James F. Wolf’s research while affiliated with Virginia Tech and other places

Individual performance evaluations provide the link between individual and organizational performance. Employees expect to be rated based on their success in meeting their individual performance objectives regardless of their grade or position in the agency or other nonperformance-related criteria. This study examines performance appraisal ratings from three federal agencies (U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency) to learn whether the evaluation processes are free of a systemic bias based on an individual's position in the hierarchy. The analysis suggests that such a bias does exist and that this bias presents challenges to those who design, implement, and use performance evaluations to support their performance management systems and overall organizational performance. The importance of these exploratory findings goes to the question of fairness and equity in performance management systems, both real and perceived, and the impact of such beliefs on employee satisfaction and performance.

The smart growth movement aims to combat urban and suburban sprawl by promoting livable communities based on pedestrian scale, diverse populations, and mixed land use. But, as this book documents, smart growth has largely failed to address issues of social equity and environmental justice. Smart growth sometimes results in gentrification and displacement of low- and moderate-income families in existing neighborhoods, or transportation policies that isolate low-income populations. Growing Smarter is one of the few books to view smart growth from an environmental justice perspective, examining the effect of the built environment on access to economic opportunity and quality of life in American cities and metropolitan regions. The contributors to Growing Smarter—urban planners, sociologists, economists, educators, lawyers, health professionals, and environmentalists—all place equity at the center of their analyses of "place, space, and race." They consider such topics as the social and environmental effects of sprawl, the relationship between sprawl and concentrated poverty, and community-based regionalism that can link cities and suburbs. They examine specific cases that illustrate opportunities for integrating environmental justice concerns into smart growth efforts, including the dynamics of sprawl in a South Carolina county, the debate over the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and transportation-related pollution in Northern Manhattan. Growing Smarter illuminates the growing racial and class divisions in metropolitan areas today—and suggests workable strategies to address them.

Metropolitan areas have increasingly relied on the creation of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) as a way to focus on the special needs of retail and commercial centers. Whether part of the central city or a suburb, these relatively recent forms of organizations represent a new way to address sub-municipal issues. As such, they have become an important part of metropolitan governance and administration. The BIDs also clearly fit within the recent set of ideas represented by advocates of “new governance” that emphasizes both public/private partnerships and alternative institutional structures as strategies for addressing problems of metropolitan governance. This article examines four active BIDs in downtown Washington, DC. It presents the political and economic context of both the creation and operation of the four BIDs, relates them to new governance ideas, considers the extent that they have become an institutionalized form of metropolitan governance and finally, speculates on the extent that they are part of enterprise of public administration and management.

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) and the ensuing Transportation Efficiency Act for the 21 Century (TEA-21) established a central role for Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) in regional transportation planning. In this new role, MPOs found themselves bringing together governmental and nongovernmental organizations representing the various transportation modalities in the planning process. At the same time, these MPOs assumed responsibilities for more effectively integrating transportation plans with other public policy arenas that affect and in turn are affected by transportation at the regional level. This paper reviews the progress that MPOs have made in achieving these goals. It concludes that there has been some progress in most areas specified in the ISTEA/TEA-21 legislation, however, the institutional contexts of MPOs substantially limits their effectiveness as regional transportation planning organizations.

Using a neo-institutional perspective, this article describes seven different, yet related, institutionalized frameworks that form the practice world of public administration. Created and maintained in the broader environment, they provide interpretive lenses that public servants experience during the workday. The frameworks include: (1) organizations/agencies; (2) bureaucratic and program routinization; (3) politics; (4) law; (5) professions; (6) management; and (7) markets. The analysis was drawn from over fifty informal conversations with practitioners in different settings and levels of government. The author concludes that effective public administrations require an institutional literacy that allows them to recognize and respond appropriately to diverse situations. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are the conduit through which billions of federal and state transportation dollars are funneled annually for regional transportation facilities. MPO transportation investments are guided by long-term regional transportation plans that are implemented through short-term transportation improvement plans. Because transportation investments shape land use patterns, decisions by MPOs have important implications for regional land use patterns and, by implication, social equity. For their part, MPO decisions are made by a board whose composition varies widely across the nation. They are not elected to serve on the MPO, however, and MPOs are not required by federal law to have balance in voting. Therefore, the potential exists for MPO decisions to be biased and favor certain investments beneficial to particular metropolitan areas' interests at the expense of others. This study reviews MPOs generally, discusses variation in their voting structures, and reports results from a statistical analysis on the pattern of transportation investments with respect to MPO voting structure. It was found that for each suburban MPO voting member, controlling for other factors, MPO investments are shifted 1% to 9% away from transit (and other modes) to highways. Implications for land use patterns and especially social equity are described. More research should be undertaken, however, to confirm whether and the extent to which such bias exists.