CAREER: Pockets of Effectiveness and the Diffusion of Organizational Capacity

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

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.