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Message from the Chair
It is with great pleasure that I assume responsibility
as Chair of the Public Administration section this year.
First, I must thank Kathy Newcomer for her role as Chair
last year, and Ed Kellough for his magnificent work as conference
program chair for the 2006 meeting. Ed has now assumed the
position of Chair-elect and Julie Dolan was elected to serve
as 2007 conference program chair. Fortunately, Sharon Mastracci
has agreed to continue to serve as section treasurer and
Domonic Bearfield and Mel Dubnick as newsletter/website
editors. We also owe our thanks to outgoing Council members
Richard Feiock and Brint Milward and welcome to the Council
Charles Gossett, Roger Hartley and Greg Saxton.
Of course, in addition to serving on the Council, there
are other ways in which Section members can be active participants.
Please let me know if you would like to volunteer.
At the annual business meeting the Section approved a
new initiative headed up by Jay White at the University
of Nebraska. The project involves the production of a public
administration research annual to be published by M.E. Sharpe.
The annual would include original research on cutting edge
topics and would be available to Section members at a discount.
The Section would also have representatives serving roles
as members of an Editorial Advisory Board and/or Board of
Editors. Also sponsoring the project is ASPA's Section on
Public Administration Research. Questions can be directed
to Council member Dale Krane.
I would also like to take this opportunity to solicit
your feedback for a survey I have been asked to complete
for the APSA Teaching and Learning Committee. If you can
take a few minutes to provide me with your responses to
any of the following questions, I would incorporate them
into my response to the Committee: (please e-mail me at
kcnaff@sfsu.edu)
Regarding the APSA teaching website: http://www.apsanet.org/section_168.cfm
" Do you make use of this website?
" Does it seem relevant?
" Do you have suggestions for improving it?
" Have you attended the annual conference on teaching
and learning?
" What did you like or not like about it?
" How could it be improved?
" How can political science classes better address
issues related to race, gender and sexual orientation?
" Are there other teaching-related issues that APSA
should give high priority to address?
Thank you for your input!
--Kathy Naff, SFSU
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Volcker
Endowment:
2007 Call for Proposals
Attention Junior Scholars, Doctoral Students, Doctoral
Advisors
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The Paul A. Volcker Endowment for Public Service
Research and Education Junior Scholar Research Grant
Program
Application Deadline:
March 15, 2007
Note: Applications accepted no earlier than February
1, 2007
Scope of the Grant Award:
The Section for Public Administration of the
American Political Science Association (APSA) invites
applications and research proposals from junior scholars
researching public administration issues affecting
governance in the United States and abroad.
Proposals will be judged on their potential to shed
new light on important public administration questions,
their scholarly and methodological rigor, and their
promise for advancing practice and theory development.
Individual grants are not renewable.
As a part of the APSA Centennial Campaign, support
from the Volcker Endowment can, but need not, involve
research residencies at the Centennial Center in Washington.
Recipients may conduct research on issues affecting
or relevant to public administration at any level
(or levels) of government, in any nation (or across
nations), and from whatever locale is most useful
or appropriate for their research purposes.
Application Materials:
Proposals must address all items under the scope of
the award and must be done in triplicate or sent electronically.
Proposals are limited to five (5) single-spaced
pages and must:
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State the purpose of the project
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State how the project contributes to scholarship
within public administration and its applicability
for practice and theory development
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State how the project relates to previous research
and theoretical developments
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Specify research design
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Provide an itemized budget and budget justification
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Specify any additional financial support that
the applicant is already receiving or anticipates
receiving.
In addition, each proposal also must include (in
excess of the five-page written proposal):
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A cover letter summarizing project title, qualifications
for successfully completing the project, and professional
status (doctoral student working on dissertation
or untenured assistant professor)
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An abstract of the proposal (maximum 150 words)
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A letter attesting to the quality of the research
project (typically from a doctoral student's dissertation
advisor or a junior faculty member's department
chair
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A curriculum vitae (no more than three pages)
Eligibility:
Eligibility is limited to doctoral students who have
successfully defended their dissertation prospectus
and tenure-track assistant professors.
