Journal of Public Affairs Education

Public administration courses often use the pillars of public administration (e.g., efficiency, effectiveness, equity, economy, accountability, responsiveness) as foundational concepts across our core curriculum. However, our public administration curriculum is alarmingly absent of conversations about emotional labor. Put simply, emotional labor is emotion management and life management combined, which is unpaid, invisible work we do to keep those around us happy (Rinfret et al., 2022). In this paper we detail a semester-long research project focused on emotional labor, and why it is necessary for how we work in a diverse and changing workforce. Our pilot study examines original data collected during the spring and summer 2022 to document the experiences of 36 students enrolled in a core public administration course. The findings illustrate that using the emotional labor project (ELP) provides opportunities for us to engage in conversation with our students to change the narrative in our discipline and practice.

Aspects of public service often involve tasks sometimes considered taboo, including working with grit, grime, blood, guts, grease, and stigmatized populations. Yet scholarship in our field directly incorporating dirty work remains limited yet growing. Importantly, if MPA students are not trained in how to work with and manage public sector employees engaged in such work, there is a chance for misunderstanding and mismanagement. In this paper, we draw on the concept of dirty work and showcase several ways how it can be incorporated into the MPA curriculum through topics such as regulation and compliance, emotional labor, budgeting and procurement, and public health. We rely on stories from deathcare workers throughout the U.S. to supplement the points. A dirty work practitioner from a large Iowa medical examiner department lends expertise in each section, and we conclude with case scenarios and questions for incorporating dirty work into MPA classes.

Using fictional literature in public administration classrooms has been advocated by public administration educators since the middle of the past century. Stories are asserted to be a legitimate tool to understand social systems, management models, and ethical dilemmas. It is argued that fictional literature influences how students perceive the complicated contexts within which public management occurs. Yet with one exception, public administration scholars have not tested what knowledge students gain from engaging with fictional literature. A systematic literature review is undertaken to learn what scholars from other disciplines have learned about knowledge gained from using fictional literature as a pedagogical tool. The review shows that fictional literature can lead to gains in factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge. From the identified articles, lessons about how educators can effectively incorporate fictional literature as part of public administration coursework are drawn.

Despite Minnowbrook’s call in 1968, social equity has been slow to be incorporated into public administration scholarship, teaching, and practice. However, recently, more organizations have promoted a social equity lens in their missions, strategic plans, budgets, hiring decisions, programs, and policies. As a pillar of public administration, this is long overdue. With this increased support, we have also seen a resurgence of dangerous policies and decisions that if successful, could undermine the work that has been done in support of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). In the face of such adversity, institutions of higher education have the obligation to give public servants the context, language, and skills to advocate for DEIJ. Some programs have thus begun to incorporate DEIJ topics and classes into their curriculum. This paper outlines the process by which a social equity in public service class was prepared and taught.

The intersection of arts and public policy is three-dimensional. A multitude of direct subsidy, regulatory, and support programs are advocated and managed as “arts policy,” but a wide variety of non-arts-targeted realms such as tax law, public education, public health, and urban development and housing programs importantly influence artists and their encounters with their audiences. These interactions, and the complexity and thorniness born of the difficulty of clearly categorizing the arts as either market or non-market goods, as well as our difficulty in their valuation, make a particularly good area for teaching about public policy generally. And finally, policy of all kinds is too important to be made without the insights and guidance of artists, whose job is to show us the society we live in and who we are. Our “Arts and Cultural Policy” course explores this landscape for students in both fields.

Public sector accounting education (PSAE) has recently attracted increasing attention from both scholars and practitioners. Nonetheless, there is still an education/practice gap that undermines public servants’ ability to face the complexity of the current working environment. This paper reviews and critiques the PSAE literature, identifies the main practical issues affecting the field, and outlines how education providers can improve formal and non-formal curricula and training. Results reveal that the exploratory nature of a large part of the PSAE research and the lack of a practical perspective able to bridge the gap between PSAE and the requirements in practice of the current public sector context demonstrate the pressing need to develop the topic and how it is investigated. The present review is one of the first attempts to investigate PSAE with a focus on the practical approaches that could be used for the development of graduates and public servants’ accounting competencies.

The civil service has seen dramatic changes over the last 50 years, symbolized by the shift from Traditional Public Administration, to New Public Management and now New Public Governance. Likewise, the role and nature of people management functions has changed with the development of Strategic HR and Human Resource Development (HRD). Finally, the nature of higher education has changed with a growing emphasis on research impact, knowledge exchange, and industry-academia links such as focusing on employability. In this research we explore the development of the Bahrain Institute for Public Administration’s (BIPA) Master in Public Management (MPM) program. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with students, managers, and stakeholders we identify how this program was established, how students were selected, and the implications of their study on the program for the success of the Bahrain government.