author dropped out.
So, not promising to me again,
in trying to fill these holes.
And again, you may say, "Well, this
guy's absolutely crazy in terms
of expecting one article to
make that much difference."
But again, if you go back to my 50th anniversary
article on public service motivation,
slow start after that but now you know, the
article gets you know, lots of attention
and we had 130 peer reviewed articles
on public service motivation since 2008.
So, it may not have generated a lot of
attention until we sort of created --
till I created a scale to measure
it that was published in 1996.
But you know, one good article and
sort of the right development of it,
can make a big difference in the long run.
And one of the things I think is that we have
a lot to say about leadership that gets lost
in the babble coming out of business
schools and the corporate sector.
And there are parts of -- there are facets
of leadership like collect leadership
or public leadership, where we need to
be part of that conversation that's going
to generate the knowledge that will
flow out of our field, not only --
you know, we should not be merely the
receptors of ideas from elsewhere as this sort
of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary.
We need to also be generating new knowledge
and ideas that sort of are transportable
or exportable to other locations.
And then finally, and I'm not going to say
more about this but I have this view that --
I say here, "Explore using public
service professionalism as a frame
for unifying public values
ethics, practice, and scholarship."
Dwight Waldo, and I did call for articles
on -- for the 75th anniversary of ASPA.
And I got 40 proposals for articles
on public service professionalism.
We commissioned about 20 papers.
Maybe about 15 were submitted
and two passed muster.
So that's 1 out of 20 from the original numbers.
Very small numbers.
Part of it I think is related to the
fact that we're not comfortable thinking
about public administration on
professional terms, but I think we need --
again need to frame public
administration in professional terms.
Now, is public administration
only one profession?
No. The question is you know,
"How does it sort of fit??
How did the professions that -- what
Frederick Mosher talked about the professions
in 1968 book, "The New Public Service?"
How does that -- how do they sort of
all come together and what are sort
of the ethical obligations and sort of the
moral connections across those professions,
and how do they behaviorally get
played out in public service?
And you know, what might be the sort
of the hierarchy of commitments?
Well, we need a robust research
on professionalism
in public context, which
we're not getting at all.
You know, I would say generally, although I tend
to associate professionalism with sociology.
We're not getting much out of
sociology either, but maybe you know,
we could certainly be the engine.
And I think some clarity about professionalism
and how we want to think about it
in the public context would help us think
about values, would help us think about ethics,
would help us think about scholarship that would
advance our ability to bring everybody together
in public service in these -- you know,
one of the things that Stokes talked about
and we've all talked about are these sort
of new, complex service arrangements.
But I think that -- you know, in that context,
I think we need to be thinking about you know,
what is professionalism in that context?
What are -- clearly, we -- even if we thought
historically about public professionals,
where we've outsourced all the work to
the private sector, the question is,
"Do we expect those people to be
thinking about their public obligations
in the same way we think
about our public obligations?"
Now you know, one example.
The Australian National or the Australian
government I think created a statute I think
going back as far as 1998 that
said, "When you contract things out,
you don't contract the values out.
You don't contract the ethical obligations out.
You may be -- put them on a different cost
footing and a different efficiency footing,
but you don't contract out
certain public values."
That hasn't been our sort of way of thinking
about the world, but it may be useful to sort
of frame public and have sort of a
robust analytic framework associated
with public service professionalism that
helps us think about what values are lost,
what are gained, and you know, what sort of
the trade-offs are in those contexts but also
to help us think about doing research and
accumulating ideas over a variety of studies.
And hey, that's it.
I'm done. Janet, yes?
>> Janet: There is just so much here.
Thank you.
>> James L. Perry: Well Dion
gave me a broad sweep here so--
>> Janet: Well thank you for being here.
Thank you for taking us through this.
There's a lot to worry about here.
And I do worry.
Just make a couple point
and then ask a question.
You know, talking about Australia.
If you look at the countries of the world
that led in the [inaudible] out movement,
a lot of them have reversed the
legislation to promote that and have begun
to focus on administrative capacity.
And you've been talking a lot about
building administrative capacity.
Second, I would agree with you that there's
not enough [inaudible] public leadership.
But the third thing I want to say and ask
you about is, I really appreciate the role
that scholarship and publication plays
in laying the foundation for the field.
One of the things that concerns me most,
and I don't know what we need to do about,
is that as you point out, we're
producing more MPAs than [inaudible].
But the scholars we're producing are more in the
field of policy than in public administration.
Who's going to teach in those MPA programs?
