Books in the Elements in Public and Nonprofit Administration series

This Element introduces a new approach in the measurement and reporting of government performance - behavioral public performance. Drawing especially on evidence from experiments, this approach examines the influence of characteristics of numbers, subtle framing of information, choice of benchmarks or comparisons, and information sources.

Communities across the United States face problems not easily solved by any one organization or sector. Partners must work together over time to address these shared priorities. This Element compares and contrasts a sample of enduring voluntary partnerships with those that have ended to identify features that contribute to collaborative resilience.

Advances nonprofit scholarship using the conceptual framework of policy fields to examine differences across nonprofit fields of activity. Focusing on the structure of relationships in four sectors (government, nonprofit, market, informal), and how they differ across policy fields (health, human services, education, arts and culture, religion).

What happens to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) after their creation has remained in mystery over the years. Research is yet to untangle how these organizations work and operate. This Element addresses this niche in the literature by delving into two important aspects: the management and governance of IGOs.

Accountability is a staple of Public Administration scholarship, but scholars have been unsuccessful at developing a predictive model of accountable behavior. In this Element, we seek to further a predictive model of accountability by understanding the norms and expectations associated with the implementation of Body-Worn Cameras.

This Element rejuvenates research on how local governments respond to culture war conflicts, documenting new fronts in the culture wars and the changing face of local government. It advances new categories of responsiveness scholars and practitioners can employ to understand the roles local governments play in contentious culture war conflicts.

This Element aims to connect the literature of street-level bureaucrats with that of policy entrepreneurship in order to analyze why and how bureaucrats operating at the street level can promote policy change in public administration at the individual level.

Women are still underrepresented as public-sector organizational leaders, despite comprising half of the United States' workforce. Using a problem-driven approach, inductive and deductive research, the authors explore the complex puzzle of gendered experiences and career paths that provide insights into gender imbalanced leadership in this domain.

This Element introduces the concepts of "shared measures" and "collective data use" to add collaborative, relational elements to existing performance management theory. It draws on a case study of collaboratives in North Carolina that were established to develop community responses to the opioid epidemic.

In 2015, the Old Fadama slum of Accra, Ghana was a government 'no-go zone' due to the generally lawless environment. Participatory action researchers (PAR) began working with three stakeholders to resolve complex challenges facing the community and city. In three years, they created a PAR cross-sector collaboration intervention incorporating data from 300 research participants working on sanitation. In 2018-2019, the stakeholders addressed the next priorities: community violence, solid waste, and a health clinic. The PAR intervention was replicated, supporting kayayei (women head porters) in Old Fadama, the Madina slum of Accra and four rural communities in northern Ghana. The process expanded, involving 2,400 stakeholders and an additional 2,048 beneficiaries. Cross-sector collaboration worked where other, more traditional development interventions did not. This PAR intervention provides developing-country governments with a solution for complex challenges: a low-cost, locally-designed tool that dramatically improved participation and resulted in projects that impact the public good.

Exploring efforts to integrate women into combat forces in the military, we investigate how resistance to equity becomes entrenched, ultimately excluding women from being full participants in the workplace. Based on focus groups and surveys with members of Special Operations, we found most of the resistance is rooted in traditional gender stereotypes that are often bolstered through organizational policies and practices. The subtlety of these practices often renders them invisible. We refer to this invisibility as organizational obliviousness. Obliviousness exists at the individual level, it becomes reinforced at the cultural level, and, in turn, cultural practices are entrenched institutionally by policies. Organizational obliviousness may not be malicious or done to actively exclude or harm, but the end result is that it does both. Throughout this Element we trace the ways that organizational obliviousness shapes individuals, culture, and institutional practices throughout the organization.

What motivates public employees to work hard? This Element systematically reviews answers from public administration research. The authors locate this research in a novel two-dimensional typology, which shows that public employees can be motivated for other- and self-interested reasons and extrinsic (motivated by outcomes) and intrinsic (motivated by work itself) reasons. Public administration research sheds significant light on extrinsic motivators: working hard to help society (public service motivation), one's organization (organizational commitment) and oneself (financial incentives). Future research should focus on hitherto understudied motivators: symbolic rewards and intrinsic motivators, such as enjoyable work tasks, warm glow, and relatedness with colleagues. Supplementary material for this Element is available online.