Refounding Public Administration (1990) is a noted text in the public administration field that formulated a multi-faceted argument that government is properly an agential and active servant of the public good. It is among a very few books that have been pivotal in defining public administration as a distinct field from political science with its own theory and raison d'etre. Other works in this genre include Dwight Waldo's The Administrative State and Frederick C. Mosher's Democracy and the Public Service . The work was edited by Gary Wamsley, who contributed a classic essay on bureaucratic agency, and also includes works by Charles Goodsell, John Rohr, Camilla Stivers, Orion White, Philip Kronenberg, James Wolf and others.
A follow-on volume called Refounding Democratic Public Administration was edited by Wamsley and Wolf. These works have strongly influenced the development of the Center for Public Administration and Policy as a center of public administration research.
A community is a social unit with a shared socially significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable good relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, TV network, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.
Communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about and analyzing key events, processes, and commitments that together form communication. Theory can be seen as a way to map the world and make it navigable; communication theory gives us tools to answer empirical, conceptual, or practical communication questions.
A case study is an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case within a real-world context. For example, case studies in medicine may focus on an individual patient or ailment; case studies in business might cover a particular firm's strategy or a broader market; similarly, case studies in politics can range from a narrow happening over time like the operations of a specific political campaign, to an enormous undertaking like world war, or more often the policy analysis of real-world problems affecting multiple stakeholders.
Rudolph Joseph Rummel was an American political scientist, a statistician and professor at Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Contrasting genocide, Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government, such as the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or undemocratic regimes, coming to the conclusion that democratic regimes result in the least democides.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Public administration, or public policy and administration refers to "the management of public programs", or the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day", and also to the academic discipline which studies how public policy is created and implemented.
In the field of sociology, cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person that promote social mobility in a stratified society. Cultural capital functions as a social relation within an economy of practices, and includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers social status and power; thus cultural capital comprises the material and symbolic goods, without distinction, that society considers rare and worth seeking. There are three types of cultural capital: (i) embodied capital, (ii) objectified capital, and (iii) institutionalised capital.
Media economics embodies economic theoretical and practical economic questions specific to media of all types. Of particular concern to media economics are the economic policies and practices of media companies and disciplines including journalism and the news industry, film production, entertainment programs, print, broadcast, mobile communications, Internet, advertising and public relations. Deregulation of media, media ownership and concentration, market share, intellectual property rights, competitive economic strategies, company economics, "media tax" and other issues are considered parts of the field. Media economics has social, cultural, and economic implications. Regular study of media economic issues began in the 1970s but flourished in the 1980s with the addition of classes on the subject at U.S. and European universities. The Journal of Media Economics began publishing in 1988, edited by Robert G. Picard, one of the founding fathers of the discipline. Since that time the field of inquiry has flourished and there are now hundreds of universities offering courses and programs in media economics. Other significant figures in the field have included Steven S. Wildman, Alan Albarran, Bruce M. Owen, Ben Compaine, Ghislain Deslandes, Stuart McFadyen, Gillian Doyle, Karl Erik Gustafsson, Lucy Küng, Gregory Ferrell Lowe, Nadine Toussaint Desmoulins, Achour Fenni, Amanda D. Lotz, and Stephen Lacy.
Men's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning men, masculinity, gender, culture, politics and sexuality. It academically examines what it means to be a man in contemporary society.
Left realism emerged in criminology from critical criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the left's failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, allowing right realism to monopolize the political agenda on law and order. Left realism argues that crime disproportionately affects working-class people, but that solutions that only increase repression serve to make the crime problem worse. Instead they argue that the root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation, although preventive measures and policing are necessary, but these should be democratically controlled.
Charles True Goodsell is Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration and Policy. He is perhaps best known for his volume The Case for Bureaucracy, now in its 4th edition.
Gary L. Wamsley is public administration specialist and professor emeritus at Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration and Policy. He is perhaps best known as the coordinating editor of Refounding Public Administration, a work that followed from a well-known public administration paper called the Blacksburg Manifesto. He has also for many years edited the journal Administration & Society.
Clifford Dwight Waldo was an American political scientist and is perhaps the defining figure in modern public administration. Waldo's career was often directed against a scientific/technical portrayal of bureaucracy and government that now suggests the term public management as opposed to public administration. Waldo is recognized the world over for his contributions to the theory of bureaucratic government.
Budget theory is the academic study of political and social motivations behind government and civil society budgeting. Classic theorists in Public Budgeting include Henry Adams, William F. Willoughby, V. O. Key, Jr., and, more recently, Aaron Wildavsky. Notable recent theorists include Frank R. Baumgartner, Bryan D. Jones, Richard Fenno, Allen Schick, Dennis Ippolito, Naomi Caiden, Irene Rubin, James D. Savage, Thomas Greitens, Gary Wamsley, and Usman W. Chohan. Budget theory was a central topic during the Progressive Era and was much discussed in municipal bureaus and other academic and quasi-academic facilities of that time such as the nascent Brookings Institution.
Complexity theory and organizations, also called complexity strategy or complex adaptive organizations, is the use of the study of complexity systems in the field of strategic management and organizational studies. It draws from research in the natural sciences that examines uncertainty and non-linearity. Complexity theory emphasizes interactions and the accompanying feedback loops that constantly change systems. While it proposes that systems are unpredictable, they are also constrained by order-generating rules.
Timothy W. Luke is university distinguished professor of political science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences as well as program chair of the Government and International Affairs Program, School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Vincent Alfred Ostrom was an American political economist and the Founding Director of the Ostrom Workshop based at Indiana University and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of Political Science. He and his wife, the political economist Elinor Ostrom, made numerous contributions to the field of political science, political economy, and public choice.
Göran Ola Tunander is a research professor emeritus at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He worked as a researcher at PRIO in the period 1987-2016. He is the son of Museum Director Ingemar Tunander and his first wife Gunvor. Tunander is married to the Chinese scholar Yao Xiaoling. He has written and edited 12 books and a number of articles on security politics, naval strategy, submarine operations, geopolitics, dual state, psychological operations (PSYOP) and Cold War history.
David John Farmer is a professor emeritus of philosophy and public affairs in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is best known for his publications on post-traditional governance theory and practice – especially on macro public administration and public policy. He has also published on the philosophy and foundations of economics, on the metaphysics of time and on criminal justice policy and management. Post-traditional conceptual approaches analyzed in his writings include thinking as play, justice as seeking, practice as art, reflexive language, imaginization, anti-administration, deterritorialization, and epistemic pluralism.
Jerry L. Mashaw is an American lawyer, currently the Sterling Professor Emeritus and professorial lecturer of law at Yale University, and also a published author. He is a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mashaw is a Marshall Scholar. He teaches courses in administrative law, legislation, social welfare policy and law, and regulation.