Applicants must be APSA members at the time of application.
Membership in the Section for Public Administration
is not required, but can be one of a variety of factors
that the Volcker Awards Committee considers in making
awards.
Funding Process and Purposes
Grants will be awarded annually by a three-person
Volcker Awards Committee. The number, size of grants,
and allocation of grants (to doctoral students and
tenure-track assistant professors) awarded annually
will be up to the Volcker Awards Committee.
Initially, grants are expected to range between
$2,000 and $3,000. Funds may be used for such research
activities as: travel to archives; travel to conduct
interviews; administration and coding of survey instruments;
research assistance; and purchase of datasets. This
list is merely illustrative, but specifically excluded
from funding are: travel to professional meetings;
secretarial costs except for preparation of the final
manuscripts for publication; and salary support.
Submission:
Proposals sent electronically (preferred)
should be emailed to grants@apsanet.org.
Otherwise, three (3) hard copies of the total proposal
package should be submitted to:
Paul A. Volcker Endowment for Public Administration
Research and Education
Junior Scholar Research Grant Program
c/o American Political Science Association
1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036-1206
For further information call APSA, send email to
the Grants office at grants@apsanet.org,
or contact Robert
Durant (Chair), Volcker Junior Scholar Awards
Committee.
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APSA Public Administration
Section Officers,
2006-2007:
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2006-2007 Chair:
Katherine
C. Naff, San Francisco State University
Chair-Elect:
Ed
Kellough, University of Georgia
2006 Program Chair
(and future chair-elect)
Julie
Dolan, Macalaster
College
Treasurer:
Sharon
H. Mastracci, University
of Illinois, Chicago
Council members:
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Dale
Krane, University of
Nebraska, Omaha
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Roddrick Colvin,
John Jay College/CUNY
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Charles Gossett,
California State Polytechnic University
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Webmaster & List
Manager: Mel
Dubnick, University of New
Hampshire
Newsletter Editor:
Domonic
Bearfield, Texas A&M
University
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SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE AND CONTACT INFORMATION
This newsletter is being provided as a service to members
of the Public Administration Section of the American Political
Science Association. The editor is solely responsible for
its content. Please send notices, suggestions, and corrections
to newsletter editor, Domonic
Bearfield.
In order to notified of the PA Section Electronic Newsletter,
your current and correct e-mail address must be on the official
section listserv. To subscribe to that listserv, send an
email to or click on listserv@h-net.msu.edu
and include the following IN THE BODY of the message:
SUBSCRIBE H-PUBADMIN your name
Caution: Make certain you are subscribing from the email
server where you want to receive postings. The system automatically
registers that server.
If you have any questions, or in the highly unlikely event
that you wish to unsubscribe, contact Mel
Dubnick.
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The Program Theme for 2007 is "Political Science and
Beyond" and through that theme we aim to embrace the
extraordinary potential of linking political scientists
with researchers, teachers, and scholars from other disciplines.
We encourage you to think across disciplinary boundaries
in organizing panels and in contributing to the program.
We particularly encourage the participation of scholars
from cognate fields.
"Proposals for papers and panels about a wide variety
of topics in public administration are welcome. This year’s
conference celebrates the interdisciplinary nature of political
science, and public administration scholars have long been
engaged in interdisciplinary work. Respecting the centrality
of politics to public administration scholarship, research
that addresses questions related to the politics of administration
at local, state and national levels is particularly fitting
for this conference. Some broad areas include bureaucratic
decision-making, accountability, and responsiveness; the
delivery and provision of government services (including
those delivered by non-profits, quasi-governmental organizations,
faith-based, and private sector organizations); and the
importance of privacy and civil rights issues in a post-September
11th world."
