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The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of the public interest. The central question is whether the public interest is a usable concept in a time of social and political change. A historical overview of the public interest is provided. Two researchers are highlighted: David John Farmer and O.C. McSwite. The paper concludes by proposing the refusal of subjective identification with the public interest.

Discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis are discussed in this paper. The emphasis in both approaches is to examine ethical challenges in politics and administration through new epistemological lenses. A further use of these research strategies is to identify existing institutional practices and situate administrative decision-making within those practices.

The findings in this paper indicate that while institutional resistance is useful, it can also be co-opted or result in retribution. In both cases, power is asserted and maintained by those who hold institutional power. David John Farmer’s work on anti-administration and O.C. McSwite’s work on administrative refusal are effective strategies to address the abuse of institutional power.

This paper introduces the concept of subjective identification to the literature of public administration. Subjective identification offers administrators a new approach to the ethical dilemmas they face in the workplace.

The question of whether, and to what extent, Chicago price theory is Marshallian is a large one, with many aspects. The theory of individual behavior is one of these, and the treatment of altruism, or, more generally, other-regarding behavior, falls within this domain. This chapter explores the analysis of other-regarding behavior in the work of Alfred Marshall and Gary Becker with a view to drawing out the similarities and differences in their respective approaches. What emerges is sense that we find in Becker’s work important commonalities with Marshall but also significant points of departure and that the line from Marshall to modern Chicago is neither as direct as it is sometimes portrayed, nor as faint as it is sometimes claimed by Chicago critics.

Governance is central to our current understanding of public administration and policy. Mark Bevirʼs work provides governance studies solid epistemological grounding through a social constructionist approach which gives rise to a decentered theory of governance. This article explains decentered theory by examining the entrepreneurial subject as an artifact of neo-liberal governance. In doing so, it explores the key concepts that give shape to decentered theory.

This paper is a response to Gary Marshall, Colin Macleod, and Amit Ronʼs careful discussions of my book, A Theory of Governance. The word “governance” is used in two contexts that might initially appear to have little relation to each other. Governance is used, first, as a general term to discuss abstract theories of coordination and organization. And governance is used, second, to narrate a historic shift in public organization and action. A Theory of Governance offers a decentered theory (part one of the book) that seeks to combine a general analysis of various forms of coordination and organization (part two of the book) with a narrative of recent changes in public organization and action (part three of the book). In this paper, I emphasize that decentered theory turns to historical genealogies to avoid determinism, reification, and foundationalism. Contemporary governance is, therefore, the variegated product of contests over meanings, specifically those reform agendas that have sought to spread markets and networks. I conclude the essay with some reflections on the nature and importance of democratic innovations within governance.

In a longitudinal field study we tested several hypotheses of adaptive structuration theory, which predicts the impacts of advanced information technologies on work teams. We observed 47 technical and administrative work teams in a large, multinational energy company. The teams varied in their structural properties—team size and geographical dispersion—and in their degree of interaction with one another. We tracked the extent to which the teams used advanced information technologies, and we assessed the impacts of technology use practices on teams' views of the quality of their coordination and their overall group effectiveness. The teams in our study had access to a range of traditional and advanced technologies, and we observed the impacts of team structural properties on technology use practices and outcomes across a three-year period. Use practices varied between the two types of teams. We found that, early on introduction of technology, team size, geographic dispersion, and meeting frequency predicted advanced technology use by administrative teams. Larger administrative teams reported more comfort with technology use, and they were more likely to use the technology to dominate one another rather than to collaborate. These effects diminished over time, however, and the influence of team structure and interaction patterns on advanced technology use were not clearcut. Use practices, which we label “appropriation,” impacted perceptions of coordination quality, especially in the case of technical teams. The most consistent pattern was that use of technology to dominate rather than to collaborate was negatively related to outcomes. Surprisingly, teams with relatively high use of advanced technologies grew in their use of the technology for domination purposes over the course of our study. Our findings suggest the need for more in-depth study of technology use practices in teams over time.

THE Conference of the Library Association may be described as one without a press. The greatest dailies had the barest references to it, a fact which is surprising and lends us matter for reflection. If an admittedly national service, almost universal in application, can be completely ignored in its annual gatherings, what is to be thought? Is it that libraries are now so normal a part of the social landscape that they may be taken for granted? Are they so insignificant that they do not merit notice? Alternatively, were our proceedings too dull for the dramatic necessities of the reporter? Or, finally, was it because the general publicity of the L.A. is not aggressive, is indeed inert? These questions every librarian and library authority may ask and have a right to the answer.

The authors address how a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing --- adaptive data management systems that monitor, analyze, make decisions and learn -- will transform businesses, work and customer offerings.

A survey of 6,050 C-suite executives worldwide identified a small group of cognitive innovators and revealed what they are doing differently.

Cognitive innovators identify customer satisfaction, retention, acquisition and revenue growth as the primary rationale for embracing cognitive technologies.

Cognitive computing systems are already helping make sense of the deluge of data spawned by ordinary commerce because they are able to adapt and learn.

The authors offer a four-step approach to cognitive computing innovation based on their research findings.