Goal Ambiguity and Organizational Performance in U.S. Federal Agencies

In spite of numerous observations that government organizationshave high levels of organizational goal ambiguity that exertmajor influences on their other characteristics, few researchershave measured goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertions.In previous research, we developed measures of four dimensionsof goal ambiguity: mission comprehension ambiguity, directivegoal ambiguity, evaluative goal ambiguity, and priority goalambiguity. Confirming hypotheses developed from the literatureon public organizations, the latter three variables showed relationsto such organizational characteristics as organizational age,financial publicness (proportion of funding from governmentallocations), and regulatory status. This article reports asecond analytical step of examining the relations between thegoal ambiguity dimensions and indicators of organizational performancebased on responses to the 2000 National Partnership for ReinventingGovernment Survey of federal employees. The performance variablesincluded managerial effectiveness, customer service orientation,productivity, and work quality. Regression analyses with numerouscontrol variables found that directive, evaluative, and prioritygoal ambiguity related negatively to managerial effectiveness.All four performance indicators showed significant negativerelationships with evaluative goal ambiguity and directive goalambiguity. The results provide further evidence of the viabilityof the new measures of goal ambiguity, support theory-basedbut previously untested hypotheses, and further indicate thefeasibility and value of analyzing goal ambiguity of governmentorganizations.     

Representative Bureaucracy, Organizational Strategy, and Public Service Performance: An Empirical Analysis of English Local Government

The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that organizationsperform better if their workforces reflect the characteristicsof their constituent populations. The management literatureimplies that the impact of representative bureaucracy is contingenton organizational strategy. Our empirical evidence on Englishlocal government is inconsistent with the basic theory of representativebureaucracy but supports a moderating effect of organizationalstrategy. Representative bureaucracy is negatively associatedwith citizens' perceptions of local authority performance. However,organizations pursuing a prospector strategy are able to mitigatethis negative relationship.     

Citizens' Perceptions of Politics and Ethics in Public Administration: A Five-Year National Study of Their Relationship to Satisfaction with Services, Trust in Governance, and Voice Orientations

In recent decades organizational politics (OP) has become agrowing field of interest in managerial studies. To date, themajor scholarly effort has been dedicated to the explorationof intraorganizational politics based on employees' perceptions.However, one of the important aspects of this phenomenon isthe way in which it is viewed by the external organizationalenvironment—by customers, clients, and as far as governmentalagencies are concerned, by the general public as well. Thisarticle examines citizens' perceptions of organizational politicsand ethics in public administration systems. It focuses on therelationship between these perceptions and several key outcomesof modern bureaucracy such as satisfaction with services, trustin governmental institutions, and the resulting voice orientationsand actions by the public (i.e., political efficacy, politicalparticipation). The data for the study were gathered from ahalf decade's worth of national surveys in Israel. The resultspoint to meaningful direct and indirect relationships betweenorganizational politics and ethics in the public sector, satisfaction,trust, and voice orientation. The article ends with a discussionof the theoretical and practical implications of the findingsand suggestions for future studies.     

英语歧义现象及其积极作用

歧义是一种语言形式能够表达两种或两种以上意义的语言现象，它普遍存在于世界各种语言中。一般认为歧义会有碍交流，但如果人们加以巧妙运用，却也能起到积极的作用，更好地达到某一交际目的。文章主要分析了几类英语歧义现象以及歧义在幽默笑话、广告、文学作品中的积极运用。     

Role Conflict and Ambiguity

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between role conflict and role ambiguity, and burnout of mental health service providers. The study used a sample of 259 mental health service providers who completed a questionnaire that included several measures: role conflict and ambiguity scales, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, social support scales and an involvement scale. Results showed that role conflict and role ambiguity had statistically significant correlations with several of the burnout dimensions. The author discusses the potential implications for increasing workers' quality of work life.     

Reactions to Job Content Plateaus: Examining Role Ambiguity and Hierarchical Plateaus as Moderators

Plateauing research often reveals a negative relationship between job content plateauing (i.e., lacking challenge in one's job) and work attitudes. This study explores situations where job content plateauing is associated with fewer negative work attitudes, revealing role ambiguity (i.e., being unclear about job duties and responsibilities) and hierarchical plateauing (i.e., low likelihood of promotions) as moderators of the job content plateau‐work attitude relationship. Specifically, job content plateaued employees reported greater job satisfaction and organizational commitment if they were not also experiencing a hierarchical plateau. Job content plateaued employees also reported greater job satisfaction when role ambiguity was low.     