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Editorial:
Teaching
about technology in public administration education
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Professor
and Associate Dean
School of Social Science, Public Affairs,
and Public Policy
Northeastern University, Boston
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"Right now students in schools of public
administration and affairs are not well versed in
science and technology; yet, as they become leaders
in public institutions, they will be faced with decisions
of immense scientific and technological complexity,
and with equally immense societal implications."
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The recent
meeting of the National
Association of Schools of Public Administration and
Affairs in Minneapolis was organized around the
theme, "The Future of the Public Sector,"
and many of the topics discussed in respective panels
and plenary sessions were what one might expect: concerns
about the health of democracy, the roles of policy
makers in strengthening civic life, the increasing
centrality of nonprofit organizations and philanthropy
in public governance systems, and the challenge to
uphold values of social equity, cultural competency
and diversity, both in the public sector and in the
teaching of public administration itself.
The meeting's theme also provided an appropriate
opportunity to explore a more esoteric and seldom-considered
challenge to the future of public administration:
the impacts of science and technology. The members
of the roundtable, "Emerging Technologies and
the Challenge to the Public Sector," did so both
in a direct sense-for example, the potential risks
generated by a range of chemical, bio- and nano-technologies-and
more indirectly in terms of the even less acknowledged
impacts of technological change on society, with its
eventual impacts on and challenges for the public
sector. The roundtable offered presenters and audience
members a forum in which to discuss both the types
of challenges and expected needs, ranging from assessing
comparable risks to building in government and society
the requisite capacity to respond to potential effects,
accidental or otherwise.
What was unique about the roundtable, according
to several of those in attendance, was that it took
place at all. In some ways this is no surprise, given
our tendency to take the impacts of technology as
a given, a fact of life that needs little acknowledgement.
For example, Carolyn
Ban noted in her 2001
NASPAA presidential address, "technology
is changing so rapidly that it's very hard to assess
its current effects on organizations, on culture and
communication, and on our sense of ourselves as global
citizens, let alone predict its possible future effects,
positive and negative."(1) Nicely stated, yet
how often do discussions about the direct and indirect
impacts of technology on society find their ways into
public administration conferences, or, more critically,
public administration classrooms?
Not often, and certainly not often enough. A few
MPA programs offer optional concentrations in some
variation of science, technology and public policy,
and many more offer at least one elective on the topic,
but it is the rare program that requires future public
sector leaders to learn anything about the direct
and indirect impacts of technology. In fact, any reference
to "technology" in the teaching of public
administration is generally confined to the use of
educational technology in the classroom. The same
goes for
NASPAA accreditation guidelines, which in several
instances ask programs to detail use of technology
in teaching, but never mentions teaching about technology
as a subject for inclusion in the curriculum. Technology
is a tool, but not as a topic in its own right.
Such omissions do our students a disservice. Consider
just three broad issues brought up at the roundtable:
Understanding impacts.
For one thing, as Clark
Miller (Consortium
for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University)
noted in his presentation, the cumulative impact of
technological change on society, and eventually on
the public sector is growing more acute, and at a
dramatic rate. Such profound and rapid change affects
all aspects of public sector responsibilities (e.g.,
security, health, environment, public welfare, economic
development), yet it is doubtful whether we spend
sufficient time discussing such issues in our courses.
Consider for a moment how dramatic changes in computing
power, combined with the emergence of the Internet,
have profoundly affected the public sector in innumerable
and still as yet ill-understood ways. Now add to these
advances expected breakthroughs in bio- and nano-technology,
which together promise to revolutionize entire sectors
of everyday life: new medical applications (e.g.,
destroying individual cancer cells, alleviating Parkinson's
Disease), defense applications (e.g., sensing devices
for detecting biological and nuclear threats), energy
(e.g., solar power generation, storage, and transmission),
and, of course, a new generation of incredibly small
but incredibly powerful computers. Some even see nanotechnology,
paired with parallel revolutions in genetic engineering
and artificial intelligence, as heralding profoundly
new forms of human/machine consciousness. (2) Bring
on the ethicists.
