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call for papers: nonprofit management for social change

ASPA's Section on Nonprofit Management has issued a call for papers for a symposium to explore how nonprofit and philanthropic research and practice might embrace its interdisciplinarity by developing theories and methodological approaches to challenge traditional ways of understanding and address wicked problems facing communities today. We invite you to submit original manuscripts on methodological approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic studies that embrace interdisciplinarity in a number of ways. Please see the attached for more details.

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PAQ Articles

An Advanced Degree in Public Administration – Is It Valued by City Councils?

JAMES VANDERLEEUW, JASON SIDES and BRIAN WILLIAMS
PAQ, Vol. 39 No. 3, (2015)

Does holding an advanced degree in public administration matter to city councils, the local political institution that makes the hiring decision? Previous studies of city manager education place emphasis on city managers receiving professional training in public administration, and do so from a strong normative tradition stressing the professionalization of local government. The analysis presented in this paper asks whether city councils in fact place greater value on hiring a manager who holds an advanced degree in public administration compared to managers with other educational backgrounds. We employ logistic regression analysis of responses provided by city managers in the state of Texas to determine the extent to which this is the case. We find that an advanced degree in public administration is valued more than other educational backgrounds by city councils, and this value is independent of social and economic characteristics of cities and traits of individual managers.

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