This course will seek to answer these questions by using managed health care as the paradigmatic case. This course assumes that successful leaders in the public sector will need to have a wide variety of knowledge and skills to manage in a diverse and ever-changing work environment. Through readings, assessment instruments, and exercises participants have an opportunity to examine their own leadership styles and capacities and then to develop a plan to acquire the leadership knowledge, skills, and experience that will make them effective in future leadership positions. This course seeks to answer these questions by examining the legal, historical, economic, political and professional foundations of American public administration. The overall goal of the course is to introduce students to the tension that exists between the constitutive role administrators play in creating policy and the more instrumental role in managing effective and efficient policy implementation.
Administrators are stewards of the public trust.
In this capacity they have extensive discretion to shape both the content and processes that define the public good. Drawing on the general concept of the policy cycle, this course explores the central actors, processes, and issues associated with the formation of public policy. The course gives particular attention to interaction among the three branches of government, interest groups, and the private sector. Tensions between technocratic and political approaches to policy development also receive attention, as do intergovernmental dynamics that influence policy initiatives. When policies receive the formal status of laws, they acquire a special significance for the executive and judicial branches.