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The purpose of this paper is to determine the overarching lessons to be gleaned from 30 years of public management literature.

The methodology was simple: review the professional literature generated during that time period.

Despite important contributions to our understanding of everything from bureaucratic motivation, public budgeting processes, the promises and pitfalls of contracting out and identification of the skills needed to be an effective public manager, to the scientific arcana of sustainability and the respective responsibilities of public administrators and elected officials, the profession would benefit greatly from more sustained emphasis upon the history and philosophy of the constitutional choices made by those who framed America’s original approach to governance.

The lack of a common understanding of America’s legal culture, or even a common vocabulary for exploring our differences poses immense challenges to public administrators, whose effectiveness requires a widely shared, if necessarily superficial, agreement on the purposes of America’s governing institutions and an ability to recognize the bases of government legitimacy. In the past 30 years, however, literature that addresses the important connections between constitutional theory and management practice, between the rule of law and the exercise of public power and discretion, has been all too rare. Let us hope that the next 30 years corrects that deficiency.

Ever since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, employers have complained that nondiscrimination laws constitute an additional regulatory burden on business, while civil rights advocates have argued that compliance requires nothing more than the sorts of sound personnel practices that successful businesses have long found to be effective management tools. While most Americans clearly agree that people ought not be subjected to invidious employment discrimination based on race, religion, or other criteria unrelated to job performance, current laws do not necessarily represent the best approach to that problem. We argue that the “group identity” approach to workplace equity embedded in traditional civil rights statutes has retarded, rather than promoted, the adoption of sound and valid personnel assessment tools, and that attempts by U.S. business to reconcile the mandates of current civil rights law with fair and effective corporate human resource practices represent a heroic but fundamentally flawed effort. In this paper, we outline an alternative model based upon worker productivity which we believe to be legally defensible and practically superior to current regulatory approaches to evaluating and attaining fairness in the workplace.

Lawyers and political scientists focus upon explicitly religious components of American political polarization. A robust scholarship illuminates the nation's religious history. Nevertheless, we fail to appreciate the extent to which conflicting policy preferences are rooted in religiously shaped normative frameworks, or the extent to which scholarship in religious history, sociology, social psychology and culture might be synthesized to inform our understanding of contemporary policy disputes. Like the blind men and the elephant, we encounter different parts of the animal. We see a tree, a wall, a snake – but we fail to apprehend the size, shape and power of the whole elephant.