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Home >> The School and Its Faculty >> Tina Nabatchi Courses
PAI 709: Public
Organizations and Management
This course focuses on
developing managers and leaders of public and nonprofit organizations.
Such managers must mobilize resources to achieve important public
purposes, and to do so effectively, they must anticipate and manage
change strategically, as opposed to reactively. They must understand the
integrative, interdependent nature of organizations, their environments
and stakeholders, and the manner and variation in which management
tools,
such as performance
measurement, strategic planning, collaboration, conflict management, and
citizen involvement,
can be used to direct and
lead complex organizations and programs effectively. The student’s role
as a manager is a central theme of this class. Students will be exposed
to the literature on management and public organizations, as well as
strategies and tools for managing public and nonprofit organizations in
complex environments. Theory, research, case studies, and simulations
are used to bridge, expand, and deepen students’ ability to manage and
lead organizations by anticipating, evaluating, and managing both the
opportunities and barriers that they are bound to face as public
managers.
PAI 755: Public
Administration and Democracy
Public administration is as much an art as a science. It requires far
more than the rote application of managerial skills. One must understand
the political and social context that shapes the practice of public
administration, and the ethical and normative issues that public
administrators face as they seek to make effective decisions. Given this
reality, this course is primarily normative rather than skills-oriented
in nature. It is based on the presumption that only those public
administrators who are broad-minded and self-reflective, who are
cognizant of the environments in which they operate and of the
principles that ought to drive their decisions, can be effective in a
truly meaningful way. To this end, the course provides
students the
opportunity to grapple with fundamental questions concerning the
relationship between public administration and democracy such as: What
is democracy? What are the tensions between bureaucracy and democracy?
And, to whom are public administrators responsible? Each question is
seemingly simple, but actually quite complex, and reasonable people can
and do disagree on the answers.
Theory, research, case studies, and simulations are
used to bridge, expand, and deepen students’ responses to these
questions and to help them
develop a greater
sensitivity to the political and social context of public administration
and a greater awareness of the principles that ground good public
administration practice.
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