Charles Goodsell

• Virginia Tech

Government bureaucracy is widely ignored, condemned, ridiculed, and misunderstood. In this article, combined stories by reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post reveal that federal agencies seldom reach planned goals unambiguously without complication from external forces. A total of 28 articles is summarized, classified under five...

Public Administration is reaffirmed as an applied field of practice rather than a traditional academic discipline. Hence, scholarly research in it should not merely expand an extant body of knowledge, but also support, encourage, and refine its linked professional practice out in the nation and world. The author tests this idea on his own books, wi...

Producing fine architecture is a fine art. How citizens perceive the design of government buildings is at the heart of politics. This is because prominent and lasting physical features such as these constitute the locale of official governing and thereby become central public images of what that governing is about. Hence the term ‘architectural pow...

President Trump and his Administration have gravely damaged the institutions and values of American public administration. Harm has been done to the federal workforce, the policymaking process, the integrity of missions, agencies and programs, and the government’s relation to science.

A theoretical framework for social interpretation of public buildings is proposed. Seven types of social meaning attributable to such structures are identified, by which we mean forms of Ullderstanding apart from those associated with the standard architectural criteria of aesthetic quality and programmatic functionality. These types are named afte...

Government buildings can provide physical reference points for the creation of common meaning, even in the postmodern condition. They remind us of our collective activities, help to distinguish the public and private spheres, and crystalize important institutional meanings. Also the relatively open nature of government buildings in this country, an...

The Publicness discussed here exists when the society as a whole is working hard on behalf of its hungry and unsafe. Such work is not the responsibility of government alone but its private institutions as well. When studied closely, one finds in the United States a remarkably diverse and interpenetrated array of antipoverty activity across the publ...

Despite discussion in the literature of “new governance,” the self-standing government agency continues to constitute the institutional center of American public administration. Drawing on his volume Mission Mystique, the author proposes that the book’s concept of mystique and its template of institution-strengthening characteristics be used to rea...

Six normative principles are developed for consideration in the debate as to when and how government should directly administer its activities versus contract them out. These differ from the inherently governmental and economic efficiency criteria commonly espoused. The principles are inspired by the purposes of government stated in the Preamble to...

Employing the metaphor of human sight, this essay advances a new vision for public administration. It is a departure from past visions in that it asks us to "see" the field from its own viewpoint rather than that of others. First, three common perspectives on public administration are critiqued as possessing a vision of the field that is not in acc...

The Symposium on Literature and Leadership concludes with a review and reassessment of the relationship between these two distinct but related fields. They reflect different yet related cultures. The evolution of the ties between them shows that their relationship is more than a series of interesting but isolated connections of ideas. The value of...

The preceding article by Neil Brady and David Hart explores the issue of whether conflict in administrative ethics should not be viewed as a problem but welcomed as necessary to good management. They compare the situation to the arts, where they see a similar presence of unresolved tension having favorable consequence. The present commentary points...

American public administration as a field is “mature” in terms of its identity, roles, knowledge, and open-system nature. Yet it lacks maturity in the sense of an adequate sense of self-worth. This “inferiority complex” is revealed by the field's obsession with two intertwining, persistent themes: a perceived state of societal illegitimacy and of p...

As the aticles of the symposium present a wide variety of conclusions on whether public administration has “grown up,” this overview article does not attempt a unified synthesis of the authors’ views but rather makes a composite analysis of contrasts and patterns among them. Attention is then shifted to the organizing metaphor itself, that of matur...

This symposium addresses the question “Has public administration grown up?” as a provocative vehicle for free-ranging inquiry into the state of the field. Its articles originated from a panel of the same name held at the 2003 national conference of the American Society for Public Administration. The authors, each of whom make a quite different resp...

The term public space has multiple meanings depending on the scholarly discipline. One aim ofthis article is to develop a unified concept of public space that draws on varied pertinent literatures, while at the same time expanding the idea’s coverage to incorporate the impacts oftele vision and information technology. A second objective is to utili...

Books reviewed: Barry Bozeman, Bureaucracy and Red Tape

In this article written in mid-January 2002, the author offers four insights for his field derived from the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. These relate to how public administration can stir our hearts and meet exigencies on one hand and how the field needs to do some rethinking and maturation on the other.

The “deep structure” of presidential space refers to underlying, given characteristics of the physical setting of the U.S. presidency. The institutionalized presidency has expanded greatly in the past century. At the same time, the historical home of the presidency, the White House complex, has not expanded appreciably. As a result, the institution...

A concept of presidential administrative power is manifested by the siting of the first permanent office buildings of the federal government in Washington. George Washington was instrumental in laying down this concept, insisting that the first two executive buildings be placed on either side of the White House. Opposing political and economic forc...

