Staci Zavattaro

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Central Florida

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, public servants globally were faced with resource scarcity, ever-changing science, and stalled global supply chains. Like healthcare counterparts, deathcare public managers had to adapt to unknowns, including body storage issues, personnel safety when handling potentially virulent bodies, and mental healt...

The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has exacerbated cracks in the United States' healthcare systems—along with its deathcare systems. The pandemic as an ongoing mass fatality incident highlights the need to understand the public servants engaged in deathcare work, as they are a vital part of the emergency response equation. This exploratory, descriptive...

Contemporarily, the word “woke” has moved into the popular lexicon, largely to mean aware of and ideally doing something about systemic racism. After the George Floyd murder, and many other state‐sanctioned murders of Black Americans, protests erupted globally, and public administrators responded either with actionable policy changes or sometimes s...

Using fiction is a popular way to communicate sometimes-complex administrative practices. This paper uses Disney Pixar’s WALL-E to examine the movie’s ethical dilemmas and how to communicate those in the public management classroom. Through a content analysis of the movie, several overall ethical themes emerged: ethical use of technology, environme...

I will end as the book began – with a nod to the rapid changes in our world affecting communities globally. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to shake our sense of place and urgency. Many people thought something like this could not happen again in an advanced society. Epidemiologists, though, warned about a virus-spreading crisis repeatedly (Cox et...

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is still gripping the world, brought death front and center into many people’s lives. In the United States, however, some of the deaths were treated as “more tragic” than others given someone’s economic use value coupled with dehumanizing language. Using Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, this is understood as a public...

This edited volume discusses public branding and marketing from a global, comparative perspective. Place branding and marketing practices are now prominent in cities, states, nations, regions, and organizations all over the world. While disciplines such as hospitality management, tourism marketing, and business marketing have made inroads into unde...

Fat. The word has a negative, vitriolic meaning, but there are body positivity activists trying to reclaim the word as a descriptor rather than derogatory term. People in larger bodies are often ostracized, not allowed to fully participate in society, making this a social justice issue. Social media are becoming primary tools people use to shape an...

Local government cemetery management is an unexplored area of public administration, and this paper begins to tackle that gap by exploring the role of cultural competency in the role. Based on a content analysis of interviews with 35 municipal cemetery managers throughout the U.S., I find cultural competence manifests in several ways: racial segreg...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted public organizations' challenges related to deathcare. Within existing emergency management literature specifically in public administration, there is a gap when it comes to planning past death. Using data from interviews with 35 municipal cemetery managers throughout the U.S., I show how our unwillingness in g...

In this Editor's Introduction, we write during the COVID-19 pandemic response this manifesto for public service.

Researchers often struggle with power dynamics when conducting qualitative interviews. Interviewing can be emotionally exhausting, and sometimes it is difficult to tell where the interviewees’ thoughts end and yours begin. This tension, though, is normal throughout the process, so I use autoethnography to share my experiences with conducting 75 int...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework for understanding how millennial social media use preferences can help public administrators change their delivery ethos to foster meaningful micro-encounters in digital spaces to then create public value. Ideally, these micro-encounters encourage public values creation from both the use...

As national, state, and local governments implement strategic place branding and marketing plans, questions remain about how to best measure the success of such endeavors. Using a natural quasi-experimental design, we evaluate how well marketing efforts from Brand USA achieve intended tourism goals. Brand USA was created in 2009 to market the count...

Local government policy makers continue to pursue governance reforms that introduce business-like practices including the privatization or contracting-out of essential government services. It is unclear how these privatized arrangements may influence the accountability standards of local government employees and elected officials. Using a Cox propo...

As practitioners in public organizations undertake place branding and associated communications efforts, scholarship in public management needs to better understand these phenomena. Related disciplines such as business management, tourism management, and corporate marketing help frame “big questions” for this emerging area of research and practice...

This article details decisions made to flip a small, public administration graduate-level course in real time. Interweaving student feedback with instructor notes and reflections gives a unique, personal look into a scenario-based course that changed weekly. We detail this dynamism, highlighting successes and failures in flipping the classroom. Stu...

The word bullshit often has a negative connotation – and for good reason. Bullshit often is worse than lying given the stories and calculations involved. What if bullshit could be useful for public administration? Using a revised interpretation of bullshit, this article argues that public administrators and citizens might find the exercise useful w...

State-sponsored lotteries are adopted to raise funds for state programs. As such, there is a public mission within these organizations; however, most operate like private companies, thus shifting the organizational ethos to profit maximization. Much research on social media focuses on federal and local government agencies. In this paper, we explore...

The authors analyze public higher education policy in Texas during the current era of fiscal austerity in the state through Morgan’s (2006) images of organizations. Scarce resources have led to cuts in educational funding and a refocusing of faculty work using statistical methods designed to enhance the status of teaching over research. In the name...

