Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Relationship Between Bureaucracy And Developments In Management Accounting, 1700-2023: An Overview, Helena Costa Oliveira, Russell Craig, Lúcia Lima Rodrigues

Jurnal Akuntansi dan Keuangan Indonesia

Bureaucracy has co-existed with forms of management accounting [MA] from the time of ancient civilizations. In this paper, we review literature in a wide variety of scholarly journals and books to provide an overview of this co-existence. We trace the historical evolution of MA and how it was influenced by bureaucracy from 1700 to the present. We do so through four time periods, designated classical, modern, post-modern and contemporary. For each of these periods, evolving understandings of bureaucracy were linked to changes in the practice and conceptualization of MA. In the classical period (1700 – 1950), developments in MA corresponded …

Direct Election, Bureaucratic Appointment, And Local Government Responsiveness In Taiwan, Sara A. Newland

Government: Faculty Publications

Does local democracy induce better service to citizens? While elected officials can be punished at the ballot box if they fail to address citizens’ needs, appointed bureaucrats may have policy knowledge that enables them to better serve citizens. Employing a multimethod design, this paper uses variation in local political institutions in Taiwan to assess the relative merits of direct election and bureaucratic appointment for local government responsiveness. While democratic institutions are often thought to induce responsiveness, I find that in Taiwan, with its historically strong bureaucracy and relatively new democratic institutions, the picture is somewhat more complicated. Elected and appointed …

Bringing “Behavioral” Fully Into Behavioral Public Administration, D. Banko-Ferran, L. Bengali, Syon Bhanot

Economics Faculty Works

Behavioral economics is an increasingly influential field across the social sciences, including public administration. But while some behavioral economics ideas have spread rapidly in public administration research, we argue that a broader range of behavioral economics concepts can and should be applied. We begin by outlining some central models and concepts from behavioral economics to fix ideas, including the rational model and the “behavioral” response. We then discuss how a variety of heretofore underutilized behavioral economics concepts can be applied to a specific area of work in public administration – bureaucratic decision making. Our aim in doing so is two-fold. …

The Effect Of Bureaucracy On The Inflow Of Foreign Direct Investment: A Comparative Study Of Libya And The United Arab Emirates, Abdurraouf Abdussalam Elakder

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) is a determinant factor for developing national economies, and Libya is no exception. However, the bureaucracy in Libya still needs to be improved to help attract foreign direct investment. Therefore, this comparative case study seeks to analyze the effects of bureaucracy on attracting FDI to Libya and the United Arab Emirates, highlighting the bureaucratic barriers embodied mainly in bureaucratic expansion, bureaucratic corruption, and the obstacles of the FDI laws. I argue in favor of eliminating those bureaucratic barriers and improving bureaucratic quality, enhancing the chances of attracting and keeping FDI. The study's standpoint is that …

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

The Politics Of Institutional Reform: Vulnerability And Bureaucratic Independence In Asian Agriculture, Jacob Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Although effective bureaucracies are seen as key for service provision in developing states, we still have limited explanations for their emergence. I argue getting these institutions right is a political, rather than technical, challenge based on a set of theoretical predictions for reform outcomes acknowledging the interaction between a state’s political vulnerability and degree of bureaucratic independence. I apply these predictions to a controlled comparison of irrigation sector reforms in three Asian countries. The results demonstrate that the success of institutional reforms necessary to implement policies is contingent on both the degree of vulnerability experienced as well as the extent …

Insistence: The Active Quest Of Citizens For Achieving Their Health And Justice Rights In Mexico, Julia Hernández-Gutiérrez

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In Mexico’s public healthcare and justice institutions, where insufficient infrastructure, unnecessary, confusing procedures, and mistreatment are common obstacles to fundamental rights, insistence can be interpreted as an indicator of a citizen’s active quest to ensure their rights are respected. Even if citizen dependence on the State is reinforced on a daily basis within some public institutions, service users are not inactive patients or victims waiting for their turn, but rather are active agents claiming their rights, because access to healthcare and justice cannot be achieved in Mexico without the ability to cope with bureaucratic barriers and the despotic attitude of …