Telling stories,reflecting, learning: hannah arendt and organization

This article is written in recognition of the need for dialogue between organization theory and other disciplines and languages. It uses some concepts coined by Hannah Arendt to develop reflection concerning organizational dynamics. Arendt's category of action, as different from both labour and work, makes possible to define, in an original way, the political dimension of organizational action. The category of thought, again, as defined by Arendt, allows us to highlight the production of meaning which takes place in organizations. With the help of those two concepts, the author develops a notion of organizational learning as a process where the political and cognitive dimensions of organizational action are strongly interrelated.     

MARGINALITY,ADVOCACY, AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF MULTICULTURALISM: NOTES ON ROMANI ACTIVISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Activists who take up the cause of marginalized and discriminated cultural groups often find themselves in an ambiguous position in relation to the very people whose interests they seek to represent. Inspired by the ideas of multiculturalism, minority advocates turn the cultural identity of marginalized and discriminated minorities into the central focus of a political struggle for recognition. By so doing, however, they construct a particular sectional minority identity that not only fails to give full expression to individual identities, but is usually also “stigmatized” in the sense that it is popularly associated with standard stereotypical images and negative characteristics. This article identifies this ambiguity in contemporary projects of minority rights advocacy aimed at redressing the social and economic grievances of the Roma in Central Europe. It shows how activists in the articulation of their claims rely on essentialist assumptions of Romani identity. While these minority rights claims resonate well in international forums, they also run the risk of reifying cultural boundaries, stimulating thinking in ethnic collectives, reinforcing stereotypes, and hampering collective action. By reviewing some of the recent literature on multiculturalism in social and political theory, this article explores ways of dealing with this ambiguity. It concludes that minority advocacy for the Roma can avoid the tacit reproduction of essential identities by contesting the essentializing categorization schemes that lie at the heart of categorized oppression and by foregrounding the structural inequality that drives political mobilization.     

Public Sector Management and the Democratic Ethos: A 5-Year Study of Key Relationships in Israel

This article deals with the nexus between bureaucracy and democracyin a management-oriented public sector. The article developsthe idea that public administration plays a major role in determiningcitizens’ political attitudes and behaviors. A theoreticalmodel is suggested to examine the relationship among citizens’perceptions of involvement and participation in administrativedecision making, perceived managerial quality, perceived publicsector performance, and democratic participatory behavior (i.e.,trust in administrative agencies, political participation, andcommunity involvement). A sample of 2,281 Israeli citizens providedinformation on the research variables over a 5-year period (2001–05).Findings reveal that citizens’ perceptions of involvementand participation in administrative decision making are positivelyrelated with perceived managerial quality but are not relatedwith perceived public sector performance. In addition, perceivedmanagerial quality is positively related with trust in administrativeagencies as well as with political participation and communityinvolvement. Finally, public sector performance is a mediatorin this relationship. These findings lead to a discussion aboutthe linkage between the bureaucratic and the democratic ethosin modern managerial governance, theoretical and practical implications,as well as suggestions for future studies.     

THE ORGANIZATIONAL CAREER OF GANG STATISTICS: The Politics of Policing Gangs

This article examines the way in which the construction of a "gang" problem and the resulting "gang statistics" in a particular community, referred to as Bigcity, are related to the local political context and the police accommodation of political interests. In particular, the political accountability of the police impacts on police recordkeeping practices and the statistics regarding "gangs" that those records generate. The organizational career of gang statistics, from the citizen's call to the police response and subsequent recordwork, is examined in order to demonstrate how the recordkeeping practices of the police bureaucracy facilitate the social construction of the "gang" problem. Field research data, including calls to the police, ride-along observations, and interviews, illustrate how the politicization of the "gang" problem impacts on police recordkeeping and the social construction of "gang statistics.'Given that the current concern about the nationwide growth of gangs is based on such statistics and that gang suppression efforts call for enhancing and sharing gang databases, the role of police practices in shaping gang statistics is an important issue.     