Certainly practitioners have a
great deal that they can offer.
You don't see this as you point out so
much in local government, but PA theory,
PA generally speaking as a field, is not
producing a lot of doctoral students.
What can we do about that?
Do we need to be concerned about that?
Can the other disciplines fill in?
>> James L. Perry: Yes, I wish I had
sort of an answer for that although,
which we do have professors of practice, right?
>> Janet: Well yes, and that's very important
but we might also need some other folks.
>> James L. Perry: Yes.
Well you know, if I were -- I need to
be a little bit careful I don't want --
what I say because I don't want to--
[ Inaudible audience response ]
Yes, yes. Well, you know one general comment I
made was that, I made to my brother last week.
My brother and I were together
on a theory practice symposium.
He is a 37 year city manager and
me as the 40 year academic, but --
and I said, "You know, some of these
places will not be placing their --
wouldn't be placing their PhD students if there
were sort of a robust turn out of students,
development of students at
the upper level institutions."
You know, one of the things I'm on all
of this is probably why USC is not able
to fill some of its positions, right.
You say, well, here are the ten places
from which we'd accept somebody in PA.
If they come from these other ones, we're not --
you know, we're going to toss those on the side.
Even if they look outstanding,
we probably can't hire them.
You know, the economics I think
has a -- you know, has a --
I know at UC Irvine, when I was at
UC Irvine, we had -- I think we --
no, I think we were turning
out people in economics.
But you know, there were only like
six economic programs in the country
where PhDs could get jobs at major universities.
And if they weren't coming from one
of those programs, they didn't get.
So we already have that sort
of structure in place,
but I see places where I
wouldn't expect people to be --
from which I wouldn't expect
people to be easily placeable,
placeable in public administration jobs.
So that you know, that concerns me.
It also concerns me about
sort of the [inaudible].
Now maybe they're gifted people
and maybe they're going to do well.
I don't know but I think it sort
of reaffirms though you know,
my experience is consistent with your concern.
I think we need to start filling [inaudible].
Now is the -- I see some of
these things though at --
I won't say self-correcting
but it's correcting over time.
That is that to the extent that you know, Paul
Volcker and others sort of stand up and say,
"We're not creating people to execute policies,
and we need people with sort of administrative
or skills about public knowledge
and public administration."
As we've understood it, traditionally
even if a --
even if they're sort of trying to translate
it into the current language and research
that you know, maybe that's what'll sort
of bring some resolution from places.
Part of it is also maybe related
to the demographics of the academy.
That as we have enormous,
you know, "I'm retired."
Rich, you're retired, right?
Yes, so we've got -- we have the old guard
retiring but we're retiring at faster rates
than we can sort of replace -- produce
new PhDs in those areas to replace us.
So that's -- and maybe that
will correct over time.
I'm not sure but -- so yes, I think there's some
legitimate concern there about which we have
to get -- now maybe the USCs
and the Indianas and some
of the other places will redouble
their efforts to turn out quality PhDs.
The other -- the thing we don't have any
control over though is when students come to us,
even though we may recruit them in X area, they
may drift over in somewhere else or whatever.
Here's the other issue though.
Students, PhD students, are doing research in
moving to the glamour areas or to the hot areas.
Not -- and that's not necessarily
serving our knowledge requirements.
I'm saying, why is everybody doing
research on public service motivation?
We don't need that much research
on public service motivation.
We don't need that much research on networks.
Everybody is gravitating.
You sort of -- if you go -- for instance,
if you've gone to the last five public
management research conferences, you know,
one year it was networks, then the
next year it was collaboration,
and the next time was public service motivation.
And those sort of three, or four,
or five areas have sort of rolled
through to dominate the stuff
that's coming to our journals.
People have to say, "Wait, somebody needs to
mentor me and I need to sort of get my head
around doing high quality ethics research.
I want to become the person who's going to
define ethics research in the mid-21st Century."
We don't have anybody like that coming along.
So somebody's got to -- we've got to get --
find ways of getting those people who are going
to lead the way and move people out of these
areas where everybody's fleeing so quickly
because they think that's the hot topic.
Because the other thing is that by the time
people are able that to actualize their plans,
the hot topic is something over which
I've got too many manuscripts at PAR
and all the good stuff is already -- all the
good findings have already been published
and the other stuff tends to
be just secondary replications.
I don't want to overstate that, but clearly
we need to sort of think about those processes
over time and somehow steering people away
from sort of giving too much attention.
This is [inaudible] over the problem of
hurrying cats or whatever you want to call it,
as sort of the -- one of the issues we can find.