Legal Aid Amid Bureaucracy, Amanda Reinke, Nicole Bevilacqua

Faculty and Research Publications

Disaster lawyers navigate bureaucratic impediments to insuranceclaims and settlement and federal recovery and relief, and they actas third-party facilitators for disaster-affected clients to help enable theirsurvival efforts. The roles of such lawyers in navigating paperwork andbureaucratic processes on behalf of survivors, while assisting them inmeeting basic daily needs, has become seen as being integral to recoveryin these processes. We utilise findings from semi-structured interviewswith disaster law practitioners working with disaster survivors in thesouth-eastern United States (SEUS) to examine the bureaucratic socio-legallife of disasters. We marshal bureaucratic violence literature to analysedisaster law practitioners’ perspectives of the socio-legal nature ofdisasters in the …

Decentralized Perfectionism: A Critique Of Contractarianism And Bureaucracy Through The Inspiration Of Nietzsche, Felix George Newton Johnson

Senior Projects Spring 2022

The goal of this project is to articulate a critique of contractarianism and it links to the modern system of bureaucracy through a commitment to individual valuation and pluralism. This work illustrates the core of both contractarianism and bureaucracy as security and through this identification demonstrates the inability to consider social, political, and economic alternatives. This critique is based on the contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls, both demonstrating the deep contractarian need for security. This is extended further into a modern critique of bureaucracy as an extension of the contractarian framework, a system dependent on limiting conceptions of …

Documenting The Undocumented: Experimenting Europe At The Biometric Migrant Archive, Romm Lewkowicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation is a critical ethnography of the biometric governance of asylum seekers and illegal migrants in the European Union, an integral apparatus for the policing of border-free Europe. Interrogating the paradox of how ‘undocumented migrants’ have been—and are—the most documented subjects in Europe today, the research explores how this documentation assumes the form of biometric technology and its relation to the postwar eradication of Europe’s internal frontiers. At the center of these processes and my research object is Eurodac: a pan-European apparatus for the biometric documentation and regulation of Europe’s paperless migrants and asylum seekers. By attending to both …

Centropoly: The Structure Of Educational Failures In The U.S., Martha Bradley-Dorsey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How did a country birthed in individual liberty and voluntary associations create just the opposite in its inflexible, layered, government-controlled public education system? Here, using public choice theory, I explain how near-sighted and unrelated reforms, often based in private motives, gave us what I call the public education centropoly – a hybrid government organization consisting of a set of monopolies layered beneath two additional government levels that especially fails disadvantaged students.

After defending the use of public choice theory (Chapter 1) and summarizing the U.S. public education system formation (Chapter 2), in Chapter 3 I examine the Elementary and Secondary …

Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout: A True Test Of The Bureaucracy, Laila El Baradei

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Latino Inequity In The Illinois State Government: An Analysis Through The Polarities Of Democracy, Rebecca Sanchez

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractHispanics in Illinois make up 17.5 % of the population yet are disproportionately represented in state government, composing only 6.5 % of the workforce. Unequal representation deprives ethnic and underserved groups of participating in program and policy decisions that provide communities opportunities. Hispanic leaders have expressed their concerns and dissatisfaction to state legislators and actively requested equity in the state’s workforce. However, there were no studies that examined the perceptions of Hispanic community leaders in Illinois regarding solutions to address this disparity. To address this gap, a qualitative study using Benet’s polarities of democracy as the theoretical framework was conducted. …

“Insurance Doesn’T Care About The Patient”: An Institutional Ethnography Of The Influence Of Professional Autonomy On The Provision Care For Medicaid Dental Patients With Disabilities, Stephanie Lau

Theses and Dissertations

In terms of unmet needs for people with disabilities (PWD), dental care is number three behind residential care and employment (Fisher, 2012). Regardless of disability, oral healthcare traverses all disability diagnoses and can be a significant factor in quality of life (Deckler, 2011; Griffin et al., 2007; Norwood & Slayton, 2013). When attempting to secure oral healthcare, people with disabilities face many challenges, including lack of access, lack of provider education on proper care of PWD, and difficulty finding a willing dental provider (Deckler, 2011; Fisher, 2012; Kennedy, 2009).

The purpose of this study was to investigate professional practices and …

Navigating The 'Bureaucratic Beast' In North Carolina Hurricane Recovery, Amanda Reinke

Faculty and Research Publications

No abstract provided.

