The Public Administration Casebook

Robert A Cropf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317343004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is designed to serve either as a companion to current introductory public administration textbooks or as a stand-alone casebook. It presents several case studies around several main themes or topics of public administration, including leadership, budgeting, ethics, and decision making.

INTRODUCTION

OBJECTIVES AND OVERVIEW

Public policy, public administration, and, more generally, public service are showing renewed growth and vitality in terms of both educational and career opportunities. This is happening despite the continuing uncertainty regarding the economy and the restructuring of entire industrial sectors, including automobile manufacturing and finance. Indeed, issues associated with globalization, the environment, terrorism, immigration, and the economy all point to the importance of public policy and public administration in helping to find practicable solutions. Given the current political environment, it is critical that public service professionals are well prepared to tackle these and other key issues. Not only does this require the proper academic training, but it also demands extensive practice-based knowledge and skills. Much of the responsibility falls on public affairs/administration faculty and programs to better prepare practitioners.

Not only do students need better preparation for the public service, but the profile of these students is also rapidly changing with an increase of in-service, diverse, and nontraditional students including more females, part-time students, students attending two-year institutions, first-generation students, working adults, and students with one or more dependents (Choy, 2002; U.S. Department of Education, 2002). These trends are radically altering the face of higher education and, in particular, public administration programs (Loutzenhiser & Orman, 2005). Thus, there is an ongoing need for public administration programs to use teaching methods geared toward adult learners and other nontraditional students—methods referred to in the scholarly literature as andragogy (Knowles, 1988; Merriam & Caffarella, 1999). Andragogy attempts to facilitate more effective adult learning by integrating more of the learner's lived experience into the learning process. For these nontraditional students, pedagogical techniques that incorporate subject matter that relates directly to the their lives and is problem oriented as opposed to theoretical is the preferred method.

Why and for Whom Was the Book Written?

Dialogue with colleagues and professionals from the National Association of School of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) led the authors to conclude that there is a need to meet the educational and professional requirements of a new generation of students in public administration undergraduate and graduate programs. A number of ideas were discussed for meeting these needs, including one that gave rise to this project—a book of real-life case studies written with working adults in mind. The case study method is one way to better meet the educational requirements of a wide range of students because the orientation of many of today's students tends to be more practice based and less theoretical in nature. Therefore, current learners appreciate efforts to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Although this is essential to any student of public administration (Reid & Miller, 1997), it is particularly salient for current students. However, there is a lack of texts that “speak to” the lived experience of students, ones that provide them with meaningful and relevant examples drawn from those experiences.

At the time of these discussions, a book such as this one did not exist. Thus, this book was written in order to provide students with applied examples incorporating workforce-relevant issues into the curriculum (White, 2004). This volume is the direct result of that discussion as well as subsequent conversations and other collaborations involving the authors. The case material contained herein is geared toward preparing students to become effective practitioners in the public and nonprofit sectors. The cases are written and compiled in such a way that they are all practice based and appeal to a variety of consumers, including traditional and nontraditional students. The book is designed to serve either as a companion to current introductory public administration textbooks or as a stand-alone casebook.

Unique Features of the Book

Another unique aspect of this casebook is that all the third authors of the cases were students. The cases are based on their actual experiences in organizational settings (see the later section on Casebook Methodology for additional information). A result of our students' deep involvement in the creation, development, and writing of each of these case studies is that the material better reflects current workplace realities and therefore results in a more meaningful learning experience for everyone. Specifically, the value of this approach is that it

• Enhances pedagogy by providing a means for students to become deeply immersed in the learning process

• Provides a teaching case methodology that serves as an easily adaptable model for other instructors

• Stimulates more interest in the public administration issues and theories discussed in class: when students analyze the cases, they can see their direct relevance to actual workplace experience

• Focuses on everyday people in ordinary situations as opposed to unique situations or national figures as other cases in the literature have done

• Provides an opportunity for student writers to reflect on their own experience and tie it in with the material covered in class

• Offers a text that speaks to the real-life experiences of students and, in particular, in-service and nontraditional students

The cases were all written in conjunction with students in the following programs:

• Working adult students in Saint Louis University's School for Professional Studies, specifically senior-level nontraditional students in the organizational studies, criminal justice, and public administration undergraduate programs

• In-service and masters-level students in Saint Louis University's Masters of Public Administration (MPA) program

The following types of students will derive the most benefit from the cases:

• Upper-level undergraduate students taking an introductory course in public administration

• First-year students in an MPA or similar degree program taking the required introductory course in public administration

• In-service, diverse, and nontraditional students in undergraduate- and graduate-level public administration or nonprofit management programs

The Themes of the Cases

Most of the significant themes covered in a typical introductory public administration course are included in this casebook. The complete list of themes is shown in Table 1. Since the choice of case study subject matter was left entirely up to the students, perhaps it is not surprising that certain themes are more salient than others. Decision making, bureaucracy and organizational structure, leadership, human resource administration, and professional and personal ethics stand out in particular as the themes most written about by the students in their cases. Arguably, these are the aspects of organizational life that most impact working students, at least as far as our sample is concerned. Other important themes covered by the cases include organizational culture, fiscal management, privatization, and organizational communication. Several of our cases involve nonprofits, reflecting the reality that many MPAs are employed by this sector, a trend that will continue well into the future. An intriguing aspect of these nonprofit cases is that they allowed us to broaden the scope of topics to cover faith-based and grassroots citizens' organizations, which are not typically included in standard public administration textbooks. Again, a strong case can be made that the choice of subject matter in these case studies reflects the altered landscape facing current MPAs, who now have direct experience with the increasing significance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in public service delivery.

TABLE 1 Thematic Content of the Case Studies

Case Name	Main Themes	Secondary Theme(s)
Oakdale Administrator	Decision making, financial management	Political context, ethics
Crime Victim Support Center	Decision making	Ethics, bureaucracy
ReadNow!	Decision making, ethics	Communication, intergovernmental affairs
Community Credit Union	Social equ...