This book argues that we can find the resources to build a public perspective if we make two commitments: to respect people as autonomous agents and to endorse a shared ethics of beliefs.

Throughout its history, public administration has used a number of different perspectives for analyzing the discipline's theory and practice, and both mainstream and alternative lenses have produced valuable insights and prescriptions. At the same time, an individual way of looking at PA can be misleading. Alone, a solitary lens can miss critical aspects and often gives only part of the picture. Public Administration in Perspective has been specifically crafted to give new life to public administration theory and practice by helping readers view the discipline through a variety of perspectives. Designed for the capstone course in public administration programs, as well as a fresh approach for courses in PA theory and organizational theory, this unique book provides a culminating experience--bringing together what has been learned in previous MPA courses without simply rehashing old content. It offers a comprehensive guide to eleven major approaches to PA, and synthesizes them to deepen our understanding of the discipline. Each chapter in Part I describes the key features of the selected perspective--history, content, and proponents--and discusses the strengths and weaknesses related to PA theory and practice. Part II synthesizes the various perpectives, with specific implications for PA management and practice. Part III concludes with a complete overview, identifying ways in which readers can think more creatively and productively about PA, putting the perspectives themselves into perspective.

Most public administration texts overly compartmentalize the subject and don't interconnect the various specializations within government, which leaves a serious gap in preparing students for public service. Government: A Public Administration Perspective is designed to fill that void. It provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary view of government that includes perspectives from political science, political theory, international relations, organizational sociology, economics, and history. The text draws on classic and modern literature from all these areas to analyze government at four different levels - ideational, societal, organizational, and individual layers. It links public administration's various subfields - human resource management, budgeting, policy making, organizational theory, etc. - into a holistic framework for the study of government. It also includes an extensive bibliography drawing from American and European literature in support of the book's global, historical, and comparative approach.

To succeed in foreign policy, U.S. presidents have to sell their versions or framings of political events to the news media and to the public. But since the end of the Cold War, journalists have increasingly resisted presidential views, even offering their own spin on events. What, then, determines whether the media will accept or reject the White House perspective? And what consequences does this new media environment have for policymaking and public opinion? To answer these questions, Robert M. Entman develops a powerful new model of how media framing works—a model that allows him to explain why the media cheered American victories over small-time dictators in Grenada and Panama but barely noticed the success of far more difficult missions in Haiti and Kosovo. Discussing the practical implications of his model, Entman also suggests ways to more effectively encourage the exchange of ideas between the government and the media and between the media and the public. His book will be an essential guide for political scientists, students of the media, and anyone interested in the increasingly influential role of the media in foreign policy.

Public relations practitioners are often called upon to help chart their organization's strategic development, thus functioning as managerial decision makers linking the organization to its larger environment. This book is about understanding organizations, especially the role played by organizational decision making in the development and implementation of public relations programs and activities. It emphasizes the ways in which an organization's culture and decision making processes ultimately influence the success or failure of their public relations efforts. The research, case studies, and author's interpretations and suggestions explore the often confusing netherworld of organizational mindsets -- particularly as those world views affect the organization's relations with clients and other stakeholders. Understanding organizational politics is the way to understanding how and why decisions are made by the organization's dominant coalition. The primary goal of this text is to enhance our understanding of the ways in which organizations "work" -- the political process that accompanies organizational decision making. As an instrumental participant in the organizational political process, the public relations practitioner must posess knowledge and understanding of the organization's political process in order to succeed within that organization. Given the need for public relations practitioners to form coalitions, negotiate consensus, and advocate organizational interests, the political system metaphor is most approriate for understanding the relationship between organizational power and organizational public relations. This book, then, "steps back" from a focus solely on the design of public relations programs, and instead examines how the impetus for those programs emerges within the organization as a result of organizational politics in action. Its special features include: * practitioner responses at the end of each chapter providing commentary on the usefulness of the ideas presented; * sidebars from popular sources illustrating theories; * new case studies; * merging of management and organizational theory and research with communication theory and research; * a focus on external stakeholders from both an advocacy and a collaborative frame resulting in the creation of a "collaborative advocacy" framework for external communication; and * an extended examination of ethical considerations pertaining to organizational decision making and communication.

