Nonprofit social enterprises (NSEs) seek to address societal problems through for-profit ventures. Because they pursue social and commercial goals, these organizations have great potential to solve social and environmental issues more efficiently and effectively. Given their unique purpose and challenges, NSEs require a different type of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate how town-gown relationships (partnerships between public administrators and colleges/universities) contribute to civic engagement, specifically examining the linkage between public administrators and higher education institutions in Los Angeles County. Theoretical Framework: The theoretical…

This qualitative case study focuses on the concept of systems thinking, which is a component of Peter Senge's theory on learning organizations. Systems thinking is a concept and tool that assists organizations in understanding the growing complexities in their organization and in the world. The purpose of this case study is to gain a better…

Discretion is ubiquitous in both public and business administration. Public programs, laws, regulations, and rules cannot be self-implemented, and their implementation usually involves the exercise of discretion. Research on discretion in public administration, to date, has focused predominantly on normative considerations, particularly, the…

In this dissertation, I present an examination of the economics of education through three chapters. In the first paper, I study the overrepresentation of elite university graduates in senior positions in public administration. Using rich administrative data from Chile, I employ a stacked fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate the…

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze, from a Public Administration (PA) perspective, the provision of public education using the portfolio model, in which a school district employs autonomy-accountability tradeoffs to oversee a collection of schools operating under a variety of governance structures. The study relies on the New Public…

Many unemployed or underemployed workers find it difficult to attain wages that support them and their families. Due to a skills gap, a program evaluation was conducted using a qualitative case study methodology and was intended to determine the efficacy of a workforce training and education program in Maryland. The study was designed to gain…

The purpose of this historical/descriptive study was to determine the status of lottery revenue generation and allocations to education across the United States that had lotteries. More specifically, the study profiled the number of states which used lottery revenue for education during the year 2004, the types of these lotteries, levels of…

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine information systems-enabled interorganizational collaborations called public safety networks--their proliferation, information systems architecture, and technology evolution. These networks face immense pressures from member organizations, external stakeholders, and environmental contingencies. This…

This study sought to broaden the understanding of the role that academic professions play in shaping the values and attitudes of faculty toward CES. This study explored faculty perceptions regarding the factors that encourage or dissuade them in the pursuit of CES within public administration programs. As a framework for research, a conceptual…

"End-to-End (E2E)" voting systems provide cryptographic proof that the voter's intention is captured, cast, and tallied correctly. While E2E systems guarantee integrity independent of software, most E2E systems rely on software to provide confidentiality, availability, authentication, and access control; thus, end-to-end integrity is not…

This study has two main areas: first, the study evaluates whether the ethical leadership style of a direct supervisor has an impact on the police officers' perception of the integrity violations; second, the study scrutinizes whether police officers' moral judgment of integrity violations makes a difference in the amount of such violations. The…

In this dissertation, I study the performance impact of information technology (IT) investments in the public sector. IT has been one of the key assets in public administration since the early MIS era. Even though the information systems (IS) discipline has witnessed a considerable amount of research efforts on the subject of IT business value for…

The problem with the study of the concept of electronic government (e-Gov) is that scholars in the field have not adequately explored various dimensions of the concept. Literature on e-Gov is replete with works on the form of government to consumer e-Gov. Much less work had been done on the government to government (G2G) e-Gov. This qualitative…

This dissertation examined the performance outcomes of public management networks (PMNs) in the disaster management context. The effectiveness of three disaster response sub-networks in the area of evacuation were examined and compared using the case of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Louisiana in August 2005: Citizen Protection:…