Death is all around, yet more research is needed to understand it is a critical public management function especially at the local level of government. Medical examiners and coroners are public servants guided by science and jurisdictional rules, yet get caught in a swirl of empathy, politics, and resource constraints when acting as citizen-state agents. Using interview data with 18 medical examiners, coroners, and deathcare leaders throughout the US, this article finds that: ethical leadership guides decision making; neutral competence and professional standards are used yet sometimes challenged; and personal conduct in the face of internal and external pressure remains key to accountability. Findings are not meant to generalize but rather give insight into public servants dealing with socially and politically challenging topics and how they exercise decision-making abilities within these situations.
In many front-line professions, especially those in law enforcement, the people-centered nature of the job and work relationships are essential considerations for understanding organizational effectiveness. The relationships among citizens, constituents, or other service recipients and the state are particularly critical to shaping the outcomes of important public policies. This article explores the impact of the relational nature of work in policing on job-related attitudes of satisfaction and organizational commitment, both of which are related to individual performance and organizational outcomes. This study uses data from a web-based survey of sworn law enforcement officials across the United States on perspectives of roles and work. Findings here indicate that community relationships, transformational leadership, coworker trust, and public service motivation are positively related to both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are discussed, followed by concluding comments on the future of policing.
On President Biden’s first day in office, he issued Executive Order 13985 directing federal agencies to revise their policies to address historical inequities. One such effort is the Reconnecting Communities Pilot (RCP) program. The program’s goal was to reconnect communities separated by transportation infrastructure by removing, retrofitting, or mitigating divisive transportation facilities. This was part of an equity agenda for the US Department of Transportation which is currently inactive. This article examines the program’s 17 construction grants which attempted to achieve equity goals in local transportation development. This multiple case study approach identifies how RCP construction grants operationalized equity through local development, access, community participation, and procedural and workforce strategies. One of the program’s most significant innovations is the attempt to merge equity goals with local development plans. This study finds that the program’s most significant innovation was its effort to weave equity into local development plans, although several cases show tensions over community participation, environmental review, and the distribution of benefits.
State-owned enterprises can remain formally strategic while losing the ability to execute. This article conceptualizes that condition as implementation fragility: delayed, partial and vulnerable execution that emerges before organizational failure becomes visible. Using an interpretivist qualitative case study of Namibia National Reinsurance Corporation Limited, the study examines preparedness for the phased withdrawal of per-policy cessions by 28 March 2028. Evidence from 12 semi-structured interviews and six categories of organizational documents is analyzed through agency theory, dynamic capabilities theory and the McKinsey 7S alignment lens. Findings show that regulatory transition exposed pre-existing weaknesses in accountability, technical oversight, actuarial and analytical capability, digital systems, procurement routines, performance contracts and strategic alignment. The article explains dynamic capabilities in a state-owned enterprise as governance-conditioned and advances a sequencing argument: accountability repair should precede capability investment, which should precede major transformation where protected revenue is being withdrawn. Transformation plans become performative when announced before credible decision rights, implementation indicators, budgets, systems and strategic skills are in place. The findings provide boards, regulators and policymakers with an early-warning lens for diagnosing execution risk before regulatory shocks turn latent fragility into financial and strategic failure.
This study integrates Behavioural Public Administration (BPA) and Conservation of Resources (COR) theories to undertake a deep dive into understanding the personal, contextual and organisational complexities correlated by the discretionary power of Street Level Bureaucrats (SLBs). Survey panel data at two time points, with a 4-week time lag, were obtained and included 259 healthcare SLBs in Australia. SEM was used to analysis the data. The results show that burnout and institutional work harassment fully mediate the relationship between PsyCap and employee wellbeing, with the variance explaining more than half of SLBs’ wellbeing. The implication for SLBs research is that combining BPA and COR theories provide a useful platform for examining the previously hidden psychological impacts on SLBs outcomes. The implications for those who manage SLBs is that training and performance managing implemented to achieve increased wellbeing will require a change towards reducing employee burnout , and a fundamental redeveloped of the resourcing models that assume institutional work harassment is ethically, legally or prosocially appropriate.
