As qualitative interviewers, we know firsthand that the emotional labor of interviewing does not stop at the interview; rather, interviewers continue to carry the emotional labor as they “re-tell” interviewees’ stories with credibility and compassion. This research offers our autoethnographic reflections on conducting qualitative interviews with public service practitioners around topics of gender and motivation, relying on our observations and immersive experiences from interview research. Too often following interviews, we seem to ask ourselves “Where do we go from here?” as we struggle to make sense of stories from interviewees. We argue being prepared to embrace the emotional labor associated with qualitative research is necessary for producing meaningful qualitative work in public administration. Through vignettes of our own research experiences, this work helps to convey the powerful opportunities that qualitative research offers practitioners and scholars of public administration. We offer our experiences and coping strategies for fellow researchers as they engage in the emotional, intimate, and intense journey of conducting qualitative research. In doing so, we illustrate how embracing the emotional labor of interviewing can lead to liberatory and rich new understandings in researching a variety of contemporary issues in public administration.

Despite a general awareness of the potential of big data in terms of public interest, several obstacles prevent their effective sharing. This study, linking the discourse on data to the concepts of data value and accountability, aims at emancipating the scientific debate from the emphasis on administrative transparency and the protection of privacy, tracing new perspectives for future research. The present research examines the main peer-reviewed articles published by journals that have dealt with data value and accountability across the public and private dimensions. The bibliometric analysis carried out indicates a propensity by current literature to consider the issue of data value creation either only in the private (data as input to improve business performance or customer relations) or in the public dimension (open data government models). This means that research on behavioral data for public governance has so far been underestimated. Evidence shows that big data value creation is closely associated with a collective process where multiple levels of interaction and data sharing develop among private and public actors in a multilayered accountability environment.

Corruption enables private gains for public purposes, violates democracy, and incapacitates the majority of people. Though under-discussed, business or corporate corruption rather flourishes from governments’ various omissions and commissions. The field-responses in several parts of West Bengal, India reveal that people have sound understanding of both business and government corruption, but their individual efforts are too inadequate in countering corruption. Still, such awareness; and people’s continued interest in politics sets the context before collective capability: by non-violent means, people need to use the state’s space for asserting empowerment and agency; and revitalize the regulatory agencies, as countervailing forces for strengthening democracy’s space against corruption.

Combatting corruption has been a long-standing commitment for Jordan, which had particularly heightened in light of the Arab Spring in 2011, with increasing demand for stricter measures and more transparency being voiced by Jordanian political movements. However, despite strong will for change, Jordan had done less to curb informal practices in public administration such as “Wasta,” which relies on its deeply-embedded notion of cultural legitimacy in circumventing laws and regulations. This article investigates perceptions of “Wasta” through a sociocultural lens that places emphasis on how culture and informal interactions can challenge mainstream understandings of corruption. Drawing on elite interviews with senior public officials and politicians in Jordan, it argues that conventional understandings of corruption that are typically grounded in western literature may be less useful for Jordan in tackling deeply-embedded societal practices such as Wasta. The study finds that corruption and Wasta cannot be conceptualized as one and the same due to intrinsic differences between their subjective goals. The study concludes by suggesting that new approaches in defining unethical use of social capital in public administration need to be developed in order for Jordan to improve its capacity for tackling the negative impacts of Wasta.

This paper considers the genealogy of the “revisionist” approaches to corruption. The core of the approaches is the idea that practices deviating from formal rules or “accepted norms” with the objective of serving private ends may have a positive aggregate-level impact. No less important, the approaches are skeptic about anti-corruption attempts. In interrogating the revisionist approaches, the paper demonstrates that corruption studies have ignored important ideas, causing it to remain intertwined with moralism, despite proclamations otherwise. The paper thus argues that incorporating revisionist ideas might ease the discontent in corruption studies and improve public integrity.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, politicization of public health policy has loomed over the governmental response in the United States. The scope of politicization is underscored by instances of political pressures faced by public employees across state and local government. Observation of such instances prompts questions regarding the implications of highly politicized crisis on public personnel systems. Using systematic qualitative content analysis of data from syndicated news articles, this study identifies publicized instances of adverse personnel actions experienced by public employees during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the identification of publicized instances, this study also explores legislative trends focusing on public personnel systems during highly politicized emergency conditions. Results outline the positional roles subject to adverse actions, along with traits of legislative activity changing public personnel systems in the states identified. Implications of the study and considerations for future research are then discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major public governance issue in the United States since 2020. Public officials at all levels of government have provided important policies to control the spread of the pandemic and reduce its impact to society. This paper examines public value and ethical challenges that are related to the government’s pandemic responses. The paper first provides a review of value and ethical studies in public administration and public health crisis. It then examines value concerns and ethical challenges in COVID management and policy cases and the influence of political polarization to the value challenges. The paper concludes with discussions about the pandemic’s comprehensive challenges to the traditional professional management and suggestions of public value studies and trainings.

The present study embarks on a scientific quantitative assessment of Russian disinformation effects in Baltic States. A cross-sectional survey and the partial least squares structural equation modeling were employed as research tools. It was found that Russian disinformation is aimed at increasing the perceived distrust of governments, perceived lack of career possibilities, perceived lack of justice, and perceived imminence of military actions in the region. These are also echoed in the decrease in citizens’ incentives for investment activities. The largest of the Baltic States, Lithuania, served as an empirical basis for the research.

This study examined whether meritocracy in the civil service (merit-based hiring and administrative impartiality) can produce desirable outcomes, specifically recruiting and retaining highly competent public employees. Using data from the 2015 Quality of Government Expert Survey II, which polled 886 public administration experts from 149 countries, this study found that, overall, merit-based practices in government can enhance the capacity of public employees to promote the efficiency of public services, strive to help citizens, obey the laws, actively implement public policy, and uphold integrity. However, testing the hypothesized model with sub-samples from seven geographic regions/groups (Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Oceania, European Union (EU) countries, and non-EU countries) revealed varying relationships. Specifically, in North America and Oceania, meritocracy was not statistically associated with supplying bureaucrats who concern for efficiency. In North America, meritocracy was not statistically associated with supplying bureaucrats who strive to help citizens and obey the laws. Interestingly, the positive relationship between meritocracy and enlisting bureaucrats with an active willingness to implement policy laid down by politicians can only be found in EU countries. Finally, in North America and Oceania, meritocracy was not statistically associated with enhancing integrity in public administration.

The purpose of this study is to examine the significance of vision, virtues and values—attributes of leadership ethos in shaping a framework to fulfill ethical duties owed by leaders. The paper begins by highlighting examples of some types of modern leadership associated with selected macro environment forces namely political, religious and cultural. It then identifies leadership ethos as a leadership perspective that can guide leaders toward fulfilling their ethical duties through vision, virtues and values as premises of trust. The study discusses compliance-based and integrity-based leadership as indication of the level of trust followers have in their leaders based on the nature of ethical duties owed by leaders. Following are four action steps for the implementation and practice of leadership ethos with a view of enhancing the fulfilment of ethical duties owed by the leaders. By incorporating the three key elements of LE (vision, virtues and values), leaders should inspire others to transcend their own self-interests in the pursuit of a higher purpose, pursue organizational excellence while honouring duties to employees/followers to keep them informed, provide them with the resources to achieve individual goals, and seek their highest potential.