All The President’S Men? Politicization And Executive Control Over The Rulemaking Process, Josh Goldberg

Honors Theses

In the age of the administrative state, the battle over who controls the federal bureaucracy and the rulemaking process decides much of the direction of American public policy. The president has emerged from this milieu as the strongest political actor in the administrative state because of their ability to leverage political appointees and the centralized EOP to protect their agenda from entrepreneurial bureaucrats and a rivalrous Congress. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of political appointees as a tool of presidential control outside of case studies of individual agencies in the large federal bureaucracy. Using data from the Office …

Hsu Communicative Practices: Administration Must Include The Student Voice, Q Medina

Communication Senior Capstones

This paper examines the impact of communication practices of university administration (openness and inclusion) on the student body’s sense of satisfaction, value, and connectedness by focusing on a selected collection of past moments of communication from administration to students. A total of five current instances where official emails were sent out addressing a handful of the biggest impactful events at the university and the following reactions from the overall student body was used as the qualitative data to analyze the effectiveness of such communication choices. Results of the observations confirmed that the current practices of the university administration were no …

The Impact Of Bureaucracy, Power, And Structure On The Black Graduate Student Experience, Demetria Scherell Green

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis utilizes muted group theory to understand the impact bureaucratic structure has on Black graduate students at predominantly white institutions. Muted group theory is used to inform individuals of the impact power functions have on both verbal and nonverbal communication. The premises of the theory focus on the lack of underrepresented voices present in policies, structures, and organizations. In order to gain clarity on the experiences of Black graduate students in particular, the use of qualitative data gathering provided unique insights to answer the research questions guiding this study. A focus group was first used to generate key themes, …

Reform And Democratization In Ukraine: My Service As A Peace Corps Volunteer With An Ukrainian Local Government Organization, Danielle Stevens

Capstone Projects – Politics and Government

This paper provides a micro-analysis of democratization and reform in an Ukrainian local government institution that was the site placement for the author's Peace Corps service. Through using a culturalist lens and applying open systems theory while working as a Peace Corps Volunteer, the researcher observed how one organization coped with implementing public administration reform that is the result of the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014. This paper contributes to existing research regarding reform efficacy in other post-Soviet spaces, and provides a foundation for furthering similar research in Ukraine.

The Principles Of Organizational Inaction, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Organization inaction and the absence of change are seriously understudied topics. This article (a spoof) reports on a research problem that identifies and studies four principles of organizational inaction: The time, subject matter, group size and controversy theorems together and separately explain a great deal of committee and organizational inaction. The article also introduces innovative techniques of invariant statistics and mystery sampling. The article is an extensive rewrite of a 'research report' that originally appeared in a peer-reviewed administrative humor journal, The Bureaucrat, in 1979.

The Semi-Autonomous Administrative State, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Conflicting views about presidential control of the administrative state have too long been characterized in terms of a debate over agency independence. But the term “independent” when used to describe administrative agencies carries with it the baggage of an unhelpful and unrealistic dichotomy: administrative agencies that are (or should be) subservient to presidential control versus those that are (or should be) entirely free from such influence. No agency fits into either category. This essay proposes reorienting the debate over presidential control around agency “autonomy,” which better conveys that the key issue is a matter of degree. Contrary to some proponents …

Bureaucracy, Civil Society And Ideology In Latin America, Grazielli Faria Zimmer Santos, Paula Chies Schommer

Gobernar: The Journal of Latin American Public Policy and Governance

This essay analyzes how political and ideological changes affect public bureaucracy and its relationship with civil society regarding different strategies of openness to participation. We suggest a theoretical-conceptual framework to discuss aspects of the political situation in Latin America. First, we discuss the changes that occurred over time, in the state-civil society relationship, which strengthen the latter and amplify a discourse for more participatory democracy. The focus is the role of the public bureaucracy in mediating the relations among the several actors in society, and we examine the way different political and ideological strands influence how open to participation the …

Nurturing Faculty Buy-In For Top-Down Mandates, Emily K. Faulconer

Publications

Higher education is a bureaucracy. As such, colleges and universities require strong leaders but they also must have committed faculty members. Shared governance and transparency - arguably empty buzz words – have definitions that will vary based on who you ask. Despite the minefield, these terms are relevant when discussing change within academia.

