CAREER: Pockets of Effectiveness and the Diffusion of Organizational Capacity

本项目分析了在具有挑战性的环境中传播与异常有效的公共管理案例相关的实践的努力。迫切需要了解如何在低收入和困难的环境中增加诚实和有效的公共行政，因为有效和战略性的财政承诺符合国家利益。公共部门的组织效率是改善人类福祉的其他努力的关键基础，无论是提供教育、改善公共卫生、扩大机会还是刺激经济增长。本项目将试图解释在六个地区全面复制商事法庭模式的努力和在所有地区向法院推广替代性争议解决办法的不同努力在执行方面所观察到的差异。该项目通过分析社会因素如何影响识别和成功采用可能提高组织效率的实践的能力，推动了组织学术和宏观社会学学术领域的发展。该项目的教育目标是培养一个新的学者分支领域，专注于解释公共部门内组织效率的变化。研究方法是一种混合方法分析评估五个理论知情假设。研究1利用人种学观察和对法官和工作人员的访谈，通过对六个新设立的区域商事法庭的定性比较案例分析来评估这些假设。研究2考察了替代性争议解决（ADR）在法院的传播，通过调查有资格进行ADR的法官人数（n=333），收集人口统计、先前的专业经验、ADR经验和专业网络等信息，构建和分析了详细的定量数据集。这些不同但相关的研究将促进对组织系统内部和系统之间组织强度变化的理解。这项工作还有助于建立组织效率的社会基础，从而有助于正在进行的多学科辩论，即为什么我们观察到公共和私营部门组织绩效的持续差异。拟议的工作将关键的社会学变量纳入社会背景和个人解释的特定特征如何影响适应结果的分析中，例如，分析技术上能够提高效率的新实践如何与决定这些新实践是否可以有效实施的社会基础相交。研究成果将纳入本科社会科学方法教学。这项研究还将纳入研究生一级的培训讲习班，以帮助建立一个更广泛的研究界，围绕社会组织方法的主题来了解有效的公共部门组织。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project analyzes efforts to spread practices associated with a case of unusually effective public administration in a challenging environment. There is a critical need to understand how to increase honest and effective public administration within low-income, difficult environments because it is in the national interest for financial commitments to be effective and strategic. Public sector organizational effectiveness is a critical foundation for other efforts to improve human wellbeing, whether providing education, improving public health, broadening opportunities, or stimulating economic growth. This project will seek to explain observed differences in performance from efforts to replicate fully a commercial court model in six regions and distinct efforts to spread Alternative Dispute Resolution to courts throughout all regions. The project advances the fields of organizational scholarship and macrosociological scholarship by analyzing how social factors influence the ability to identify and successfully adopt practices that may enhance organizational effectiveness. The educational objective of the project is to foster a new subfield of scholars focused on explaining variation in organizational effectiveness within public sectors.The research approach is a mixed methods analysis evaluating five theoretically informed hypotheses. Study 1 assesses the hypotheses through qualitative comparative case analysis of six newly created regional commercial courts, drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews with judges and staff. Study 2 examines the spread of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to courts, constructing and analyzing a detailed quantitative dataset by surveying the population of judges eligible to conduct ADR (n=333), collecting information on demographics, prior professional experience, experience with ADR, and professional networks. These distinct but related studies will advance understanding of variation in organizational strength within and between organizational systems. The work also contributes to establishing the social foundations of organizational effectiveness, thereby contributing to ongoing multidisciplinary debates on why we observe persistent differences in organizational performance in both public and private sectors. The proposed work brings crucial sociological variables into the analysis of how particular features of social context and individual interpretation influence adaption outcomes, for example analyzing how new practices that are technically capable of improving effectiveness intersect with social foundations that shape whether those new practices can be effectively implemented. The research products will be integrated into undergraduate teaching on social science methods. The research also will be integrated into graduate-level training workshops to help foster a broader research community around the topic of socio-organizational approaches to understanding effective public sector organizations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.