Jodi Sandfort

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at University of Minnesota

This handbook surveys knowledge from all six of the planet’s continuously inhabited continents to understand how governments and related institutions have attempted to advance human development and improve social outcomes over the past several decades. The current state of knowledge about the social welfare sphere is robust, but explorers of its tw...

A key question of each Minnowbrook has been how public administration scholarship can be relevant to practice (Carboni and Nabatchi 2019; Nabatchi and Carboni 2019; O'Leary, Van Slyke, and Kim 2010). This question remains salient today, as public administration scholarship is increasingly distant from the challenges identified by practitioners. Aca...

Performance management regimes significantly influence public management practice and policy implementation. Yet, within public administration scholarship, there is insufficient attention to how regimes are reified through policy implementation or how they influence management decisions and outcomes. In this analysis, we considered the robustness o...

https://tinyurl.com/DelibTech We introduce the concept of deliberative technology as an integrative framework to encapsulate how facilitators and participants bring different resources into use in deliberative processes. It serves as a holistic lens to observe, explain, and intervene constructively in the unpredictable, emergent dynamics of deliber...

Increased pressure for evidence-based practices in policymaking and administration has led to the growth of a new research stream of implementation science. Little is known about how this new stream of research compares with scholarship on policy implementation within public administration. This paper provides a comparative review of more than 1,50...

This chapter examines how facilitators of public participation become critical, pragmatic practitioners of their craft. We analyze how facilitators learn through ethnographic study of an approach known as the Art of Hosting. We identify three ways in which facilitators transform knowledge to facilitate. They metabolize facilitation knowledge to und...

Current world events demand public affairs leadership training that generates among professionals a sense of capability, agency, and responsibility to engage in complex public problems. In this paper, we describe a unique course operated in the US focused on achieving these learning outcomes. It uses an unconventional schedule and course design tha...

Drawing upon the theories of social skill and strategic action fields (SAFs), this article presents a SAF Framework for Implementation Research. In the framework, policy implementation systems are conceptualized as multilevel SAFs that form around a public service intervention. Within this context, socially skilled actors leverage diverse sources o...

This paper provides a systematic review of the state of policy and program implementation research over the last ten years. We take two sampling approaches. First, we identify 1,375 published articles focused on policy or program implementation listed in the Expanded Social Science Citation Index in the Web of Science. Drawing upon conceptual model...

Deliberation is increasingly embraced as a mode of policy-making, and this paper focuses on how facilitators of deliberative policy processes become critical, pragmatic practitioners of their complex craft. We analyze how deliberation facilitators learn to do their work through ethnographic study of an approach to facilitation known as the Art of H...

This paper investigates the use of open source, idea competition platforms to catalyze citizen participation. It specifically focuses on an initiative of Ashoka’s Changemakers, an innovative international nonprofit to develop this capacity to leverage modest philanthropic resources and inspire citizens to offer ideas about solutions to public probl...

This essay focuses on the potential of information communication technologies to move the Public Administration (PA) scholarly community into a new information paradigm. We begin with a review of conventional approaches PA scholars use to communicate with each other, students, and practitioners. After illustrating advances in Web applications, we c...

Our study investigates the use of a new open source platform in catalyzing social innovations and participation of its members over time. We empirically examined how the nature of project designs and social pressure affect contribution to the open source platform. In the twenty-one projects (3, 998 contributions) from 2004 to 2009, we find that the...

This paper analyzes in-depth interviews with 45 frontline welfare workers and clients in one county to explore the perceptions that develop at the front-lines of the welfare system and to consider how these perceptions may influence new welfare reform strategies. This exploratory study finds that welfare workers utilize three distinct typologies to...

A collaborative approach to public management is critical in an era of governance that depends upon networks more than centralized bureaucracies, yet public affairs education has not adequately responded to the need to develop new tools to support analysis of complex settings. Policy field analysis is one tool that can help professionals-in-trainin...

Although private, institutional philanthropy can be an engine of significant social change, often this possibility is not realized. This article creates a new framework to inform phil- anthropic strategy built from lessons gleaned from decades of public affairs research. Drawing on what is known about social change movements, government relationshi...

The challenges of nonprofit management and leadership often lie in balancing the constant demands of internal issues and the rapidly changing external context. As the third and final segment of the Casa de Esperanza case illustrates, there is no point of perfect balance. Part C documents the various mechanisms used to institutionalize the organizat...

When nonprofit organizations make significant changes in mission, there are many issues of organizational structure and culture that must be re-examined and re-aligned. As the second segment in the case of Casa de Esperanza illustrates, there are many human issues that must be navigated by leaders making such changes. Case B illustrates the challen...

Many nonprofit organizations struggle with the challenges of staying true to their mission in light of increasing reliance on public revenue streams. Casa de Esperanza, a mid-size nonprofit in St. Paul, Minnesota, faces these tensions. Although it was founded to support Latinas who experience domestic violence, public funding streams mandated a dif...

This brief summarizes information collected during visits to Massachusetts in 1999 and 2000 to document changes and progress since 1997, updating a 1997 report on the state's benefits and services and the economic and political context shaping Massachusetts' agenda for serving low-income families. It profiles Massachusetts' economy and population,...

This article examines the ability of frontline human service agencies to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Data come from an in-depth study of the public wel- fare and private welfare-to-work contractors in two Michigan counties and document significant problems that arise from the inability of these two sectors to collaborate in the pr...

This article examines the ability of frontline human service agencies to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Data come from an in-depth study of the public welfare and private welfare-to-work contractors in two Michigan counties and document significant problems that arise from the inability of these two sectors to collaborate in the prov...

This article examines a sample of young, unmarried mothers from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and considers how different types of economic support received soon after their first child is born contributes to the later self-sufficiency of young, unmarried mothers. It expands conventional categories of income support—AFDC, food stamps, c...

The opinions and conclusions are solely those of the authors and should not be construed as representing the opinions of our employer. We thank for comments and suggestions; and also the participants in seminars given at Washington University, St Louis, and the MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy. We thank Kati Foley, Karen Cimilluca an...