The Impact Of Contextual Political Factors On Personnel, Rulemaking, And Partisanship, Emily Moore

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The context in which an institution operates structures the way political actors respond to it. Broadly, this dissertation explores these contextual variables. The first chapter provides an overview of the arguments I will make in the dissertation and the results I find. The second chapter considers political context as it relates to excepted political appointees. I argue that presidents utilize Schedule C appointees more frequently in ideologically proximate agencies and when ideological conflict in the Senate is high. I show some evidence for these arguments using an original OPM dataset on Schedule C appointees from 1998 through 2013. The third …

Who Gets “Saved?” : Making Sense Of Racially Disparate Disciplinary Practices In Urban School Systems., Kala Brown

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

The “racial discipline gap” describes the phenomenon in which black and brown youth disproportionately face exclusionary punishments in schools for instances of misbehavior. Despite the declining trends in youth violence, decades of research still show that this process ultimately leads to minority youth being processed through the courts for mostly non-violent offenses as part of the school-to-prison pipeline. This paper examines minority youth perspectives on disciplinary practices in secondary schools as responses to, and embedded within, bureaucratic practices in school disciplinary systems. Using a review of qualitative research studies and labeling theory as the primary framework for this investigation, I …

Managing Judges Mathematically: An Empirical Study Of The Medical Malpractice Litigations In Shanghai, Wei Zhang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The post-Mao China has been increasingly managed mathematically, not the least in its judicial system. In this paper, I looked into some of the mathematical indicators used to judge the performance of judges in this nation, and ascertained their effects on the judicial decisions on medical malpractices in Shanghai. The findings of this paper support the previous study that qualitatively identified the judicial responses to such a quantified evaluation system. Underlying the effect of performance indicators is the Chinese judiciary’s bending toward populist pressure. Essentially, therefore, this paper serves to place in perspective the judicial populism well documented in the …

Call And Response: The Effect Of Terrorist Incidents On The Way Nations Fight Terrorism, Hannah Engber

International Relations Summer Fellows

This paper compares the ways in which countries that have suffered from terrorist actions combat terrorism. Specifically, I compare counterterrorism policies in the United States and Spain before and after two of the most severe acts of foreign terrorism, the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 and the attacks in Spain on March 11, 2004. These comparisons are made in two counterterrorism policy aspects: Bureaucracy and Institutions, as well as Foreign Relations and Military Intervention. Each of these sections shows both convergent and divergent choices made by the Spanish and American governments. In terms of bureaucratic institutions, …

The Maternity Ward As Mirror: Maternal Death, Biobureaucracy, And Institutional Care In The Tanzanian Health Sector, Adrienne Elizabeth Strong

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As public health policies continue to encourage women to give birth in biomedical care facilities, this research provides insight into the sequences of events leading to deaths in these settings from the unique perspective of the healthcare providers and administrators themselves, in addition to that of women and their communities. While the term maternal mortality implies biological processes and clinical practices, this dissertation focused on sequences of events at the hospital, and on historical, institutional, and political economic structures that shaped maternal risk in this region through 23 months of mixed-methods, ethnographic fieldwork in the Rukwa region of Tanzania and …

Street-Level Bureaucrats And Irrigation Policy Reform In Southeast Asia, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Policy reforms are difficult for developing states, especially when they are meant to improve cooperation and collaboration between private citizens and state officials, such as in the case of education, health care provision, business-state relations, and policing. A large part of this challenge is that the policy reforms required for coproduction of services necessitate development of state capacity in new directions. Using the substantive issue of irrigation reforms, especially those aimed at improving service provision and farmer participation, I identify three lessons for reformers regarding the implementation of policy for the coproduction of services. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Thailand …

The Collateral Effects Of Representation : Three Essays Evaluating Representative Bureaucracy In Practice, Ashley Miller Alteri

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation evaluates representative bureaucracy, a public management theory that has been embraced by public management scholars and implicitly embraced by practitioners through the use of diversity hiring initiatives. The theory of representative bureaucracy posits that a bureaucracy will function better if the administrative arm of government, in addition to its political one, is representative of the public. This representativeness is achieved if the bureaucrat shares a common identity with the group or groups they are meant to represent. The three papers within this dissertation provide an analysis of how this theory translates into practice. Specifically, these papers examine the …