Chad Newswander

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Brigham Young University - Idaho

Social equity has been considered a pillar that supports the legitimacy of the field of public administration, with affirmative action as one of the most visible vehicles of the principle. However, the Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admissions calls for a reconsideration of the practice and the value it supports. Though the Court has...

Using a survey of nearly 2,000 federal government employees, we test the extent to which civil servants are willing to use their position to impose administrative burdens on political opponents. Such an act would create a burden of bad intentions. Rather than discovering that administrators are partisan actors through their use of burdens, we find...

Employee recalcitrance and employer reprisal are ever‐present conditions in public service. Yet we have limited knowledge of the forces that move administrators away from acquiescence and toward antagonism. The authors follow the theoretical thrust of behavioral public administration to better understand administrative behavior by targeting the det...

It has been almost 20 years since the Refounding’s last unified publication. Although the name “Blacksburg” continues to hold a place in the field, it has increasingly been withdrawn from serious consideration. The purpose of this special issue is to renovate and reassert refounding insights back into the theory and practice of public administratio...

Manifestos are bold and declarative, often seeking to challenge contemporary norms. This was true of the Blacksburg Manifesto, which critically argued that the field of public administration was resting on an unstable foundation. Instead of merely serving the role of critic, the authors of the refounding project laid a new foundation that could hou...

Understood in economic terms, interest elevates baser human impulses and degrades higher human potential as it motivates individuals to value material gains over moral ones. Because of this influence, it is difficult to consider interest as a regime value. But just because it is beleaguered does not mean it ought to be abandoned, especially because...

Managerial competence expressed in the promise of science provides administrators with a set of dispositions. In attempting to achieve such a character, the Supreme Court set up a hard look orientation that used rational means to justify the substance of administrative power. Even though this mode of operation grants legitimacy resulting from meeti...

In handling contingencies that do not yield to categorical answers, Aristotle argues, deliberation grounded in a general purpose becomes necessary so that reason can be exercised in a way that effectively and correctly resolves particular problems. This article explores how Aristotelian prudence adjusted to constitutional conditions can serve as a...

According to judicial precedents, administrators informed by their expertise can speak on issues of public concern under First Amendment protections. In one sense, they could dissent by working against their employers in an attempt to direct issues of public concern through an educational function. The power to act like a statesman in raising such...

When seeking to accomplish public ends in a prudent manner, administrators are occasionally put in precarious situations that require a degree of metis. Metis is a distinct form of knowledge characterized by a mixture of wile and wisdom and is valuable because it can offer viable alternatives for solving complex problems in contingent situations. I...

Crisis situations disrupt the status quo, create dilemmas, and produce a fluid environment in which power relations can be recodified. Disruption of the status quo creates a space for agency, thereby enabling individuals to respond to dilemmas as subjects, and thus a problematic event can be an opportunity for enhanced agency—a momentary break in t...

The pursuit of the common good must be understood from the reality that governing is ugly. The ability to grapple with situations that are ambiguous requires administrators to be cognizant of action that might be suspect but necessary to accomplish the public interest. This often requires them to become active players. John Rohr postulates that the...

Seeking to close the gap between expectations and capacity, presidents have utilized a broad interpretation of executive power to control administrative affairs. However, the emergence of a post–New Public Management environment characterized by loosely constructed networks and a surge of governmental activity has required an evolution in the tools...

In response to the increased complexity that comes from a shift away from government and toward governance, public administration programs need to adjust their traditional curriculum and encourage interdisciplinarity perspectives in students. Given the proper mind-set, administrators can be better prepared to face the challenges of governance in a...

A political pattern of power focused on defining enemies of the state permits administrative agencies to be grounded in framework that allows them to create meaning. In an effort to better understand how agencies act as political players in a web of power relationships, this article suggests a framework based jointly on Foucault’s concept of power...

The changing status and capacity of enemies of the state play an important role in the evolution of the securitization of the state. Examining how enemies of the state mold state action, this article uses Foucault's concern with governmentality and Schmitt's theory of the partisan to describe how and where agencies have begun to manage closed and o...

Background Interdisciplinary teamwork is increasingly important for engineering graduates. Yet, the reality of teaching interdisciplinarity requires faculty and students to navigate structures of engineering pro grams that do not accommodate interdisciplinary work. Purpose (Hypothesis)The purpose of this study is to understand how students and facu...

Government delivery mechanisms and services are increasingly being shifted to the private sector where executive values of efficiency and effectiveness reign supreme whereas legislative and judicial institutional values are confined to traditional government agencies. New Public Management (NPM) has ironically initiated a process of diffusing legis...

A careful study demonstrates that President Bush has implemented the faith-based initiative as a method of governmentality, one which appears to be biased toward Christianity. This paper examines the definition of Foucaultʼs governmentality as it relates to the ever-expanding structure of contemporary American governance and justifies the categoriz...

AbsTRAcT Engineering education, like many fields, has started to explore the benefits of concept maps as an assessment technique for knowledge integration. Because they allow students to graphically link topics and represent complex interconnections among diverse concepts, we argue that concept maps are particularly appropriate for assessing interd...