acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

This study focuses on the job definitions held by police patrol personnel. The demographic and experiential variables that influence the development of job definitions in policing are examined. The substantive meanings of these definitions are also identified. The ecology of the patrol function and the highly differentiated nature of the police environment encourage the development of individualized job definitions. / The research centers on the differences in patrol officer job definitions held by supervisors and selected officer groups. Differences in job definitions can adversely impact the capacity of the organization to communicate expected behaviors to the employees through mechanisms such as performance appraisal. The appraisal process is particularly important in policing because these organizations tend to hire at entry level and to promote from within their ranks. The effects of differences in job definitions on perceptions of appraisal fairness, perceptions of supervisory adequacy, and appraisal scores are explored. / The job definitions are derived from the factor analysis of the ratings of the importance of generally used performance appraisal categories. It is determined that officers generally perceive a lower level of supervision than supervisors; lower levels of perceived supervision lead to lower levels of perceived appraisal fairness. Very few relationships between officer group membership and appraisal outcomes are identified, and differences in job definitions mediate only the positive relationship identified between tenure and performance appraisal scores. / Police job definitions are generally idiosyncratic. However, some consensus exists between the officers and supervisors on those dimensions of the job that were identified through the factor analysis procedure. These dimensions accounted for only slightly more than 50% of the variance in the ratings. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0945. / Major Professor: Richard Chackerian. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Leviathan governments have a single goal in mind: to maximize tax revenues. This dissertation looks at some of the possible constraints that Leviathan governments face in their quest for growth. In particular, we are interested in the effects of intergovernmental competition as a constraint on Leviathan government size. / The standard theory of intergovernmental competition concludes that if migration costs are low, and districts are good substitutes, then competing governments (even revenue-maximizing governments) will not be able to exploit their citizens through excessive taxation. To do so would encourage their taxpayers to flee to other less intrusive governments. / Federalism is a way for a single government to artificially introduce some aspects of intergovernmental competition. By decentralizing the authority to raise and spend tax revenues, the federal system creates a competitive insurance policy against exploitative government. With the wide range of degrees of federalism across nations and states, the Leviathan view holds that centralized governments should be larger than decentralized ones, all things being equal. In centralized governments the internal competitive constraint is weaker, thus leaving room for Leviathan to increase taxation. / We used three data sets: international, state and local, and state educational, to determine if centralization of government tends to increase government size as predicted by Leviathan. Our results from all three samples are mildly supportive of this view. / In addition, we feel the results are strong enough to reject the notion that government centralization encourages cost savings that tend to reduce government size. This result, in itself, is a valuable piece of evidence against the trend towards increasing consolidation of government on economies of scale grounds. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2469. / Major Professor: James D. Gwartney. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

This dissertation examines the relative importance of environmental and incremental factors for state spending. The scant literature addressing this question suffers from major deficiencies. This dissertation remedies these deficiencies and extends the scope of determinants study by using more appropriate techniques and data. / This study examines total expenditures and four categories of state spending--education, highways, welfare, and natural resources--modeled with five independent variables--incremental variable, per capita personal income, federal grants, population, and party control. In addition to the exploration of the relative importance of each determinant for each expenditure category, this study compares goodness of fit of the model and the relative importance of determinants for each spending category and across categories. / This dissertation found that the factors drawn from the incrementalism theory and the determinants theory showed higher explanatory power for welfare-related expenditures than non-welfare-related expenditures. The incremental variable proved to be the most influential variable and the party control variable proved to be least influential for all spending categories. There are, however, many cases where the incremental variable has smaller $\beta$ coefficients than other factors and there are even cases where there are negative relationships between policy expenditures and the incremental variable. Sharkansky and Hofferbert's hypothesis that educational and welfare expenditures have similar $\beta$ coefficients and highways and natural resources expenditures have similar $\beta$ coefficients was not confirmed in this study (1969). The two types of policy expenditures in each group showed different $\beta$ coefficients. / The considerable variation of the relative importance across spending categories and among states demonstrates the value of separate time series analyses of categorical spending of 48 states in order to obtain answers for the question, "what determines state spending?" It also points out the necessity of incorporating state-specific and policy-specific factors in the model in order to better explain state spending in future research. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 3068. / Major Professor: Gloria A. Grizzle. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

