Topics for Individual Presentations and Topic Essays
(Note: This is a partial list. Approve all topics, except reviews of the specific books
listed below and topic suggestions that I provide in class handouts, through me.
Email, or turn in on paper, your specific topic to me for approval.)
Book reviews of noteworthy books related to public administration:
- Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
- George Beam, Quality Public Management: What it is and How it Can be Improved and Advanced
- Barry Bozeman, Bureaucracy and Red Tape
- Charles Goodsell, The Case for Bureaucracy
- Herbert Levine, Public Administration Debated, take several sets of essays and review them critically
- Max Neiman, Defending Government: Why Big Government Works
- David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government
- David Osborne and Peter Plastrik, Banishing Bureaucracy
- Mary Walton, The Deming Management Method
- Robert MacNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
- David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
- Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
- Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding
Examine the controversy about the "principles of public administration"
and whether they are "proverbs of administration".
First read Herbert Simon's 1946 Public Administration Review article,
"The Proverbs of Administration", which is available on my web site.
Then read some of the writings by Gulick and by White that Simon criticizes.
Write a critical essay about the principles and Simon's critique of the principles.
Compare/contrast two-four articles in a relevant professional journal(s), such as
the Public Administration Review.
Critically relate some public administration readings to your professional experience.
Take some important public administration topic and write a critical essay comparing
what two-four basic public administration textbooks say about that topic.
Examine two-four basic public administration textbooks, looking carefully at how
they are organized and their choice of topics. Write a critical essay about what
this shows about the field of public administration.
Take a possibly important historical influence on public administration
- an event (example: the Great Depression)
- a scholar (example: Woodrow Wilson)
- an intellectual movement (example: scientific management)
- a research or other type of project (example: Hawthorne experiment)
- a publication (example: H. Simon's Administrative Behavior).
Investigate the influence on public administration by researching how much it is
referred to in five-ten basic public administration textbooks, and write an essay on your findings.