Abstract: "As governments are increasingly experiencing shifts away from ‘simple’ problems and facing ‘wicked’ and interconnected challenges, fiscal constraints seem to have become a constant in government operations. Increasingly, it appears that the capacity to innovate will represent the dividing line between success and failure. Governments and international organizations have focused on public service innovation (PSI) and agility (Kattel et al 2014; OECD 2015; Osborne and Brown 2013). Considerable energy, time and resources are dedicated to the exploration of innovative ways of renewing public service and building capacity to better support service delivery and policy advice at the organizational culture and structural levels (Schultz Larsen 2015; Stewart-Weeks and Kastelle 2014; Albury 2011). We argue that a major weakness in the literature and practical analysis of PSI rests with the definition of innovation itself. We lack a shared definition of what – precisely – public service innovation is, in part because we still rely on a model designed for private sector manufacturing (Porter 1985) and in part because we have increasingly made it a prescriptive positive bias in public administration to ‘innovate.’ We propose a solution by approaching innovation as a methodology: a way in which analysis and decisions are modeled around core organizational functions. This allows us to circumvent the positive bias (i.e., measuring innovation based on the success of change) and to focus on the agents of change both internal and external to the organization that diffuse and champion the logic of innovation."

Abstract: Logic models (Yin, 2014) are useful tools for policy analysis, development and evaluation. They permit a visual representation of a problem, potential interventions and policy objectives. They serve to operationalize a complex chain of activities repeated over time, explain the linkages between those activities, highlight the transitions between them and provide contextual conditions. This paper compares existing models of terrorist financing and their related policy outcomes. Substantively, this paper presents a revised version of John Schmidt’s Terrorist Resourcing Model (TRM) as an alternative to the money-laundering model for counter-terrorist financing in Canada. Conceptually, it contributes to the literature on logic models and how they can influence policy development and evaluation.

Paper / Communication

Abstract: "I argue that the governmentality approach is optimal for studying Canadian public bureaucracies. The study of public bureaucracy in Canadian Political Science and Public Administration has been largely dominated by descriptive-normative institutional analysis. Such work focuses primarily on analyzing the institutional and operational formations and reforms of Canadian public services, from the Keynesian welfare state to New Public Management (NPM), to network-based governance models. While this work offers useful insights into the material practice of Canadian public bureaucracies, it has not effectively situated Canadian public bureaucracy within the context of broader social relations and phenomena. For instance, it obfuscates neoliberalism’s impact by limiting contextual discussions to electoral politics, and dismissing such “ideological” considerations because elected governments both right and left have implemented similar policies and reforms. Using the example of the implementation of Lean Management in the Saskatchewan health bureaucracy, I highlight the shifting dynamics of bureaucratic expertise in order to explore the suitability of governmentality as a theoretical approach to understanding contemporary models of public bureaucracy in Canada. Exploring the uses of governmentality research for the study of public bureaucracy, I argue, offers a potentially novel way of reviving theoretical considerations of Canadian bureaucracy, a robust framework for the empirical study of contemporary bureaucracy, and a beach-head for governmentality scholars to engage with a topic that, until now, has only attracted their limited attention.

Abstract: In the current era of austerity and ever-shrinking bureaucracies and cutbacks, improving morale and the overall job satisfaction of employees could become a focal point of policymakers. This is particularly true in the Canadian federal context, given the history of Le Relève in the 1990s, and the current low levels of employee morale in the federal public service. Job satisfaction in organizations throughout the world has been argued to be affected by numerous variables, including age (measured in terms of cohort, chronological age, or life cycle) (Armentor and Forsyth 2005), job tenure and rank (Buzawa 1994; Forsyth and Copes 1994), education level (Griffin et al. 1978), gender (Donohue and Heywood 2004; Bender et al 2005), level of autonomy (Katz 1978; Graham et al 2011), salary (Rudd and Wiseman 1962), diversity management policies (Pitts 2006; 2009), and cognitive variables, such as intelligence (Ganzach 1998), among others. With so many possible causal variables of job satisfaction, it is clearly difficult for policymakers to create policies that will sufficiently improve job satisfaction. To that end, this paper will seek to understand job satisfaction in the Canadian federal public service. By using the 2011 and 2014 Public Service Employee Survey, which surveyed over 150,000 public servants, this study will probe which employees are most satisfied with their jobs and why, thus shedding light in possible avenues for future organizational performance improvement policies. This will be done through regression analysis, which will determine which variables have the strongest impacts on job satisfaction.