Role Emphases of City Managers and Other Municipal Executives

Abstract

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Professionalism, Responsiveness, and Representation: What do They Mean for City Managers?

“…Public administration scholars have treated administrative involvement in conflict resolution in relation to Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 13:34 26 December 2014 1. its impact on emotional stress and turnover among managers, 2. political identification as a result of involvement in conflict, and 3. conflict resolution skills of public administrators which would determine the success or failure of their efforts in the end (e.g., Sparrow, 1984;Newell & Ammons, 1987;Daniel & Rose, 1991;Kaatz, French, & Prentiss-Cooper, 1999). The complex and diverse policy environment is laden with conflicting forces, and this inevitably requires managerial involvement in conflict resolution.…”

The Managerial Work of Italian City Managers: An Empirical Analysis

“…These activities were later grouped into three main areas, specifically with regard to city managers per se: management activities, policy activities, political activities (Newell & Ammons, 1987). Management activities principally involve human resources management, general management and drawing up budgets, while policy activities mainly refer to supporting the political organ in choosing and developing public policy, as well as selecting the various options for the implementation of said policy.…”

Understanding CEO Role Perception and Time Usage: Are New Municipal Typologies Useful?

“…To supplement the survey data, demographic data on each municipality is also obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau's website and the municipal websites of individual participants. To capture the time allocation information each participant is asked to allocate their individual work time among the three role activities (Note 2) describe by Wright (1969) and Newell and Ammons (1987) as discussed above (Politics, Policy, and Management). Three dependent variables representing each participant's actual allotment of 100% of work time to each of the three role activities are captured for analysis.…”

“…This study utilizes two of the most comprehensive new taxonomies (along with the traditional mayor-council and council-manager typology) to examine whether this classification can offer insight concerning how the chief executive officer (CEO) of local municipalities (mayors in mayor-council form cities and city managers in council-manager form cities) allocate their work time and perceive of their role (Figure 1 below compares the three typologies and where they fit along a hypothetical reformed -unreformed dimension). This paper first examines, using these three typologies, how mayors and managers actually use their work time by examining time allocation between the "Political", "Policy", and "Management" work roles as described by Newell and Ammons (1987) in their 1987 Public Administration Review article and subsequent book (Ammons & Newell, 1988). It is anticipated that that if the institutional changes described in each typology make a difference in the duties that a mayor or manager conceive of as part of their role, the analysis should then reveal differences in how these officials allocate their work time.…”

“…Although the International City / County Management Association (ICMA) recognizes the five most common forms of local government (including the mayor-council, council-manager, commission, town-meeting, and representative-town-meeting forms), most research on local government structure in the U.S. focuses on the two structural forms that dominate the American municipal landscape, namely the mayor-council (34% of municipalities) and council-manager (55% of municipalities) forms (DeSantis & Renner, 2002;MacManus & Bullock 2003;Moulder, 2008). Scholars often use this dichotomous classification system to analyze the effects of form of government on a number of variables including characteristic differences between mayors and city managers (Nolting, 1969;Stillman, 1974;Wikstrom, 1990;DeSantis and Newell, 1996); time allocation (Wright, 1969;Ammons & Newell, 1989;Newell & Ammons, 1987); and the influence of demographic and socio-demographic variables on form of government (Sherbenou, 1961;Kessel, 1962;Dye & MacManus, 1976;Sanders, 1979;Giles, Gabris, & Krane, 1980;Farnham, 1986).…”