These technological advances are routinely seen
as "revolutionary" by those doing the research,
and as such will produce equally profound societal
consequences. Yet, as Miller observed, we rarely fully
understand the ways in which individuals and communities
will adapt to themselves around new technologies.
Moreover, as he noted with reference to governmental
response to Hurricane Katrina, our public institutions
are too often deeply imbued with a false sense of
certainty, predictability, and control regarding science
and technology. Such failures underscore the need
to instill a sense of "anticipation and reflection"
in our understanding of and approaches to science
and technology, both in the classroom and, more important,
in public institutions, and on the need to build capacity
for anticipating, not simply reacting to, the policy
challenges of emerging technologies.
Oversight and Expertise:
Not only do the depth and rate of technological change
pose challenges, but so too does the complexity of
the technologies in question. Few in public administration
have backgrounds in science or engineering, yet many
of our graduates will occupy positions where they
will have to make policy decisions on behalf of the
public good on issues of tremendous scientific and
technological complexity. As Jennifer
Kuzma (Center
for Science, Technology, and Public Policy, the Humphrey
Institute, University of Minnesota), noted, policymakers
are forced assess and balance risks posed by increasingly
complex technologies laden with significant and not
always acknowledged tradeoffs. Which institutions
and/or actors are equipped to think in multi-dimensional
ways about oversight for new technologies, she wondered.
What are the processes for doing so?
Technologies pose myriad challenges to public institutions,
Kuzma argued, including adequacy of in-house expertise,
agency mandates that rarely match the complexity of
problems, transparency of and access to information,
inter-agency coordination, and, of course, resources.
The sheer complexity of new bio- and nano-technologies
threaten to cripple already tottering federal regulatory
oversight regimes, in turn posing fundamental challenges
to governing institutions.
Issues of capacity.
Clark Miller and Jennifer Kuzma are themselves rarities
in public affairs education. Clark has a doctorate
in electrical engineer, with additional background
in atmospheric physics, while Jennifer has a doctoral
degree in biochemistry and plant molecular biology.
Yet both migrated to public affairs education because
they are concerned about the impacts of technology
on society and how well our public institutions are
able to adapt to them.
I'm a political scientist who struggles to understand
technology (my own college science training ended
with sophomore geology, or "Fun with Rocks").
I'm interested in questions of capacity, in the form
of appropriate laws, policies, regulations, resources,
expertise, and commitment. For example, there is already
considerable concern that the unique properties evident
in nanotechnology alone will put considerable stress
on existing regulatory structures and institutions,
in the process creating confusion within both industry
and government about the nature and scope of regulation.
Such uncertainty in turn has implications for technological
development, as well as for the legitimacy of public
institutions. We therefore need to think more proactively
about the capacity of our agencies and officials to
address issues of substantial technological complexity
and impact.
Clark, Jennifer, and I are also concerned about
the capacity of our students to understand the profound
technological changes to occur in their lifetimes,
as well as the challenge s to governance such technological
change implies. Right now students in schools of public
administration and affairs are not well versed in
science and technology; yet, as they become leaders
in public institutions, they will be faced with decisions
of immense scientific and technological complexity,
and with equally immense societal implications. At
minimum, introductory MPA courses should include modules
on the impacts of science and technology; ideally,
there need to be better integration of issues of science
and technology with in training on institutions, policy
analysis, and policy design.
Public administration programs also need to break
out of the mold and recruit more students and faculty
coming out of so-called STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Math) areas. We need more people
like Jennifer and Clark in our programs. Indeed, my
own project on nanotechnology and regulatory capacity
was lucky enough to have as a research assistant an
MPA student who came to us with a degree in engineering.
His background made all that much more possible for
our team of social scientists and philosophers to
make some sense of the science and technology issues
at hand. He's now off to law school to study patent
law. I-and we-could use more like him.
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