Thank you.
Yes, yes.
>> So may I ask a question?
>> James L. Perry: Sure.
>> So is -- I kind of--
>> James L. Perry: Make it easy though.
[ Inaudible audience question ]
Yes, yes. You know, when you find a
solution to this problem, let me know.
Yes.
[ Inaudible audience response ]
You know, that's something I've
struggled with as editor of PAR because --
but I've given some presentations.
I went to I think it's TASPA.
It's the Taiwan Association
for Public Administration --
which is a combination of NASPA and ASPA.
It's got both the school involved
as well as the individual scholars.
And I gave a talk on globalizing
public administration research.
I think we need to find again
some ways of framing
that so we can have some common conversations.
I've seen some movement.
We actually have a piece that I -- that may
or may not make it but from scholars from US
and Korea, trying to sort
of think about you know,
how we might go about this
process of globalizing [inaudible].
The reality is that we've done
this -- tried to do this before.
Remember the -- you may not remember it,
the comparative administration movement.
You remember probably Rich, the
comparative administration group
of the -- Indiana was heavily involved.
Fred Riggs [phonetic] and
Bill [inaudible] and others
and the Ford Foundation, threw money into it.
But it was a very much sort
of, I would say straight --
fairly abstract straight political science.
It didn't necessarily connect with the practice.
Of course those were probably in the days before
we had a lot of attention to public management
and public administration and practice.
But I think we need to sort of
find some ways of connecting them.
One of the things I tried to do when
I started as PAR editor is to say,
"What issues have some universal appeal?"
I'd at least like to see research
on questions of universal appeal.
Now, the corruption article about corruption
in the American states, we published last May,
probably got downloaded not only because
of interest across the American states,
and we marked it free, but there's probably
-- I need to check on the downloads in China.
I suspect that there were probably some
downloads in China associated with interest in
and attention to corruption there.
But, you know, corruption I think
sort of as a universal concern.
Another area is transparency.
We've had some comparative
pieces on transparency,
including an experiment between
Netherlands and Korea.
So, you know, one way for me to attack it
is to say, "Okay, we can have a conversation
across countries because
transparency is important in Korea,
it's important in the U.S.,
it's important maybe in China."
I don't know.
Although to some extent, it
probably is, and elsewhere.
So, you know, that's a concept or an idea around
which we can have a universal conversation.
We need to find more of those.
At the same time, I'm reading some of the stuff
coming to me from the Europeans for instance,
where they're talking about concepts that don't
have any connection with the American audience.
And I'm trying to say -- I'm thinking to
myself, "Is there sort of a universal here
that we ought to be searching for.
If there is, we haven't found it."
That is that the Europeans have their language
and they've identified something
that's salient to them.
It may not sort of generate
any interest over here.
So I'm trying to sort of find some ways of sort
of connecting across these geographic locations.
Now the other area is methodology.
We -- the European Group of Public
Administration had 17 papers
on experimental public administration
as presented at a symposium last fall.
We did a call for papers on
experimental public administration.
We got 40 submissions.
These are submissions, not only from the
original 17, but from a lot of other people
from around the world, some of them very good.
So I think one way to sort of unify our
conversation may be around methods, possibly.
You know? Clearly, and I've had conversations
for instance with a colleague at Milan
at Bocconi University, and he came
to Indiana and he's also working
with [foreign name] University
in China and another university
about having four country experiments.
And so that -- and focusing on the same
let's say, interadministrative intervention,
performance pay or what have you, and
to look at the commonalities there.
So, you know, there are ways of
which we can sort of knit together.
Now I don't have any sort of one best way, but
I think we need to be searching [inaudible].
Now the other thing I note, I accepted
two papers from Korean scholars recently.
You know how these papers were different
from previous papers from Korean scholars?
One of my former Korean students suspected.
[Inaudible] tell me, how where they different?
[ Inaudible audience response ]
No idea. Okay.
Yes. They were different because they
were based on data collected in Korea.
They weren't about data collected
in California or Washington.
[Inaudible] this is a breakthrough.
We've got you know, scholars from Korea doing
research that is Korea looking at things
that theoretically, I think this was on budget
transparency, or theoretically have a connection
with other parts of the world, but
they're not using American data.
So that's a breakthrough.
So this is going to be you know, one step --
two steps forward, one step
back sort of process I think,
or it's going to be a lot of baby steps.
But I think we're moving in the right direction.