MARKET VENTURES, MORAL LOGICS, AND AMBIGUITY: Crafting a New Organizational Form in Post-Socialist China

How do institutional entrepreneurs craft new organizational forms under unstable conditions, especially when all of the relevant organizational models have serious liabilities in terms of legitimacy? Previous literature argues that emergent organizational models must adopt existing organizational elements in order to solve three problems: (1) gaining access to resources, (2) exploiting previous competencies, and (3) demonstrating legitimacy to salient audiences. Yet, these three distinct needs often require very different organizational elements associated with diverse, contradictory moral logics. This article, which examines the case of for‐profit ventures started by Chinese state organizations in the 1990s, reveals one strategy that entrepreneurs can use to solve this problem—to deliberately increase ambiguity about the organization's central characteristics and its underlying moral logic. This strategy makes it possible for new organizations to solve the problems of resources, competency, and legitimacy by simultaneously adopting (and adapting) contradictory organizational elements.     

STATE MANAGEMENT OF CAREERS, WORKPLACE CONFLICT, AND REGIME LEGITIMACY IN SOCIALIST CHINA

Recent research indicates that career mobility under Chinese Communist rule has been shaped by state political screening and shifts in official ideology. Drawing on Weber's concept of modern bureaucracy and a study of schoolteachers in the Mao era (1949–1976), this article suggests that within the workplace official control of careers engendered an inferior and heterogeneous corps of management personnel, a deep schism between management and the staff, and a fractured division of labor. The antitheses of the rational features of modern bureaucracy, these arrangements fostered workplace friction and political resentment that precipitated post-Mao reforms. Primary evidence comes from recently declassified government documents and firsthand interviews with retired teachers.     

In search of the glass ceiling: gender and recruitment to management in Norway's state bureaucracy1

There are still fewer female than male managers in Norway's state bureaucracy. This article asks if there are organizational barriers which prevent women from entering these positions. Is there really a glass ceiling, or must one look outside the organizational environment to find an explanation? Is it rather the case that the scarcity of female managers is caused by women's own preferences or their life situations outside work? Or do both contribute to the situation? The study shows that female managers are treated just as well as male managers in central parts of the state bureaucracy. Employers give equal shares of respect and attention to both genders. Female managers are encouraged to apply for the same number of jobs as men and are offered an equal number of jobs as men when they apply; in fact, women are offered more jobs than men, when one controls for the number of job applications. This indicates that organizational barriers are not the problem. The study also shows that there are no differences in work orientation between male and female managers. Female managers are just as ambitious as male managers. Nor do female managers find it more difficult than male managers to combine work and family life. So, how can one explain the low number of female managers? The study shows that one reason can be that female managers apply for management jobs less often than their male colleagues. The cause of this seems to be anticipated discrimination rather than lack of ambition or self‐confidence. However, this slows down women's movement into higher management positions in the state bureaucracy.     

Procedural Control of the Bureaucracy, Peer Review, and Epistemic Drift

Regulatory peer review—in which independent scientistscomment on the technical underpinnings of proposed regulations—isa recently pursued form of political control of the bureaucracy.This article situates regulatory peer review in the contextof both the history of technical advice to government and theprincipal-agent perspective often used to explain the presenceof administrative procedures. Much of the academic discussionof attempts to influence bureaucratic decision making has utilizedprincipal-agent theory. We introduce two novel concepts to accommodateregulatory peer review into the principal-agent framework. Thefirst is "technocracy" where the preferences of technical expertsdisplace public preferences. The second is "epistemic drift,"a change in embodied knowledge that contributes to departuresfrom the policy intentions of an enacting coalition of policymakers. In addition to introducing these concepts, we arguethat regulatory peer review is more complex than other administrativeprocedures and that its efficacy critically depends on the detailsof its implementation. We hypothesize that regulatory peer reviewwill cause nongovernmental participants in regulatory conflictsto devote more effort to creating research and other epistemicresources. But we also hypothesize that, just as courts havebecome more politicized with their role in regulatory policy,peer review and regulatory science will become increasinglypoliticized as well.     

