Ambition Is Priceless

Abstract

Within the representative bureaucracy literature, there are a variety of individual or professional incentives that may discourage movement from passive to active representation. This study presents two of these incentives by explaining the potential effects of professional socialization and individual career ambition. Using 3 years of survey and performance data from public schools, this research explores how professional socialization and ambitions of career advancement may promote specific behaviors that potentially support or discourage effective representation. The results indicate that professional socialization actually promotes representation by African American and Latino bureaucrats. The impact of Latino representation across values of professional socialization is also significantly different from that of White managers. The results also demonstrate varying effects for bureaucratic career ambition, as the effect of Latino administrators on student performance is minimized for administrators with higher levels of ambition. For African American administrators, the opposite is true as Black administrators with high levels of ambition are related to increasingly positive student performance. These results add to our understanding of representative bureaucracy by exploring how different values will interact with a minority bureaucrat's decision to represent the interests of minority clients.

Political Failure, Citizen Feedback, and Representative Bureaucracy: The Interplay of Politics, Public Management and Governance*

“…We seek generalization, statements about public management and its impact that are always true everywhere, or perhaps even better always false; we would like to find universal truths. At the same time our data keep telling us that context matters, sometimes national context (O'Toole and Meier 2015; Meier et al 2015), sometimes political context (Meier and Rutherford 2017), other times organizational context (Capers 2018;Meier and O'Toole 2009) or many times just the variation in individuals (Carroll 2017). As the result of this outpouring of findings, the need for comparative theorizing and comparative analysis has never been more essential.…”

“…The tension between socialization and representation occurs because representation is perceived as something that might encourage a bureaucrat to make a decision that would not be otherwise made and that would reduce the organization's effectiveness. Although this logic has motivated substantial research examining the assumption of conflict between socialization and representation (Carroll 2017;Dolan 2002;Gidengil and Vengroff 1997;Romzek and Hendricks 1982), it is useful to reexamine the relationship theoretically because there are reasons to believe that the two do not always lead to cross pressures. In essence the question is whether or not representation can be instrumental in the eyes of the organization -might it lead to a more effective agency and under what conditions might that be possible.…”

How Self-Determination Moderates Burnout in Public Organizations Across Gender, Race, and Generation

“…for administrators seeking promotion” (p. 224). The research finds this effect only for Latinx participants and argues it may be because they “spend less time engaged with the community in exchange for behaviors that will gain them promotion” (Carroll, 2017, p. 224). These findings suggest navigating organizational practices and perception of workplace context is racialized and shaped by one’s positionality within the organization and within society, consequently leading to depersonalization and passive representation without active representation.…”

“…What is also possible and not controlled for in the empirical models is the impact of ambition on representative bureaucracy. Carroll (2017) finds in their research on school principals that ambitious Latinx bureaucrats with greater influence and autonomy in their organizations are less engaged with outcomes for the population they serve (i.e., students), likely because of "the pressure to appear unbiased and politically appealing . .…”

Self-esteem of the ambition of Russian and Turkmen students

“…Junyi Chai considers human love (or ambition) in the context of a person's past experience, the influence on the different current situation [14]. K. Carroll analyzes ambition in the context of various aspects of socialization [15].…”