Balk argues that most professionals in government agencies are underutilized. He proposes an operational approach called public agency democracy that should help reduce costly and disconcerting errors. The book will interest those who wish to better understand the frustrations of public service and how to turn these to motivate change. Well over two million very qualified individuals mediate between high-level managers and other members of public agencies. These grossly underutilized intermediary professionals must become more empowered to reduce waste malfeasance and other costly errors. Balk proposes an applied theory of public agency democracy designed to liberate the potential of its highly trained experts. The book begins by discussing professionals as power intermediaries and their necessary tensions with authority around matters of reform. Recognized dilemmas in the field of public administration are reviewed to demonstrate the need to resolve issues concerning public agency democracy. A model is then developed to incorporate democratic action with responses ranging from routine to whistle-blowing activities. The second part of the book shows why existing management orientations are not receptive to the need for agency democracy. Conventional orientations reject the paradoxical realities of government environments; therefore ingrained beliefs about effectiveness and management authority are at times inappropriate. Management approaches to public service motivation lack sophistication. Four final chapters are devoted to techniques and approaches on the part of professionals to initiate change. These involve techniques to assess organizational predicaments design resolutions and become constructively involved in processes of agency reform. Ways are proposed for professionals and others to institutionalize public agency democracy in government environments.

Living in Digital Worlds investigates the relationship between human society and technology as our private and particularly our public lives are increasingly undertaken in spaces that are inherently digital: digital public spaces. The book unpicks why digital technology is such an inextricable part of modern society first by examining the historical relationship between technological development and the early progression of human sociality. This is then followed by an examination of the ways in which modern life is currently being impacted by the expansion of digital information and devices into multiple aspects of our lives including focuses on privacy bias and ownership in digital spaces. Finally it explores potential future developments and their implications and proposes that it is crucial to consider the design of technology and systems in order to support a positive and beneficial direction of change. Each chapter includes case studies primarily drawn from The Creative Exchange a fiveyear programme which ran from 2012 to 2016 to explore the notion of the digital public space through collaborative cross-sector research.

Human resource management is experiencing profound change new challenges exciting accomplishments and much uncertainity. The public service has moved away from the old days of personnel management concerned mostly with processing personal action paperwork to a system where public employees are managed as human capital to get the work of the government done more effectively and efficiently. This volume brings together the latest thinking on human resource management in the public service presented by distinguished thought leaders in the field. While it focuses primarily on federal government policies and practices the principles conclusions and recommendations translate readily to state and local government and to the private sector as well.

Bring Us All The Trash

Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts public culture and the state in modern America. Influenced by two decades of debate inside and outside the academy about the relationship among the arts politics and public policy the essays collected in The Arts of Democracy represent the coming of age of one of the liveliest fields in contemporary academic life. Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts public culture and the state in modern America beginning with an art market at the turn of the twentieth century that supported a notion of civic identity through the mid-century era of state-sponsored art to the postmodern disconnect between artistic and civic languages. Topics range from Norman Rockwell as public artist and the creation of the NEA visual arts program to State Department-sponsored jazz tours in the mid-twentieth century and religious displays in the twenty-first century. Taken together the essays in The Arts of Democracy pave the way for future study in the complex and interwoven histories of artistic expression values ideology statecraft and democratic aspiration.