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Everyone who aspires to more effective public service should read this book. It provides a compelling antidote to the managerial focus of theory and practice in public administration. Written with the aim of inspiring and rekindling a mission for public service, Transformational Public Service weaves together theory and stories from actual practice to show that public service can (and does) advance the goals of democracy, inclusiveness, and social and economic justice. Eight practitioners from government and non-governmental organizations at all levels - from the street to the executive office - tell their personal stories of transformational public service. Theory, poetry, and popular cultu...
This inspirational work encourages Public Administration professionals to participate in progressive social change by advocating progressive values to counter the regressive values currently dominant in American society. The book begins with an analysis of regressive and progressive societal values, and then discusses specific actions PA practitioners, scholars, and teachers can take to build awareness and use of progressive values. The author presents regressive and progressive values in five matched pairs, each representing a continuum of thought and action: aggressiveness and cooperation; belief and knowledge; economics as end, and economics as means; great inequality and limited inequality; and Earth as resource, and Earth as home.
To Kill the King sketches post-traditional consciousness in terms of three rejuvenating concepts - thinking as play, justice as seeking, and practice as art. In a series of critical essays on each of these concepts, the book describes a post-traditional consciousness of governance that can yield enormous improvement in the quality of life for each individual. To Kill the King will appeal to any professor (whether in the post-modern camp or not) who wants to expose students to fresh challenges and insights.
As in earlier editions, the book is organized around a set of seven core principles: (1) serve citizens, not customers; (2) seek the public interest; (3) value citizenship and public service above entrepreneurship; (4) think strategically, act democratically; (5) recognize that accountability isn't simple; (6) serve, rather than steer; (7) value people, not just productivity. The book asks us to think carefully and critically about what public service is, why it is important, and what values ought to guide what we do and how we do it.
The essential premise of critical social theory is that contemporary society is neither democratic nor free, but that modern global capitalism creates a citizenry satiated with consumer goods, unaware of alternative ways of living. In the public sector, critical theory suggests that governing systems are influenced, if not controlled, by the wealthy and powerful, leaving public professionals to decide whether to serve those interests or the interests of a broader public. This book provides a framework for the application of critical social theory in public administration. Its goal is to encourage awareness among public administration scholars and practitioners of social conditions that tend to shape and constrain scholarship, practice, teaching, and social change. At a time when concern for public interest and a civil society have largely been displaced by the goals of economic efficiency and the "New Public Management," Critical Social Theory in Public Administration presents a viable alternative that incorporates the latest views of postmodern thinking with the central elements of critical social theory.
Connecting theory and practice, Agendas and Decisions explores how state-level public executives and managers decide and implement policy. The authors focus on Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander's (1979–1987) management system, which believed in and practiced the principles espoused by leadership theorists: focus on one or two important substantive problems or initiatives, work with stakeholders to protect the organization and to obtain necessary resources, hire good people, and authorize them to act. In addition to sending his cabinet members to the Kennedy School of Government to learn leadership principles, he also established the Tennessee Government Executive Institute (TGEI) to provi...
How our understanding of and relationship to hedgehogs reveals the complex interactions between culture, technology, bodies, conservation, and care for other animals. Across the globe, the bumbling hedgehog has been framed in a variety of ways throughout history—as a symbol of both good and bad luck, of transformation, of vengeance, and of wit and reincarnation. In recent years, it has also, in different parts of the world, been viewed as a pest for its predation on ground-nesting birds and has thus become a target for culling. In Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness, Laura McLauchlan explores how human actors have interacted with hedgehogs and other species through time and attends to the que...
The purpose of this book is to develop those ethical traditions. For example, Horkheimer’s books Eclipse of Reason and Critique of Instrumental Reason, and his early and now classic essay Materialism and Morality ask for a reformation of Kantian ethics. The reform sought is that categorical imperative in an individualism capitalism serves to worsen the difference between business ethics and moral philosophy. That is, it is not enough to try to be good or ethical as individuals when it is the systemic processes that must be dealt with. Therefore, Horkheimer asks that the maxim that would be made universal be done at the level of people organizing with others to change the social system that...
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 is used as a point of departure for a critique of contemporary welfare policy and the capitalist state. Martin and Torres set out to renew a critical Marxist method by extending it to an analysis of contemporary social policy. It is in this approach that they set out to argue that a critique of welfare policy within the context of capitalism is more timely and important than ever before.