Municipal Professionalism: More Than Just a Job in Government?

Abstract

Although professionalism remains important to the study and practice of public administration, its features have remained unclear. Whether public managers share a professional identity has yet to be empirically tested. In this article, we test a model of professional identity among public managers, using a national sample of city managers, the first profession in public administration. Both public administration in general and city management in particular lack institutional characteristics-such as mandatory programs of specialized training or a monopoly over entry into the field-that mark traditional professions such as medicine or law. Using five commonly found professional identification attributes, we test a structural equation model of professional beliefs among city managers with data from a national survey. We find evidence of city managers' professional identity across four attributes: belief in professional associations, belief in public service, belief in self-regulation, and sense of calling. City managers' beliefs about autonomy, however, were unrelated to other aspects of their professionalism.

Professionalism Criteria in the Egyptian Civil Service System: an analytical study

“…The most crucial indicators discussed in the literature can be extracted as the availability of the following (Bottery, 1996;Cooper, 2004;Fox, 1992;Heilman, 2016;McCabe et al, 2017):…”