What the Open Government Partnership tells us about how international initiatives can and do shape domestic public sector reform.At the 2011 meeting of the UN General Assembly, the governments of eight nations—Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States—launched the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative aimed at promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessi...

Gaining access to government information is a perpetual concern of citizens. This is due in large part to the relationship between transparency and the issues of ethics, corruption, administrative malfeasance, and accountability. The last few years have proven that governmental transparency is a burgeoning academic subfield spurred on by contemporary political events and attention generated by the popular press. This reader addresses the topics of governmental transparency and secrecy and ...

Over the last four decades the public trust in government in the United States has fallen dramatically due to a "perfect storm" of contributing factors, such as a seemingly never ending string of political scandals, partisan polarization and toxic attack politics, and miserable failures to respond to natural disasters or the devastation of the Great Recession. This book contains the academic presentations that were made at the Symposium on Advancing Excellence and Public Trust in Gover...

A once-in-a-generation event held every twenty years, the Minnowbrook conference brings together the top scholars in public administration and public management to reflect on the state of the field and its future. This unique volume brings together a group of distinguished authors—both seasoned and new—for a rare critical examination of the field of public administration yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The book begins by examining the ideas of previous Minnowbrook conferences, such ...

Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination.Dobbin show...

What's public about public schools? Why do we invest in educating the next generation of Americans? What is it that drives our common purpose in educating children and at the same time divides us so passionately about how to educate them? Public schools have little to do with children. Schools are political and ideological institutions in which each generation battles among itself for supremacy in determining the purposes, goals and direction of public education. From battles over school l...

Foundations are a peculiarly American institution. They have been the dynamo of social change since their invention at the beginning of the last century. Yet they are cloaked in secrecy -- their decision-making and operations are inscrutable to the point of obscurity-leaving them substantially unaccountable to anyone. Joel Fleishman has been in and around foundations for almost half a century . . . running them, sitting on their boards, and seeking grants from them. And in this groundbreak...

A corporate campaign is an organized assault on the reputation of a company that has offended some interest group. Although corporate campaigns often involve political, economic, and legal tactics, they are centered around the media, where protagonists attempt to redefine the image--and undermine the reputation--of the target company. It is a strategy most frequently employed by unions but is also employed by special interests, such as environmental or human rights groups. Sometimes it is ...

Paul T. Hill examines the real-world factors that can complicate, delay, and in some instances interfere with the positive cause-and-effect relationships identified by the theories behind school choice. He explains why schools of choice haven't yet achieved a broader appeal and suggests more realistic expectations about timing and a more complete understanding of what must be done to make choice work.

This book highlights how online networking offers potential for new forms of activist mobilizing, repertoires, participatory democracy, direct action, fundraising, and civic engagement. It calls for a re-conceptualization of some of the main tenets of contentious and electoral politics, which were originally constructed to describe and analyze face-to-face forms of mobilization, in order to more accurately analyze contemporary forms of protest, electoral processes, and civil society organi...

Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda. The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's univer...

America is in trouble. We face four major challenges on which our future depends, and we are failing to meet them—and if we delay any longer, soon it will be too late for us to pass along the American dream to future generations.In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, offer both a wake-up call and a call to collective action. They analyze the four challenges we fac...