Unit V Article Review For this assignment, select and read a journal article on

Question

Unit V Article Review

For this assignment, select and read a journal article on issues addressing public management and leadership roles and responsibilities in public agencies/organizations. The journal article you choose must be research oriented, such as those found in Public Administration Review (located in the Business Source Complete Database of the CSU Online Library). This means the article should cite other scholarly sources and have a bibliography at the end.

After reading the article, prepare a review of the article, and include the abstract from the journal article. Your review should be succinctly written in a descriptive and informative manner. Your assignment should summarize the essential contents and main ideas of the article.

Your review should be a minimum of one page in length in APA style. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required page length. All sources used, including the textbook, must be referenced; paraphrased and quoted material must have accompanying citations.

Explanation / Answer

Abstract
The public management, nonprofit, and business sectors are becoming more
integrated. Governments are increasingly dependent upon businesses and nonprofit
organizations to provide public services, regulation is increasing, and nonprofit
organizations provide an alternative for public service delivery as well as maintain
a watchful eye over businesses and governments. A solid understanding of public
problems and the intersections between the sectors is critical for managers of today.
Public affairs programs can play an important role in this process by expanding
their focus to offer courses to undergraduate business students that bridge the
gap between public affairs issues and the business sector. By developing mutually
beneficial partnerships with business schools, public affairs programs will gain
substantial benefit, both academically and professionally. We can pursue
our mission to encourage public service in a broader arena, recruit talented
undergraduates to public affairs programs and positions, expand teaching and
research opportunities, and enhance our reputation as a field.

