Courses

(previously Intergovernmental and Intersectoral Management)

In recent decades, public problem-solving and public service provision have increasingly taken place through collaborations and partnerships among entities across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors and between different governments. This course overviews how these three different sectors and governments can work together to tackle a wide array of public problems including human services, health care, education, environmental protection, and public safety. The course examines the opportunities, challenges, and strategies involved in the development and management of cross-sector and intergovernmental collaborations to create synergy between sectors for public purposes. These synergies happen between sectors, and at times concurrently, among levels of government.

The course addresses public sector human resources management from multiple perspectives, including theoretical, legal, political, policy and practical. It covers the important contemporary issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), as well as other critical issues such as public sector labor relations, performance management, ethics, and privatization.

This course addresses labor relations in the public sector from multiple perspectives, including theoretical, legal, political, policy and practical. It examines several aspects of public sector collective bargaining between management and labor unions from the perspectives of union organizing (how labor unions are formed), bargaining (how union contracts are produced), and dispute resolution (how bargaining disputes and grievances are resolved). Students should gain knowledge and an understanding of the practices used by public sector unions at the federal, stated and local levels of government. Public sector unions are important vehicles for promoting fair, equitable and ethical practices in government workplaces.

This course explores the leadership opportunities, challenges, and complexities of managing diversity in public and nonprofit organizations. Starting with a rigorous examination of the values of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) and their intricate links to critical facets such as management, ethical leadership, social justice, and representative bureaucracy, the course then introduces public policies relevant to DEI with a specific focus on gender, racial, and ethnic relations. The overarching objective of this course is to equip students with the skills necessary to foster equitable and inclusive working environments for professionals in the public and nonprofit sectors.

This course explores theories of organizational behavior and performance as applied to public sector agencies. The course covers such topics as development and fulfillment of organizational mandates, legal and political constraints associated with leading public organizations, organizational authority systems, relationships between public and private sectors, and use of resources within organizations including information and communications technologies.

This course introduces students to performance measurement and management in the public and nonprofit sectors. It covers theories of public and nonprofit performance as well as the history of performance measurement in society. Students learn tools for performance measurement, such as index construction, benchmarking, trend analysis, dashboards, and data visualization. The role of technology and big data are also considered. Students learn how to align performance metrics with strategic goals and objectives in order to facilitate organizational learning and improvement. But consideration is also given to problems of gaming, goal displacement, and other unintended consequences of performance measurement.