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As a high-impact educational practice ("Kuh, 2008"), service-learning can have a transformational effect on students, communities, instructors, and higher education institutions. However, despite cautions ("Butin, 2006, p. 481"), student enrollment in service-learning remains overwhelmingly White and female ("Jacoby, 2015"), creating a potential enrollment gap in a pedagogy intended to be inclusive. In this article the authors explore what might cause minority students to pursue service-learning, building on research that suggests that student traits and values impact the awareness of and disposition to enroll in service-learning ("Christensen, Stritch, Kellough, & Brewer, 2015"; "Pearl & Christensen, 2017"). Through qualitative methodology, the authors work to better understand students' traits in relation to their interest and enrollment in service-learning. The findings, relevant to both service-learning theory and practice, suggest the importance of purposeful consideration of how service-learning can truly promote social justice, democratic values, and equality.

This study extends a line of research focused on motivational factors that contribute to first-year students' reasons for engaging in service-learning. Among first-year students, altruistically-motivated students (Christensen, Stritch, Kellough, & Brewer, 2015) and minority students (Pearl & Christensen, 2016) were not only more knowledgeable of service-learning upon entering college but they were also more interested in enrolling in service-learning. The present study employs the Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI) (Clary et al., 1998) to explore the extent to which student traits are correlated with various motivations to enroll in service-learning courses. We examine student responses to the VFI survey instrument using multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA). Our findings establish a foundation that better accounts for students' "inputs" in order to better understand various service-learning outcomes. We discuss the implications of our findings as they relate to higher education administrators and instructors in order to close the gap between service-learning interest and enrollment, and to provide students with service-learning experiences that satisfy their motivations and help them achieve their goals.

Among college students, public service motives influence choice of major or job. Although the link between public service motives and prosocial behavior has been established among working adults, researchers have not adequately examined how these motives affect the reported behavior of precareer students. In this article, the authors explored how public service motives and certain demographic characteristics were related to the service orientation of college freshmen. More specifically, they examined whether public service motivation was related to a student's proclivity to enroll in service-learning courses and volunteer frequently. Results indicated that public service motives were positively associated with both curricular and extracurricular public service activities among first-year college students. Race and gender were found to be key traits affecting engagement. The implications of these findings for public service research and education are discussed.

Despite a great deal of research investigating incentives and goal setting more broadly, little is known about the linking of goals and goal attainment to different monetary incentive structures, or the manner in which such structural choices impact various job attitudes and job performance. Consequently, a quasi-field experiment, a laboratory experiment, and an on-line survey experiment examined the effects of three monetary incentive systems on task performance (exps. 1, 3), counterproductive behavior (exper. 2), and perceptions of fairness (exps. 1, 3). Additionally, the mediating effect of prolonged effort/persistence (exp. 3) was tested. The results revealed that an all-or-nothing distal goal method of linking a monetary incentive to a goal under-performs the multiple proximal goals and linear piece-rate methods with regard to task performance, counterproductive behavior, and perceptions of fairness. The results of the third experiment revealed that persistence and perceptions of fairness mediate the monetary incentive-task goal performance relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public service motivation (PSM), public service values (PSV), and public service ethos (PSE), we argue, constitute theoretically complementary dimensions of public service psychology. Using multi‐dimensional scaling (MDS), we also empirically map the three constructs to identify their interrelationships as constituent parts of a public service topology. Using a survey of public and private employees, we determined which of the PSM, PSV, and PSE instruments most strongly correlate with (1) sector of employment, (2) preferences in public service decision vignettes, and (3) prosocial citizenship behavior. We find PSM, PSV, and PSE to be distinctly complementary, rather than competing psychological phenomena. Incorporating—theoretically and empirically—the three approaches into one topology suggests dimensions of an integrated public service psychology comprising two axes that vary on an advocacy–neutrality scale and a self‐focused–other‐focused scale. With this topographical orientation, public administration scholars can better select the appropriate instrument(s), whether PSM, PSV, or PSE, for the public service situation/question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, we assess whether the contributions of judges from underrepresented groups are undervalued or overlooked, thereby reducing these judges' influence on legal policy. Drawing on an original dataset of discretionary citations to over 2,000 published federal appellate decisions, we find that the majority of opinions written by female judges receive less attention from other courts than those by similarly situated men and that this is largely attributable to disparities in citing Black women and Latinas. We also find that additional efforts by Black and Latinx judges to ground their opinions in precedent yield a much lower rate of return in subsequent citations by outside circuits than comparable work by white men and women judges. This suggests that, despite gains in diversification in the federal judiciary, stereotypes about social identities will play a powerful role in determining whose ideas receive recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonprofit organizations have the potential to influence public health by filling voids not filled by government or private organizations. Here we investigate whether the presence of health-related nonprofit organizations at the local community level helps to improve community-level obesity. This study used a time-series design using a random effects model to determine whether the entrance or exits of health nonprofits at the county level was associated with lower obesity rates in the US one and two years following the entrance or departures of nonprofits. The effect was small but significant in urban areas, with a smaller effect in rural areas. Our findings suggest that the presence of health nonprofits is associated with positive health outcomes, in this case obesity. The plausibility may be explained through the increased role nonprofits play in fostering social capital and increased promotion of health-related issues.

This article synthesizes the cross-disciplinary literature on city competitiveness published in the past three decades to bring attention to competitiveness as a key topic for public administration and local government performance. We systematically reviewed research regarding city competitiveness, its measurement, and its antecendents. Subsequently, to explore the link between local governments and competitiveness, we articulated multiple perspectives to investigate this connection, concluding that while the relationship between government and city competitiveness is still not entirely settled and results are far from consistent, the progress made to date charts a course for future research that centres on public administration contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the state of public service motivation research and associated big questions from the shared perspective of participants who gathered for a 20-year retrospective conference entitled "Elevating Public Service Motivation (PSM) Research" at Aspen Grove, Utah, in 2019. Using a variety of facilitation methods, conference organizers sought to (1) identify the current state of PSM research; (2) provide a practitioner perspective on PSM research; (3) identify shared perspectives of PSM researchers; and (4) identify open questions in PSM scholarship. We report on the results of these efforts. In brief, while there are some areas of broad consensus across PSM scholarship, there are still many contested areas. In particular, researchers and practitioners appear to have different views about the value of PSM research and its application to practice. We articulate several frameworks, motivated by participant insights, to guide future research and practice. We also introduce the IPMJ articles from the 2019 conference that illustrate important themes in PSM's current and future place in public administrative research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]