When we're going to get a
breakthrough, I'm not sure but I think --
I'm looking for people to sort of send
articles to me that are going to sort
of help unify this scholarship cross-nationally.
Now the other thing is we've
got a lot of databases.
We published a piece on altruism
last year that was grounded
in the public service motivation research
by economists from Erasmus University,
that was focused on 32 countries or 33
countries, using the World Value Survey.
That's not just one country.
It's multiple countries.
It's sort of talking about ideas
that have currency around the world.
And so we're you know, developing.
And some people have you know,
looked for instance and said,
"Well the public service motivation stuff
may be as far as anybody's gone in terms
of trying to internationalize something."
But maybe we need three, four, five areas
that sort of move us in that direction.
Teaching to the extent for
instance that these articles are --
that are written by Koreans that use
Korea data, they might be more salient.
But I don't think I have a
perfect answer for that one.
But--
[ Inaudible audience response ]
Yes, but you know, I think the other thing is
that Public Administration Review though is
less Ameri-centric [inaudible] yes, yes, yes.
>> One more question?
>> James L. Perry: Yes?
>> About [inaudible].
>> First of all, thank you for being here.
>> James L. Perry: Yes.
>> And I am one of those pesky lawyers
that you mentioned [inaudible].
>> James L. Perry: Did I say pesky lawyers?
>> But my question is, it just is very
interesting to me that every narrative
that I hear, various scholars
in public administration,
choose to speak about the governing
bodies that are the furthest away
from daily lives of citizens that we serve.
And not focus more on global governance
which is as you correctly pointed out,
substantially different than the experience
[inaudible] would have at the federal level.
What do we need to do in order to get
more attention or pay more attention
to an identical twin brother, then move
perhaps to a more effective way of governing?
Because I don't know how many times you've
spoken to your Congressman in the last 30 days,
but I have seen a constituent of mine or
I have spoken to a constituent of mine,
every day in the last 30
days in the local governance.
So, how do we kind of change the narrative
and go to an established form
of governance that is working?
And what can we learn from that governance?
>> James L. Perry: Well, yes that sort of
presumes though that talking about that one form
of government or governance that's
working, sort of negates the --
all the negatives associated with the others.
I mean we are a federal system.
The -- certainly local governments are
an administrative entity of the state
so that they have much sort
of more limited capacity.
And they're also closer to citizens and may
address them on a much smaller set of questions
that are more manageable by
the administrators there.
I don't think that means we should ignore
you know, state level or clearly you know,
the Indiana situation the last 48 hours is
an example that states are important too.
They're going to have a big
consequence for sales tax revenue,
the health of local governments,
and a variety of others.
And so, you know, we need all these
levels to sort of work effectively.
And clearly the -- a lot of what I think happens
is at the federal level, well I think we do
over -- do tend to give too
much attention there.
You know, happens to be quite
visible for better or worse.
And we've got -- you know,
we've got our national news.
They're not going to the -- although
I think they probably should have gone
and asked some good telling questions of
the city manager of Ferguson, Missouri.
And I asked my brother about this.
I said, "John, this guy's been
city manager for seven years."
He was hired because he was a local, although
he had been gone to the University of Missouri
at St. Louis, I think MPA
program or bachelors program.
So he has some specialized knowledge but
not -- he wasn't a highly cosmopolitan.
He wasn't sort of looking for
employment outside the St. Louis area.
But he had some role.
Of course, he was a cheerleader for the
tickets that they kept writing that were --
for which the African Americans in the
community were probably the primary victims.
So I don't -- you know, I don't know.
I think we need to be attentive to all levels.
One of the other things -- we have an article
coming out on the council manager plan.
I referred to the -- the council manager
plan has been in effect for a hundred years.
Interestingly, we have very little
research on the consequences
of choosing the council manager plan versus
a strong mayor plan versus a commission plan.
I thought, and Indiana's the one with the --
the one of 50 states that doesn't have
the council manager plan in the state law.
That I thought, "Well, I'm going to go to the
International City County Management Association
that represents 6,000 city
managers, not only in the U.S.,
but Canada, Australia, and other places.
And they're going to be able to tell me why
I should be talking to my state legislature
to create opportunities for a council
manager plan and maybe why we ought
to implement that at the local level.
They don't have that information.
So one reason for our publishing the article is
to sort of tell everybody but what's not there.
But you know, just because
local government works,
doesn't mean that we don't want
state and federal government to work.
They all really have sort of different
domains of activity for the most part.
And if we don't get them all working,
we all come out on the short end.
[applause]
------------------------------5fcda9747265--
