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We trace how privacy-encroaching technologies have unfolded over the course of human history and how such technologies have influenced human societies and economies; governments have been central to this evolution. We maintain that surveillance is inevitable: that the future of public administration will depend on how administrators and others navigate deep rifts in public fear (yet acceptance) of surveillance and other means of data collection. Finally, we argue for coordination among governance scholars, public administrators, public technologists, and civil society advocates in order to improve the institutions that govern the collection and use of data from surveillance activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolving concept of "agile" has fundamentally changed core aspects of software design, project management, and business operations. The agile approach could also reshape government, public management, and governance in general. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors introduce the modern agile movement, reflect on how it can benefit public administrators, and describe several challenges that managers will face when they are expected to make their organizations more flexible and responsive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All countries with complex geographies must extend national power to local areas. Field administration is a primitive in government: it is inevitable in modern national governments, but its variety and impact is rarely discussed in modern public administration. Building on the work of James Fesler and formal results on agenda-setting in organizations, this article demonstrates dilemmas in the use of historically important, widespread mechanisms for designing the field operations of national governments. The experiences of different nation-states provide context for these dilemmas. How governments address these dilemmas shapes policy implementation and the performance of national governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two decades of research have helped show that government agencies can be innovative under certain conditions. We test hypotheses about the adoption and use of robotics as a key emerging leading‐edge technology as advanced economies undergo the latest technological revolution. We focus on the case of U.S. crime laboratories as a core component of the "evidence assembly process" in the U.S. justice system. Using data from the census of crime labs, we show that the adoption of robotics depends on familiar "push‐and‐pull" factors: the push of agency professionalism, the pull of agency task environments, and the supporting capability of resources. Together these findings suggest that agencies can be early adopters of robotics as advanced technologies if they have the capacity (and need) to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2018, the University of Arizona's School of Government and Public Policy hosted an international workshop on the role of organization theory in public management. The intention was to renew interest in organization theory in public management research. Scholars such as Herbert Simon, Herbert Kaufman, and Richard Selznick made seminal contributions to organization theory through the study of public organizations from the 1940s through the 1960s. In our estimation, organization theory is underrepresented in public administration scholarship for the last several decades. There are natural reasons for this trend, including the discipline's turn towards organizational behavior and the ascendancy of techniques that advance the study of large datasets and those that allow for experimental control. The recent emergence of "behavioral public administration" is a prominent example of this evolution. This symposium is an attempt to make a place at the table of public management for organization theory. The articles in this symposium contain articles from scholars who operate in the tradition of classic organization theory in new and innovative ways to lend intellectual purchase to studies of public organizations and public organizational networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a comparative study of the differences in civil service laws across countries in order to observe how these systems relate to one another. We compare the civil service laws of 26 countries from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and eight non-OECD countries from Central and Eastern Europe to identify how different configurations of civil service systems are revealed through their shared attributes. Our data are drawn from the contents of civil service legislation and the status of those civil servants covered by the civil service laws of these countries. We use cluster analysis to identify several groups of countries whose civil service systems share similar features. We find that the estimated topography, or similarity among systems, depends on both subjective decisions about the number of groups and the variables used to estimate the space. However, we draw key conclusions about the value of certain cases, like the United States, for learning about other systems, and the need for expanded knowledge of systems from Central and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While collaboration among individuals, work groups, and organizations is central for understanding the performance of public agencies, most studies have focused on collaboration between organizations or sectors. We develop a model that focuses on two types of collaborative behavior: between persons (both horizontal and vertical) and between work units. We empirically test our hypotheses using data on work collaboration and perceptions of public agency performance from the United States federal government. We introduce a method for estimating the impact of different types of collaborative behavior that also accounts for nonlinear effects and a dependent variable that takes ordered values. We find that intra-organizational collaborative behavior has a large impact on organizational performance and that horizontal collaborative behavior between workers has the greatest impact among the specific types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer an approach for conceptualizing and measuring government effectiveness or performance in which the focus is on the whole government's effectiveness. We examine data that portray how countries compare in terms of perceived government effectiveness using the World Bank Governance Indicators dataset, which cover 212 countries from 1996 until 2006. We also offer and interpret a new measure of perceived government effectiveness that accounts for the economic development of each country. We argue that the comparative study of government effectiveness (in terms of both multiple measures and across countries) benefits the study of public administration, public management, and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the forces for the descriptive representation of women in ministerial and subministerial positions. We offer a unified model in which portfolio allocation makes political forces for descriptive representation more important in the case of ministerial lines; in contrast, labor market forces determine the extent of descriptive representation in subministerial lines. We provide evidence for this claim from data for 72 countries and show that the advancement of women into ministerial posts depends on the form of electoral system and presence of women in the legislature (conditional on being in a parliamentary system). In contrast, the subministerial representation for women depends on the supply of women in the workforce. Additionally, the increased incidence of women in ministerial lines is associated with an increase in representation in subministerial lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims that the organizational structure of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) failed to cope with the needs to build comprehensive environmental protection policies. Comparison of the EPA structure with other agencies in the U.S.; Structural choices at the EPA; Argument that the lack of congressional mandate created the structural failures of the agency.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses reports within the issue on topics including links betweeb theory and analysis, workshop on the proper use of panel analysis to deal with the data of public administration, and analysis of public administration using Bayesian statistics.