Strategic Appointments

This article develops an institutional spatial theory of presidentialappointments to administrative agencies that falls within thespirit of a recent line of theoretical research toward an institutionaltheory of the presidency. We show that when bureaucrats implementpolicy that results from negotiation with constituents, theally principle—appointing political allies—holdsonly as a knife-edge condition. Presidents are better servedby appointing administrators whose preferences partially offsetthe influence of organized interests. The incentives describedhave implications for the selection of a whole range of bureaucraticpersonnel at various levels, generating significant implicationsfor the study of public management on issues such as personneladministration, representative bureaucracy, and the devolutionof administrative authority.     

A Fluid Ambiguity: Individual,Dividual and Personhood

In this paper, I examine different conceptualisations and enactments of personhood, based on data gathered from a rural community in Sri Lanka. Through an examination of a relational web that moulds personhood, the article argues against a distinctive categorisation of autonomous/individualistic personhood and collectivistic/dividual personhoods; instead, it illuminates a fluidity of the boundaries that define the contours of one’s persona, highlighting not the contrasts, but the analogies between these two categories. Furthermore, it explicates how such fluidity is complemented by a manipulative ambiguity. It is such fluidity and ambiguity that enables both collective and individual desires, anxieties and hopes to materialise in and through the relational web that sketches one’s personhood and its borders.     

‘Why Do All the Women Disappear?’ Gendering Processes in a Political Science Department

The article provides an in‐depth analysis of the gendering processes among PhD candidates in a political science department. It uses Joan Acker's theory of gendered organizations operating through four dimensions: the gendered division of labour, gendered interaction, gendered symbols and gendered interpretations of one's position in the organization. The article combines this approach with theories of hidden discrimination. The key theoretical aim is to contribute to gendered organizational theory by examining the ways in which hidden discrimination and the gendered organization work together. This generates detailed and differentiated knowledge about the mechanisms of hidden discrimination that produce gender inequalities in the department. The findings presented in this article point to the role of gendered division of labour and the lack of information about departmental practices. PhD supervision by men is a particularly strong structural barrier for women because of the gendered nature of interaction in supervision and the difficulties that female PhD students have in a male‐dominated environment. The article further contributes to debates on gendered organizations by focusing upon the gendered symbols of expertise in political science. These symbols reproduce the man as the political scientist norm and result in women interpreting their own position as marginal or as outsiders.     

Power Over,Power With,and Power to Relations: Critical Reflections on Public Relations,the Dominant Coalition,and Activism

Symmetrical public relations theory acknowledges primacy of the dominant coalition in making organizational decisions and influencing public relations practices but reveals little about this powerful inner circle. Drawing from interviews with 21 public relations executives, this article opens up the dominant coalition and reveals its complex power relationships and a matrix of constraints that undermine and limit the function, rendering it difficult for practitioners to do the "right" thing, even if they want to. If public relations is to better serve society, professionals and academics may need to embrace an activist role and combine advocacy of shared power with activism in the interest of shared power.     

The European Democratic Deficit,the Market and the Public Space: A Classical Liberal Critique

This article argues that attempts to utilize a Habermasian conception of the public space as a remedy for the democratic deficit deemed to be inherent within the political institutions of the European Union (EU) are unlikely to prove successful. It is argued that the instrumental goal demanded of the public space is contrary to the communicative rationality intrinsic to the Habermasian model. Moreover, the Habermasian conception of the public space as an arena independent of both the market and the state is non-operational because a public space independent of the market is inconceivable. An alternative conceptualization of the public space, focusing on the role of the market as a communicative process, and an alternative remedy for the European democratic deficit, focusing on liberal representative democracy, are proposed.     

The Institutionalization of U.S. Political Parties: Patronage Newspapers

There is general agreement that mass political parties emerged during the Jacksonian era, but there is no consensus about their precise origins. Institutional theorists within political science contend that political parties trace their beginnings to elite who nurtured them within the civil service bureaucracy, whereas theorists in political science who rely on microlevel explanations consider that parties developed to solve problems of social choice and collective action. Historians, in contrast, indicate that newspaper patronage in Washington, DC, beginning with Jefferson, was critical for the emergence of federal political parties. This study systematically examines the empirical implications of that assumption and considers both the organizational and political processes that underlie establishment of newspapers in the Capital, contributing to the understanding that newspapers provided a model both for the civil service and for political parties.