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To provide human judgment input for computer algorithm development, this study examines the relative importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting the truthfulness ratings of two common types of online health information: news stories and institutional news releases.

This study employed a multi-method approach using (1) a manual content analysis of 400 randomly selected online health news stories and news releases from HealthNewsReview.org and (2) an online experiment comparing truthfulness ratings between news stories and news releases.

Using content analysis, the authors found significant differences in the importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting truthfulness ratings of news stories and news releases: source and style cues predicted truthfulness ratings better than content cues. In the experiment, source credibility was the most important predictor of truthfulness ratings, controlling for individual differences. Experts have higher ratings for news media stories than news releases and lay people have no differences in rating the two news formats.

It is important for health educators to curb consumer trust in misinformation and increase health information literacy. Rather than solely reporting scientific evidence, educators should focus on addressing cues people use to judge the truthfulness of health information.

This is the first study that directly compares human judgments of health news stories and news releases. Using both the breadth of content analysis and experimental causality testing, the authors evaluate the relative importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting truthfulness ratings.

Phenomenologists are among the strongest opponents of logical positivism. Mostly associated with Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is essentially an analytical method or framework for describing and explaining social relationships and psychological orientations. Phenomenologists attempt to account for the subjective qualities which logical positivists and empiricists assume to be unreal or are mistakenly treated as objective observable phenomena. The authors note that phenomenology has been absorbed into the literature and the language of the field especially in terms of how people do and do not relate to bureaucratic organizations and government programs.

Governance is central to our current understanding of public administration and policy. Mark Bevirʼs work provides governance studies solid epistemological grounding through a social constructionist approach which gives rise to a decentered theory of governance. This article explains decentered theory by examining the entrepreneurial subject as an artifact of neo-liberal governance. In doing so, it explores the key concepts that give shape to decentered theory.

Twenty years ago, Hindy Schachter (1989) posed a question about the foundation we use to structure the Public Administration theory narrative. Would an approach based on an art model, rather than the more common science model, produce a narrative with less distortion? This essay employs a definition of modernism developed by Thomas Vargish and Delo Mook outside the purview of public administration and a famous M. C. Escher lithograph as a basis for proposing an alternate way to construct the narrative. It then applies the alternative approach to Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo.

The philosophical roots of existentialism can be found in the writings of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Sartre used existentialism to frame the social and political issues of the day after World War II and Camus helped popularize the philosophyʼns focus on individualism and personal freedom. Existentialism provided justification for challenging public officials and regimes and was embraced again by public administrators and citizens frustrated by the failures of foreign and domestic policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Today existentialism and transcendentalist phenomenology remain strong alternatives to empiricism as a methodology in the study of human behavior. They provide a philosophical basis for determining and applying ethical standards, as well as a basis for encouraging public administrators to address major societal problems rather than being overly focused on management technique and administrative process.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impossible segregation of founding myths from any actual understanding of life in common, the public good and PA theorizing. The notion of shadow as used by Robert Denhardt to designate the “other side” of rational motives in organizing fits well with the approach to PA myths here intended, in consonance with the theme of unity in apparent opposites and the “intensely meaningful acts of heroes and heroines” (Denhardt, 1981, p. xii). Finally, the questionable opposition between logos and myth will be reviewed along the discussion of the sacred and the secret in PA tradition.

The author examines PA myths and discusses conjectures and explanations.

PA founding myths are not false believes or illusionary entities but genuine precursors and effective backstage arrangers of theory and praxis. The processes of languaging, musicking and organizing, basic human traits and fundamental events for human life to occur and get structured as it does, cannot prescind from them. Myths are intertwined with reasons and desires, inseparable, coexisting in the unified and pluriversal forms of doing, knowing and valuing that configure human life. Nothing different corresponds to PA and its myths as key components of the processes of thought, action and judgment that constitute the public domain.

PA myths persist not only through the ages of the administrative state but through the transformations of thoughts also occurred in each theorist’s own life experience. At different times, situations and conditions all of us – the author guess – have addressed this or that PA myth for motives worth deserving the reiterated discussion. It was never the same discussion; it could not have been, it is not, and it will not ever be.

In contemporary, complex organizations, “open secrets” may be just as common as intentionally concealed secrets, and are often associated with ethical failures and administrative evil. This chapter explores the ethical implications of open secrets in contemporary organizations and the dynamics by which they can become masked. Both the space shuttle Challenger disaster and Enron's corporate collapse, as well as other similar ethical debacles, show how organizational actors at all levels can promote the public interest and recognize ethical issues, only if they require of themselves a broader scope of ethical standards and vigilance that addresses not just individual behavior but also, and even primarily, the organizational and cultural context of values and ethics. The evolution of a moral vacuum within a culture of technical rationality and the resulting ethically deficient organizational dynamics produced the inability to recognize the open secrets that masked the pathway to disaster.