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Item Six Blind Men and One Elephant – Proposing an Integrative Framework to Advance Research and Practice in Justice Philanthropy(Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, 2022) Paarlberg, Laurie E.; Walk, Marlene; Merritt, Cullen C.There are growing calls that philanthropic foundations across the globe can and should advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Initial evidence indicates that foundations have indeed responded as evidenced by pledges to change practice, increased funding for racial justice, and the emergence of new networks to support equity and justice. However, there is also great skepticism about whether the field of foundations are, in fact, able to make lasting changes given numerous critiques of philanthropy and its structural limitations. In this article, we summarize these critiques that suggest factors that make institutional philanthropy resistant to calls for equity and justice. We posit that a core obstacle is a lack of conceptual coherence within and across academic and practitioner literature about the meanings of terms and their implications for practice. Therefore, we propose a transdisciplinary conceptual framework of justice philanthropy that integrates the fragmented literature on justice-related aspects of philanthropy emerging from different disciplinary traditions such as ethics, political theory and political science, social movement theory, geography, public administration, and community development.Item A Call for Scholarly Inclusivity(Management Matters, 2020) Merritt, Cullen C.Item Representation through Lived Experience: Expanding Representative Bureaucracy Theory(Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 2020) Merritt, Cullen C.; Farnworth, Morgan D.; Kennedy, Sheila Suess; Abner, Gordon; Wright II, James E.; Merritt, BreancaThis study draws on the insights of managers in the behavioral health treatment system to explore the value of persons who bring lived experience to their organizational positions. Within these organizations, persons with relevant lived experience occupy various nonclinical and clinical positions. When facilities incorporate workers with lived experience, managers observe increased levels of trust between clients and service providers, an enhanced client-centered perspective among service providers, and higher quality in the services provided. This study may guide managers in considering how (or whether) human service organizations might institutionalize lived experience as a mechanism to help create a representative bureaucracy.Item Indianapolis-Marion County City-County Council: A Study of Council Effectiveness(Indiana University Public Policy Institute, 2020-02-28) Merritt, Cullen C.; Rutherford, AmandaThe purpose of this research is to measure and assess the effectiveness of the Indianapolis-Marion County City-County Council. Given that effectiveness may be defined in a number of ways, the research conducted includes many types of information that can provide a well-rounded assessment of the council.Item Social Equity and COVID-19: The Case of African Americans(Public Administration Review, 2020-05-23) Wright, James E.; Merritt, Cullen C.Emerging statistics demonstrate that COVID-19 disproportionately affects African Americans. The effects of COVID-19 for this population are inextricably linked to areas of systemic oppression and disenfranchisement, which are further exacerbated by COVID-19: (1) healthcare inequality; (2) segregation, overall health, and food insecurity; (3) underrepresentation in government and the medical profession; and (4) inequalities in participatory democracy and public engagement. Following a discussion of these issues, this article shares early and preliminary lessons and strategies on how public administration scholars and practitioners can lead in crafting equitable responses to this global pandemic to uplift the African American community.Item Do Personnel with Lived Experience Cultivate Public Values? Insights and Lessons from Mental Health Care Managers(Healthcare Management Forum, 2019) Merritt, Cullen C.Health care organizations charged with addressing public problems sometimes employ persons with relevant lived experience in meaningful organizational roles. Because of their prior experience living with the challenges their facilities are charged with addressing, these individuals have intimate knowledge of the subject matter that professional training and education cannot replicate. Mental health treatment facilities in particular have demonstrated a growing trend toward incorporating staff members with lived experience. This study conducted semi-structured interviews with senior-level managers of organizations in this field to gain insight into the public values associated with this practice. Findings reveal that several public values, including dialogue, social cohesion, sustainability, productivity, and altruism, are cultivated when treatment facilities incorporate staff members with lived experience into service delivery. This study concludes with lessons for mental health care managers seeking to innovatively address mental illness.Item What Makes an Organization Public? Managers’ Perceptions in the Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment System(American Review of Public Administration, 2019) Merritt, Cullen C.The question “What makes an organization public?” is a leading point of scholarly inquiry in the field of public administration. This study supplements existing theory on publicness by further exploring the primary influences on an organization’s publicness—influences identified by analyzing data from in-depth interviews with senior-level managers of mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities. Results from a grounded theoretical analysis of these managers’ perceptions provide support for a conceptual framework of organizational publicness in which political authority, horizontal engagement, and public engagement are associated with higher levels of publicness. Better understanding of the prism through which senior managers conceptualize publicness may enhance managerial awareness of the most salient structural and institutional mechanisms that empower treatment facilities to effectively support individuals suffering from mental health disorders such as substance abuse, emotional distress, and depression.Item Formalization and consistency heighten organizational rule following: Experimental and survey evidence(Public Administration, 2018) Borry, Erin L.; DeHart-Davis, Leisha; Kaufmann, Wesley; Merritt, Cullen C.; Mohr, Zachary; Tummers, LarsThis study examines the attributes of organizational rules that influence rule following. Rule following fosters organizational effectiveness by aligning individual behaviors with organizational preference. While a range of theoretical explanations has been offered for rule following, the characteristics of rule design and implementation have received less empirical attention. Borrowing from the green tape theory of effective rules, this study examines the influence of two particular characteristics—rule formalization and rule consistency—on rule following. Three studies, which include two vignette experiments and a survey of two local government organizations, provide the data for the research. The results suggest that rule formalization and rule consistency independently increase rule following, with mixed evidence of interaction effects. The broad implication is that public managers must attend to both rule design and implementation to foster organizational rule following.Item The Civic Dimension of School Voucher Programs(Public Integrity, 2018-10) Merritt, Cullen C.; Kennedy, Sheila Suess; Farnworth, Morgan D.America’s public schools have not been exempt from the movement to privatization and contracting out that has characterized government innovations over at least the past quarter century. A number of the issues raised by school voucher programs mirror the management and efficacy questions raised by privatization generally; however, because public education is often said to be “constitutive of the public,” using tax dollars to send the nation’s children to private schools implicates the distinctive role of public education in a democratic society in ways that more traditional contracting arrangements do not. Using a content analysis, the authors explore the extent to which school choice voucher programs are mandated by state statutes to integrate civics education into their curriculum. Findings reveal that across the fourteen states (and the District of Columbia) that have enacted school choice voucher programs, statutes exempt these programs from curriculum oversight, including civics requirements, and grant them considerable autonomy in designing their curricula. This study concludes by discussing the implications for ethical and accountable governance when primary and secondary schools fail to cultivate civic competence and civic literacy.Item The Cost of Saving Money: Public Service Motivation, Private Security Contracting, and the Salience of Employment Status(Public Performance & Management Review, 2018) Merritt, Cullen C.; Kennedy, Sheila Suess; Kienapple, Matt R.The growth of government outsourcing has triggered significant legal and social science research. That research has focused primarily on issues of cost, accountability, and management. A thus far understudied question concerns the relevance and importance of public service motivations (PSM), especially when a government agency is proposing to outsource services that are considered inherently governmental. This exploratory study centers on the use of private security guards to augment government-provided public safety, and investigates the public service motivations of part-time and full-time employees of private security firms that regularly partner with—or seek to protect the public independent of—local police. Findings reveal that the presence or absence of motivations consistent with PSM was not attributable to private sector employment, but to whether informants were part-time or full-time employees.