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITY
Some may question whether offering undergraduate public affairs courses to undergraduate business students may contribute to the identity challenges of our field in a negative way. We already have definitional challenges due to the diversity of programs under the umbrella of public affairs (Mandell, 2009). Would teaching
undergraduate business students further dilute the identity of our field or compromise the integrity of public affairs teaching? We believe it does not. Many other disciplines offer courses to undergraduate students to provide a foundation of the field with a core curriculum—for example, universities have included English, math, and history requirements for business, science, and social science students for generations. The identity of the students does not muddy the identity of the field so long as the content remains consistent with the public service mission of the program. Increasing our mission’s sphere of influence is a convincing rationale for the integration of public affairs content into business education, but it is not the only benefit of doing so for our field.
Meeting Future Needs of the Public Service Field
Creating undergraduate public service programs linked to business has additional benefits for the public administration workforce, both professionally and academically. Most significantly, it enlarges the pool of students who are interested in public service careers and education at a time when expanded recruitment is critical. Undergraduate programs in Public Affairs face a difficult challenge—much of the “recruitment” to graduate programs in a particular field is dictated by a student’s undergraduate major, which in turn influences career choices. Yet, few schools offer undergraduate majors in public administration, and many undergraduate students are simply unaware of what such a degree means or have little understanding of the opportunities for careers in government and nonprofit organizations. Management education often concentrates on preparing students for work in traditional, large companies (Dart, 2008), although some entrepreneurship programs have expanded to focus on the future small business owner. Despite this, many business students do go on to work in the government and nonprofit sectors. A recent New York Times article (Rampell, 2011) suggests that this trend may be growing as a result of the recent recession. Faced with heightened competition in the for-profit job market as well as being predisposed toward “doing good,” this generation of recent college graduates is showing more interest in public service related work.
One of the most significant benefits of integrating public affairs coursework into the business undergraduate curriculum is to introduce related degrees and employment opportunities to undergraduate students, particularly as we face the critical challenges of the aging out of the public workforce. Although figures vary across reports, agencies, and levels, the challenge is clear—the public sector faces
extensive turnover in the coming years due to the aging of the public workforce and the retirement of the baby boomer generation (Broder, 2001; Civil Service
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372 Journal of Public Affairs Education
Subcommittee, 2003; GAO, 2008; Lewis & Cho, 2011; Spors & Fialka, 2002; Wamunya, 2003; Wolf & Amirkhanyan, 2010). The mean age of employees rose by approximately 5 years for each level of government between 1980 and 2005–07 averages—the federal government by 5.6 years, state government by 5.5 years, and local government by 4.6 years. Median and modal ages have grown even more rapidly during this period—for example, the federal sector’s median age rose by 9 years, and its modal age rose by 18 years. Averages for 2005–07 indicate that over 60% of those employed in the federal workforce are 40 or older, and only 17.6% are younger than 30 (Lewis & Cho, 2011). In 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that a third of the 2007 federal workforce would be eligible to retire by 2012. The problem is even more pronounced for certain agencies, occupations, and organizational levels. For example, GAO reports that “64% of career executives are projected to be eligible by 2012” (GAO, 2008, p. 3). Although most studies have focused at the federal level, recent research suggests that state and local governments face similar challenges (Lewis & Cho, 2011). This turnover is expected to drain the public sector not only of numbers of workers but also of leadership, experience, and organizational memory (Wolf & Amirkhanyan, 2010).
Public administrators will be competing with the private sector to replace this highly educated workforce whether they wish to or not. As a discipline, we should make a proactive effort to start this recruitment during the undergraduate
years. Exposing business students to employment opportunities across the sectors will help “to reflect the reality for students, rather than the stereotypes, and to
highlight organizations, careers, and alumni from a more real and diverse profile
than the traditional ‘gray pinstripe’ image would have us envisage” (Dart, 2008, p. 735). Introducing public affairs at the undergraduate level—even if only through a course or two as part of the core business or management curriculum—may lead to a greater pool of students interested in both careers and graduate education in public affairs.
Cross-fertilization may also open opportunities to develop foundational research and teaching across the business and public management training fields. Among the challenges identified in adding such courses to the business curriculum are the lack of business textbooks that cover such topics and the difficulty in finding qualified faculty (Arosteguy, 2007), both of which can be lessened by encouraging partnerships with public affairs departments to offer such courses. Although there is some overlap with the field of business ethics, the business literature recognizes that such an expansion of the “domain of the business ethics
curriculum…takes the subject into relatively uncharted water where the academic literature has only just started to make inroads, and where business ethics scholars, in particular have yet to really engage” (Crane & Matten, 2004, p. 365). Public affairs literature and scholars, however, are already well involved in the context, institutions, and practices of government and nonprofit organizations. As our
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boundaries further dissolve, we can expand on these avenues for research. As the Minnowbrook III scholars envision, public administration research in the future will be interdisciplinary and collaborative (O’Leary & Van Slyke, 2010).
The application of public affairs literature to the discipline of business could even have the benefit of improving public administration’s reputation in the broader management arena (Shareef, 2010). Kelman (2007) refers to “the public administration ghetto,” explaining that our field was tied to “mainstream organization studies” in its early years, but has since “taken a separatist turn” (p. 233). Demonstrating our value to other disciplines, both in research and teaching, has the potential for much greater benefit than harm to our own discipline.
These areas of benefits—expanded recruitment to the field, collaborative teaching and research partnerships, and an enhanced reputation as a field—are mutually reinforcing, positive benefits for public affairs. As leaders of the field, we should feel a sense of urgency to think strategically about the future of our discipline. We simply cannot wait for schools of business to ask us to participate. Rather, for the benefit of our own field, both professionally and academically, we must take the lead role in collaborative efforts to bridge the gap across sectors.
Encouraging public affairs departments to take the lead on this role is only half the battle. We turn now to the business perspective: Why should business programs attend more to governmental topics? Would they be receptive to the notion?
Meeting a Need in Business Education: A Role for Public Affairs
Public affairs courses can be a valuable component of business education, complementing more traditional business courses with courses that familiarize business students with social problems, nonprofit organizations, and government. Business managers of today and into the future need a solid understanding of the
opportunities and threats they face from organizations from other sectors. Businesses are now subject to significant nonmarket forces, yet business students often lack “a coherent or in-depth understanding of the historical, political, or cultural context in which businesses operate today” (Waddock, 2007, p. 551). Students in both business and public service programs also move between sectors as their jobs frequently change. Opportunities emerge for business students to work in public service settings and public administration students are desired by corporations.
Government regulations continue to increase, thus posing both burdens and benefits on businesses. Government regulation often emerges when businesses disregard societal values. Taking a more proactive approach to such social values can curtail a strong governmental response to regulations that may be even more costly to businesses, as it takes away a business’s flexibility in determining how to respond. A role in crafting legislation and regulation can give firms a competitive advantage (Barrett, 1991).
Government contracting provides lucrative opportunities for businesses, but some business students are not even aware that governments have such contracts
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374 Journal of Public Affairs Education
available. Thus, they have an opportunity to broaden out to a new “market” for their efforts. As Elkington & Hartigan (2008) argue, there are “market opportunities” in social problems, some of which bring profit opportunities. The public interest is served when private or nonprofit contractors recognize the need to couch winning proposals in ways that create the greatest public value.
Nonprofit watchdogs have greater insight into and influence over the policies and practices of businesses, particularly with the expansion of Internet usage. Business students need to know how to work with nongovernmental organizations in the United States and globally. By partnering with nonprofit organizations, businesses may improve their credibility with stakeholders or mitigate the potential for attacks from other nonprofit organizations (Argenti, 2004; Selsky & Parker, 2005).
These all amount to new job opportunities for the business school’s prospective
students. But as we explained in the previous section, we can go further in the expansion of undergraduate business student awareness of job prospects, to the entire range of possibilities of working in government or nonprofit service providers. We have highlighted this as a benefit to the field of public affairs, but an expansion of career opportunities is as beneficial to the student, particularly during periods of a tightened job market (Rampell, 2011).
These outlined benefits for business education—improved knowledge of regulation, contracting opportunities, and nonprofit influences as well as broadening of the job market—may be obvious to many public affairs scholars and professionals, so an important secondary question is whether business schools would be receptive to these ideas. Shareef’s (2010) concerns about the receptiveness of both fields to “such a multidisciplinary sharing” (p. 648) for MBA students are equally relevant to the application of public administration to undergraduate business students. Shareef questions whether business schools would be receptive to social issues and values, but much has changed in their clients’ operating environment since the early 1990s.1 Businesses recognize the need for attention to social issues, ethics, and other sectors in society. Businesses have witnessed a rise in nonprofit activism driven by the advent of the Internet as well as by the implementation of significant pieces of regulation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 following corporate accounting scandals and, more recently, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 in response to the 2008 banking crisis. Their recognition of the growing importance of social issues is perhaps most directly reflected in the growing importance of corporate social responsibility as a strategic issue for companies.
The business education literature suggests recognition of the need to expose students to social and environmental issues, including both the implications of such problems for business and the potential for businesses to play a role in social change (Dart, 2008). Business schools are also recognizing the importance of the public interest and social problems as integral components of the management
literature as well as acknowledging the insufficient attention paid to those areas.

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