This volume presents a global view of the current themes in public relations research. It contains comparative studies of public relations practice in different countries and explores issues such as the relationship between PR and journalism, and the history of PR and journalism.

Sound HRM practices matter—they are a sine qua non of effective governance in democratic government—equally so at the local, regional, state and national levels of government. The NASPAA (Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration) accreditation standards demand critical competencies for public managers that are vital to human resource managers and supervisors at all levels. These competencies include: skills to lead and manage in public governance; to participate in and contribute to the policy process; to analyze, synthesize, think critically, solve problems and make decisions; to articulate and apply a public service perspective; and to communicate and interact productively with a diverse and changing workforce and citizenry. This second edition of Human Resource Management is designed specifically with these competencies in mind to: Introduce and explore the fundamental purposes of human resource management in the public service and consider the techniques used to accomplish these purposes Provide exercises to give students practice for their skills after being introduced to the theory, foundation, and practices of public and nonprofit sector HRM Facilitate instruction of the material by introducing important topics and issues with readings drawn from the professional literature Provide information and examples demonstrating the interrelatedness of many of the topics in public sector HRM and the trends shaping public and nonprofit management, especially diversity, ethics, and technology. Demonstrate and describe differences among HRM practices in public, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and between the levels of government. Human Resource Management is organized to provide a thorough discussion of the subject matter with extensive references to relevant literature and useful teaching tools. Thus, students will consider the issues, purposes, and techniques of HRM and conceptualize how varied their roles are, or will be, whether a personnel specialist in a centralized system or a supervisor managing in one of the increasingly common decentralized systems. Each chapter includes a thorough review of the principles and practices of HRM (including the why and the how), selected readings, important themes, diverse examples, key terms, study questions, applied exercises, case studies, and examples of forms and processes would-be managers will encounter in their roles.

What is public opinion? How can we best study it? This work presents a "process model" that answers these questions by defining public opinion in a way that also identifies an approach to studying it. The model serves as a framework into which the findings of empirical research are integrated, producing a comprehensive understanding of public opinion that encompasses the congeries of middle-range theories that have emerged from empirical research. The three-dimensional process model--and the way it is explicated--satisfies the diverse and sometimes divergent needs and interests of political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, and communication specialists who study public opinion. This is achieved by clearly differentiating and interrelating the following: * individual opinions--the judgmental outcomes of a process in which attitudinal systems--comprised of beliefs, values/interests, and feelings--function as intervening variables that direct and structure perceptions of public issues; * collective opinions--the outcomes of communication from which mutual awareness emerges and that integrate separate individual opinions into a significant social force; and * political roles of collective and individual opinions--the outcomes of the extent to which collective and individual opinions have achieved legitimacy as the basis for governing a people. DON'T USE THIS PARAGRAPH FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... Each dimension of the model has its corresponding subprocess: transactions between individuals and their environments, communications among individuals and collectives, and political legitimation of public opinion. Since the process model is -- by definition -- interactional, none of the three dimensions has theoretical or sequential priority over the others. Instead of treating the psychological, political, and sociological aspects of public opinion as separate stages of an unidirectional process, the three aspects are modeled as dimensions of a complex, ongoing system in continuous interaction with each other. This conceptualization satisfies the need for a truly interdisciplinary theory in that it demands that each dimension be studied in terms of its defining sub-process. It also avoids the twin errors of reductionism and reification in the study of public opinion.

If historical culture is the specific and particular ways that a society engages with its past, this book aims to situate the professional practice of public history, now emerging across the world, within that framework. It links the increasingly varied practices of memory and history-making such as genealogy, podcasting, re-enactment, family histories, memoir writing, film-making and facebook histories with the work that professional historians do, both in and out of the academy. Making Histories asks questions about the role of the expert and notions of authority within a landscape that is increasingly concerned with connection to the past and authenticity. The book is divided into four parts: 1. Resistance, Rights, Authority 2. Memory, Memorialization, Commemoration 3. Performance, Transmission, Reception 4. Family, Private, Self The four sections outline major themes emerging in public history across the world in the 21st century which are all underpinned by the impact of new media on historical practice and our central argument for the volume which advocates a more capacious definition of what constitutes ‘public history‘.