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This essay focuses on institutional leadership in complex public organizations. Using an expanded version of James A. Stever’s organizational scepticism framework, an argument is presented that the concept new occupies a privileged and unique position in the modern conception of leadership. The concept’s status is due, in part, to its intimate relationship with other favorable concepts, most notably progress and radical change. It is argued that the modern fixation with new, progress and radical change is troublesome. The scholarly community is encouraged to commit more intellectual resources to developing alternative models of leadership that recognize the usefulness of, but are not limited by, the underlying values and assumptions of modernity. The model of administrative conservatorship is offered as one such model.

Critical theory has rarely articulated an agenda for social change linking theory to practice. This paper provides several examples of “critical theory in practice” and focuses specifically on Fay’s Critical Social Science (CSS) model. The methods of conflict transformation are then applied to CSS in order to accomplish two goals. First, political conflicts resulting from decision making can be used to transform both individuals and systems. Second, CSS more adequately accounts for some of the non-rational aspects of human nature, such as our resistance to change, thus improving its catalytic validity as a critical social theory. Together, the processes of CSS and conflict transformation provide a framework for enhancing the potential for citizen governance.

This essay explores the norms of civic duty, based on the legal, ethical, and practical interpretations of democratic citizenship. The authors find that interpretations of civic duty are dynamic and touch on a fundamental political question: What is the proper balance between elected officials and the professional civil service in a liberal democracy? They conclude that the norms of civic duty are political interpretations concerning an institutional struggle over governance as much as they are matters of law, ethics, and best practice. Successive interpretations of civic provide an opportunity for the renewal of citizenship while channeling political conflict into liberal democracy’s established institutions

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the perceived benefits and costs of volunteering affect participation. Based on this rational choice approach, the research tests a multivariate model of the determinants of volunteering.

The database for the empirical analysis is the 2005 Americans' Time Use Survey. To estimate the model of participation in volunteer activity, this research uses the complementary log‐log technique.

The findings support the central hypothesis that participation in volunteering decreases as the opportunity cost of volunteer activity increases. In addition, participation in volunteering increases as people perceive themselves as more embedded in their communities, thus suggesting that rational individuals make strategic assessments in their decisions to volunteer based on the level of trust in the exchange relationship.

The findings suggest that policies that promote a sense of embeddedness in the community, as well as those that link the workplace and volunteer opportunities, would help motivate rational individuals to volunteer. In‐depth interviews to ascertain people's motivations to volunteer would be useful to supplement the findings.

The findings suggest that policies that promote a sense of embeddedness in the community, as well as those that link the workplace and volunteer opportunities, would help motivate rational individuals to volunteer.

This paper contributes to the understanding of volunteer behavior as a rational choice in an exchange relationship. Based on these findings, this research argues that policies that promote a sense of community embeddedness as well as those that link the workplace and volunteer opportunities, help motivate rational individuals to volunteer.

Cameralism, as a set if ideas, refers to a system of “sciences” whose professors, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recorded and attempted to extend and improve administrative practices to serve the absolutist monarchs of Germany and Austria. This article examines some of the major themes of cameralist political and social thought. Particular attention is paid here to cameralist writings about the nature of the state, the value of science, and the power of the executive. It is concluded here that the cameralists sounded themes that continue to resonate in much of modern American public administration, but that these themes may not be as relevant to a constitutional republic as they were to the absolutist regimes of Germany and Austria.

This article examines the influence of David Hume’s ideas on American public administration. Hume’s ideas have indirectly, via their impact on modern philosophy, encouraged both support for and criticism of empiricist approaches in public administration. Also Hume’s ideas on constitutionalism, because of their influence on the writings and designs of the founders of the Constitution, provide what is arguably his most important legacy for the practice of public administration.

When they arrived in the New World the English Puritans expected to pursue justice by using the Bible and discretionary justice. Because they left England, in part, as an escape from a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah, it is ironical that the discovery of sexual license in the New World forced Puritan authorities to reconsider how they administered justice. It was, in fact, the ongoing sexual misdeeds of the colonists that forced the jettisoning of discretionary justice and the substitution for it of a system of justice administration with a legal code. In effect, this was the first public administration in English America, and it was established because of sexual misconduct.

Recognizing fertile ground and preparing ground not yet ready is an essential skill of an effective intervenor. This sequence of diagnosis and action is studied in a theoretical framework in which mediators examine and alter four classes of disputants' perceptions. These classes are (1) the available set of actions, (2) the class of possible consequences, (3) the likelihoods of uncertain events and consequences of actions, and (4) preferences over consequences. Denver's increasing demand for water led to the Foothills environmental dispute in 1977. This dispute featured various forms of third party intervention. U.S. Representative Patricia Schroeder's failure to mediate the Foothills conflict, and U.S. Representative Timothy Wirth's success, are compared in terms of the disputants' key beliefs affected by the two self‐appointed intervenors' actions. Using the technique of counterfactual case analysis, an exploration is made of a range of possible timing and ground preparation decisions. Although the particular circumstances of any dispute play a key role in its resolution, the proposed perspective extracts features that are general and therefore transferable to other contexts, thereby enabling mediators to belter develop, transmit, and apply intervention skills.

The knowledge base in public budgeting has certainly grown during the twentieth century, but the most enduring features of public budgeting were developed or documented in the first half of the century. The line item budget is still the dominant format in government budgeting; incremental adjustment to the previous year’s allocation is still the dominant budget process. Later developments in public budgeting, like planning-programming-budgeting system (PPBS), management by objective (MBO), zero-based budgeting (ZBB), and performance budgeting have had very little enduring impact on the practice of budgeting, largely because they reflected presidential attitudes about the role of government in society rather than theoretical advances in budgeting.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EES) is among the fastest growing entrepreneurship research topics. With even greater vigour, the non-scientific world of economic development agencies, administrations and policymakers has adopted the construct and applies it widely “in the field”, often lacking a solid empirical foundation and pursuing sub-optimal approaches. Improving policy instruments for EES development requires a data driven approach to first understand an EES of a specific region before making any attempts to change it. The paper showcases an empirical approach to create empirically rooted EES policy implications, contributing to closing the gap for insight in regional EES data of sub-national regions.

Exploring a mixed method design, utilising quantitative Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data and combining it with EES stakeholder interviews, focusing on dysfunctions, redundancies, power asymmetries and cut off elements as well as in-layer division and public organisation behaviour.

One finding is, that regional economic development agencies (EDA), as a main public instrument to foster regional entrepreneurial activity, seem to bring the potential of a negative impact on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems bottom-up development and the ability to become self-sustained if they assume the role of competitors towards private organisations and businesses.

As other work on EES, the approach used in this paper only sub-optimally covers temporal system dynamics.

This paper contributes to future EES support policies being rooted in an empirical foundation.

This paper not only progresses the empirical basis for research on regional EES but also lays the foundation for specific policy implications for a sub-national level entrepreneurial ecosystem.