The buildings that house government offices should reflect democratic values to the extent possible. They should be distinctive from private office buildings and register a knowable public character. Their fenestration should not mimic the bureaucratic stereotype's regimentation and their facades should not repel us psychologically. Also to be avoi...

Some scholars stress the absence of discussion in the U.S. Constitution of public administrative institutions, concluding that bureaucracy's role in American government is thereby legally and historically suspect. An important insight on this point can be gained by examining public administration activities in the 13 original states during the "Cri...

Public administration as an activity possesses in large degree the formal attributes of secular collective ritual, e. g., repetition, role playing, stylization, order, staging, and creation of meaning. Three types of administrative ritual can be identified: explicit rites, such as ceremonies and regularized events; formalistic processes, like budge...

Is there a theory that can explain the workaday values of public administration practitioners? Building on the notion of public administrators as artisans, Charles Goodsell offers the foundations of an approach that focuses attention on "microcosmic" level of government actions. Borrowing from the field of aesthetics and the theory of art, he highl...

The architecture of houses of parliament and of legislative chambers in countries around the world is analysed for its relationship to political culture. It is argued that parliamentary buildings and spaces (1) preserve cultural values of the polity over time; (2) articulate contemporaneous political attitudes and values; and (3) contribute to the...

2nd Ed Bibliogr. s 204-207

EditorOs Preface Part One. Introduction to the Encounter 1. The Public Encounter and Its Study: Charles T. Goodsell Part Two: Attitudes in the Encounter 2. Client Evluations of Social Programs: Barbara J. Nelson 3. Attitudinal Tendencies among Officials: Clarence N. Stone 4. Adovacy and Alienation in Street-Level Work: Michael Lipsky Part Three: Di...

Interviews of 240 welfare clients as they departed from welfare offices in four U.S. cities indicate a marked tendency for older clients to be more satisfied than younger clients with treatment and services received in just-completed bureaucratic encounters. Other studies have shown similar tendencies. It is speculated that the phenomenon is a comb...

The double-dip hypothesis of Lee Sigelman is highly provocative. Nonetheless, ambivalent perceptions of bureaucracy are otherwise explainable. More important, Sigelman's bureaucratization scale is not a time scale, meaning that dysfunctionalities may be encountered at slow rates and thus minimized or countered. As a result, the "dips" may be quite...

A sample of 157 state wildlife, park, tax and welfare documents were compared for "communication effectiveness" and "tone of voice," Index scores for each showed substantial variation by state and document type. This finding questions the inevitability of obscure and negative bureaucratic communication but also reveals that improvement in this real...

The collegial or commission form of administrative department, now used mainly in western and southern states, should be reconsidered as a model for state administration. This position is taken despite the public-administration orthodoxy favoring enhancement of the power of the chief executive. It is shown empirically that single-head departments d...

Study of an Appalachian welfare department by in-depth interviews and an encounter log shows that rather than exercising discretion against the interests of unwanted clients, as much human service literature would anticipate, caseworkers instead granted extra attention to favored clients (referred to as “positive discrimination”) in an attempt to c...

This position paper proposes that pessimistic self-criticism in the field of comparative public administration be replaced by recognition of its already notable accomplishments; and, more importantly, by its clearly great promise when the field is not narrowly conceived as merely non-American public administration but a generic, master field of adm...

Three welfare programs—Social Security, Public Welfare, and Unemployment Compensation—are compared with respect to client evaluations of services received. To structure this comparison, an independent variable of administrative program is derived from three components, namely, climate, technology, and clientele. Data on client evaluation are obtain...

The field of comparative public administration continues to be plagued by self-doubts. Like many of its other macrocosmic theories, Dorsey's Information-Energy model illustrates an overemphasis on comparative "ecology" rather than comparative "anatomy" or "physiology. " Mr. Berenson, author of the previous article, employs a sophisticated technique...

Unobtrusive observation is utilized to examine physical symbols of "authority" and "service" in four governmental agencies operating in Illinois; namely police departments, public health departments, drivers license examining stations, and Armed Forces recruiting offices. Hypotheses as to the relative frequency of these symbols are developed from a...

The behavior of postal clerks to clients is compared in Costa Rica and the United States using unobtrusive observation by observer-clients in high and low-status roles. Contrary to expectations suggested by previous research, role impingement and other nonbureaucratic behaviors are displayed in the United States as well as Costa Rica, but in differ...

(ABSTRACT) Research on the effects of downsizing has focused on several levels including the global,

(ABSTRACT) Public administration literature lacks richness and context regarding the moral history of