Moving Beyond the Boundaries? Exploring Nexus Among Public Policy, Public Management, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Studies Fields

Abstract

This special issue began with a call for manuscripts that explore the nexus between public management and public policy. The selected manuscripts were workshopped at a gathering of authors and editors. The workshop was followed by an APSA Roundtable, which permitted a wider ranging exploration of nexus between the fields.The original call operated off of a basic assumption: the partition between public policy and public management is essential for understanding shared research agendas, but the partition is artificial. Many of the puzzles found in public policy and public management overlap, and lessons can be learned from each field to advance the other.That assumption proved incomplete in two critical ways. First, the coeditors of the PSJ at the time (Weible and Schlager), as policy scholars, naively assumed that nonprofit studies fit neatly within the broader field of public management. Second, that a consensus existed among scholars on the (rough) boundaries of each of the fields as well as the major research questions motivating the fields.The neglect of nonprofit scholarship became immediately apparent at the workshop. Ill-defined disciplinary boundaries and the implications emerged during and after the workshop as manuscript authors found it challenging to locate a nexus and communicate it in a convincing manner to both public policy and management scholars. The APSA roundtable, which included a nonprofit scholar, fully exposed the conceit that scholars agree on the rough boundaries of each field as well as major research questions populating the fields.The experiences from the workshop and the roundtable shape the content of this special issue. The issue begins with three overview manuscripts that attempt to do four things: sketch out rough boundaries of one of the three fields, identify major research questions pursued by scholars in that field, identify nexus among the fields, and identify barriers and challenges to work at the intersections. In other words, the authors take on the difficult tasks of both defining the fields and identifying nexus. 4 0190-292X V C 2017 Policy Studies Organization

Exploring the link between government funding and efficiency in nonprofit colleges

“…The findings extend the nonprofit literature by providing some evidence with a macro view of the issue of government funding, a rather large body of literature that has so far been descriptive. This study should serve to supplement the growing body of causal inference in nonprofit management scholarship, as this is an area of potential growth for nonprofit management when input/output based measures of efficiency are available (Smith, Whitford, & Schlager, ).…”

Linking the distribution of board-executive governance responsibilities to charter school performance

“…the governing of individual organizations operating within a macro-governance framework. As Smith et al (2017) conclude, it is necessary to study and understand the nexus between public management, public policy and nonprofit management to explain the modern governance environment. In this study, we use original data to apply the evolving theories of New Public Management (Kettl, 2005) and the hollow state (Ford and Andersson, 2016) to the case of charter schools.…”