Despite a long-running debate about the existence and nature of the nonprofit sector, scholars rarely make clear how organizations constitute the sector, nor do they describe how this sector evolves. Scholars have typically focused on one of two conceptions about the sector -- either as a unitary sector or as individual sub-areas of a nonprofit sector. The following questions emerge: is there a nonprofit sector as has been asserted by some scholars? If there is a nonprofit sector, how does the nonprofit sector evolve? What is problematic about this inquiry is that there exist various distinctive types of nonprofit organizations that cannot easily be integrated into a notion of a unitary nonprofit sector. On the other hand, they cannot be treated as being completely different from others. So, how can this diversity of nonprofit organizations be understood? And how can the organizational dynamics of nonprofit organizations be explained? Does a "broad," unitary nonprofit sector have its own dynamics of organizational change regardless of sub-components within the sector? Or do sub-population nonprofit organizations have their unique dynamics regardless of the existence of a "broad" nonprofit sector? If so, are there distinguishable effects of a "broad" nonprofit sector on the evolution of sub-populations of nonprofits? These questions are not only related to nonprofit studies, but also to the main questions of the population ecology perspective. Cooperative and competitive interrelationships are central to organization theory. Organizational ecology, and density-dependence theory in particular, investigates how large-scale mutualistic and competitive processes affect the entry, or birth, -of new organizations, and thus large-scale organizational evolution. To date, existing ecological research has focused on populations of organizations that are relatively homogeneous with respect to their organizational form – often defined through salient product markets. However, some organizational forms are complex, thus resulting in heterogeneous populations, as illustrated by the nonprofit sector. The nonprofit sector holds a common cognitive base that has been accepted by the public but operates in diverse arenas with different strategies and organizational forms. From a theoretical perspective that uses population ecology and density dependence theory, the present study investigates what implications such heterogeneity has on the mutualistic and competitive relationships within a population, and how this affects the predictions of nonprofit organization entry. The identity approach to organizational forms is used as a basis for conceptualizing complex forms as systems of hierarchically nested sub-forms. Furthermore, the issue of hierarchical form complexity is extended by combining the differences of geographical location that have been studied by ecologists. Hypotheses are derived regarding density-dependent entry in heterogeneous populations characterized by complex organizational forms. The hypotheses are tested with comprehensive data on nonprofit organizations in Florida counties from 1994 to 2007, including ten sub-forms and eight geographical boundaries of sub-forms. This study anticipates that the systemic hierarchical structures in terms of both form and location of populations have impacts on the entry of sub-forms. The key findings of the study can be summarized as follows. First, the systemic structure of the underlying complex form has clear implications for the operation of the processes of density-dependent legitimation and competition. The different units and levels have clear communal interdependencies and exert mutualistic and competitive forces on one another. Second, legitimation tends to operate on a broader scale than competition. Within the simple systemic structure with the sub-populations nested directly under the main population, virtually all ecological competition is contained at the sub-population level. However, the main population has a much stronger legitimizing effect on sub-population entry than the individual sub-populations themselves. Third, the regional density variables show no effects in most models, unlike a number of earlier studies based on the empirical tests of industrial organizations in the geographical context. This may be interpreted as meaning that nonprofit organizations are strongly rooted in the local community. The present study contributes to organization theory by shedding additional light on the mechanisms creating organizational diversity, how such diversity is structured, and what implications such diversity has on the large-scale mutualistic and competitive interdependencies between organizations. Density dependence theory is extended by proposing how legitimation and competition operate in settings with complex organizational forms and underlying multilevel systems of forms. For a nonprofit sector study, most importantly, this study provides a significant clue about understanding the existence and nature of the nonprofit sector. Unlike the dominating two conceptions about the sector -- either as a unitary sector or as individual sub-areas of the nonprofit sector without considering other nonprofit dimensions, this study shows that a nonprofit sector is in fact a heterogeneous population with significant constituent nonprofit sub-populations. This study also has implications for nonprofit managerial practice. For potential entrepreneurs' decisions to create organizations, it is possible to infer which kinds of external settings are most favorable for entrepreneurial activity, and where the entry of new nonprofit organizations is at its toughest. For nonprofit managers, it may be advantageous for individual organizations to follow and even replicate existing organizational forms that have attained considerable amounts of legitimation. The study also has important implications for nonprofit managers who seek to expand service boundaries of a nonprofit organization. / A Dissertation submitted to the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester 2010. / Date of Defense: June 17, 2010. / Nonprofit Organizations, Organizational Theory, Population Ecology, Density Dependence Theory / Includes bibliographical references. / Ralph S. Brower, Professor Directing Dissertation; John Mayo, University Representative; W. Earle Klay, Committee Member; Kaifeng Yang, Committee Member.

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Thesis (PhD (Public Affairs))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Abstract in English. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.