Related Content: Isett, Head and VanLandingham (PAR July/August 2017) Related Content: Mergel (PAR July/August 2017)

We are seeking chapters for this edited volume related to contemporary discussions of property and property rights. Send me an email at staci.zavattaro@ucf.edu for the CFP. All disciplines welcome.

Purpose – This paper aims to understand how place brand managers in the US Deep South understand the brand images associated with their states and cities. The US South has its own unique identity – and the Deep South has its own differences from the rest of the country. Typically, the Deep South is seen as backwards, uneducated and the “buckle of t...

As competition for scarce resources increases, cities are turning toward marketing strategies to attract economic and social development. Innovation is a key component of success for destination marketing organizations (DMOs), but there is a need for additional empirical and theoretical development. Findings from this research based on analysis of...

Place branding practices are increasingly taking place within public sector organisations, yet destination marketing organisation managers are insufficiently researched through a lens of managerial theory. Extending previous empirical research on DMO management obstacles, this study contributes to the literature by reporting results of interviews w...

A majority of business schools and universities incorporate online pedagogy into curricula, yet scholars strive to understand the elements that influence student learning in these online communities. One framework that conceptualizes the elements of the online learning environment is the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. The CoI suggests teachi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use autoethnography to explore notions of self-identity formation and projection. The author uses the stages of grief as an analytical tool to explain athletic identity formation and personal effects when an injury removed that part of her self. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses autoethnography,...

Detroit, Michigan, is on the brink: Financial mismanagement, population exodus, increasing legacy costs, and out-of-control debt have driven it to bankruptcy. City actors, both administrative and elected, making politically driven decisions invited the disaster. This article uses the concepts of organizational implosion and image management to exam...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to integrate organizational capabilities into the place branding process to showcase how a lead destination marketing organization (DMO) can influence a customer-based brand equity outcome. Doing so highlights the strategic, relational nature of place branding. The authors focus specifically on first- and ze...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how US cities are communicating a sustainability narrative. Based on an analysis, cities are using a sustainability narrative focusing on environmental sustainability and consumption. Critical theory is introduced as a means to imagine alternative narratives. Design/methodology/approach – Explorato...

The belief that consensus-based outcomes of decision-making spaces are the best way to achieve the "right" decision has made consensus a guiding myth in public administration. This is not always positive, as consensus processes conjure images of power relations and constrained discussion. This article analyzes the myth of consensus by combining two...

As places face increased competition for human and capital resources, public managers turn toward corporate-like governance strategies and branding practices to shape places and organizations. However, for better or worse, these organizations begin to resemble highly competitive, private-sector public relations and marketing firms. Place branding i...

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Image/impression management takes place every day at the individual level. Cities similarly manage their images by creating, implementing, and evaluating strategic place-branding strategies. For public administration, however, which has neglected this subject, there is a risk that place branding may become collateral damage. The theoretical underst...

Professor Ali Farazmand envisioned a future of public administration affected by technology transformation, among other factors. In that article, however, the professor did not expound on this assertion, leaving room for this contribution. Here, Farazmand’s framework of legal and constitutional, organizational and managerial, political, and intergo...

Cities globally are focusing on place branding to set one locale apart from another. Normal touch points, such as websites, fliers, magazines, brochures, press releases and more are used often. One document not typically thought of as marketing or public relations piece that could extend the place brand is the municipal budget. The document, not th...

Public administrators always seem to be looking for a fix to the field’s “big” problem of ineffective government. One popular solution was (and perhaps still is) New Public Management reforms based on market values. Collaborative Public Management and related suggestions emerged thereafter to return the field to its democratic roots. The problem is...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework that serves as: a potential how‐to guide for place managers; an evolution of place branding strategy; a cautionary tale about place brands developed without stakeholder involvement; and a way to open up the theory space to arrive at a potentially ideal marketing mix. The framewo...

This chapter provides an overview of United States federal policies guiding citizen/government interaction on social media tools. Such an overview begins to fill the gap regarding how federal agencies make policies regarding records retention and privacy on these platforms. Records management, inherently linked with privacy concerns, also will be e...

Using an autoethnographic approach, this paper presents the impacts of image-generation programs and policies with a government organization. Based on three years’ experience with The Government, I offer autoethnographic observations of three themes that have emerged: general confusion, avoiding conformity and brand bewilderment. The research bring...

This article offers a metaphorical image of U. S. municipalities as public relations (PR) and marketing firms. Cities are practicing many of the same promotional and image-generation techniques as private-sector PR firms use with a desire for the same ends—increased consumption of goods and services, which in this case come from cities and not from...

Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand—new, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets. Keith Reinhard, Chairman Emeritus, DDB Worldwide Reinhard's original quotation is traced to "The Brand Called Obama," which looks at how the now-president, then-candidate Obama was skyrocketing through the U.S. and global consciousness (McGir...