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"CITY MANAGERS"
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Artificial intelligence in local governments: perceptions of city managers on prospects, constraints and choices
Highly sophisticated capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have skyrocketed its popularity across many industry sectors globally. The public sector is one of these. Many cities around the world are trying to position themselves as leaders of urban innovation through the development and deployment of AI systems. Likewise, increasing numbers of local government agencies are attempting to utilise AI technologies in their operations to deliver policy and generate efficiencies in highly uncertain and complex urban environments. While the popularity of AI is on the rise in urban policy circles, there is limited understanding and lack of empirical studies on the city manager perceptions concerning urban AI systems. Bridging this gap is the rationale of this study. The methodological approach adopted in this study is twofold. First, the study collects data through semi-structured interviews with city managers from Australia and the US. Then, the study analyses the data using the summative content analysis technique with two data analysis software. The analysis identifies the following themes and generates insights into local government services: AI adoption areas, cautionary areas, challenges, effects, impacts, knowledge basis, plans, preparedness, roadblocks, technologies, deployment timeframes, and usefulness. The study findings inform city managers in their efforts to deploy AI in their local government operations, and offer directions for prospective research.
Journal Article
The Impact of Government Structure on Local Public Expenditures
Though the relationship between local government structure and expenditure has received considerable attention, there is little consensus as to how the features of representative government affect local expenditure. An exception is city council size, which has consistently been found to be positively related to spending. Previous results rely on crosssectional estimation which may be subject to omitted variable bias. This paper analyzes three components of municipal governments—the form of government, the size of the city council, and the election method of city councilors. Once fixed effects estimation is employed, the positive relationship between city council size and expenditure disappears.
Journal Article
The Determinants of U.S. City Manager’s Sense of Power
Research on public managers’ power at the national level has investigated an extensive range of contributing factors. Studies in local governments, however, have focused more on structural characteristics of governments under which managers serve. This paper proposes and tests a more comprehensive model to explain city managers’ sense of power. Community base, political savvy, and tenure of the city managers positively affect their sense of power. However, powerful councils with high job engagement and are supported by outside groups reduce managers’ sense of power. Results show no significant relationship between administrative capacity and city manager’s sense of power.
Journal Article
The People in Your Neighborhood: Social Interactions and Mutual Fund Portfolios
We find that socially connected fund managers have more similar holdings and trades. The overlap of funds whose managers reside in the same neighborhood is considerably higher than that of funds whose managers live in the same city but in different neighborhoods. These effects are larger when managers share a similar ethnic background, and are not explained by preferences. Valuable information is transmitted through these peer networks: a long-short strategy composed of stocks purchased minus sold by neighboring managers delivers positive risk-adjusted returns. Unlike prior empirical work, our tests disentangle the effects of social interactions from community effects.
Journal Article
Adaptive pathways and coupled infrastructure: seven centuries of adaptation to water risk and the production of vulnerability in Mexico City
Infrastructure development is central to the processes that abate and produce vulnerabilities in cities. Urban actors, especially those with power and authority, perceive and interpret vulnerability and decide when and how to adapt. When city managers use infrastructure to reduce urban risk in the complex, interconnected city system, new fragilities are introduced because of inherent system feedbacks. We trace the interactions between system dynamics and decision-making processes over 700 years of Mexico City’s adaptations to water risks, focusing on the decision cycles of public infrastructure providers (in this case, government authorities). We bring together two lenses in examining this history: robustness-vulnerability trade-offs to explain the evolution of systemic risk dynamics mediated by feedback control, and adaptation pathways to focus on the evolution of decision cycles that motivate significant infrastructure investments. Drawing from historical accounts, archeological evidence, and original research on water, engineering, and cultural history, we examine adaptation pathways of humans settlement, water supply, and flood risk. Mexico City’s history reveals insights that expand the theory of coupled infrastructure and lessons salient to contemporary urban risk management: (1) adapting by spatially externalizing risks can backfire: as cities expand, such risks become endogenous; (2) over time, adaptation pathways initiated to address specific risks may begin to intersect, creating complex trade-offs in risk management; and (3) city authorities are agents of risk production: even in the face of new exogenous risks (climate change), acknowledging and managing risks produced endogenously may prove more adaptive. History demonstrates that the very best solutions today may present critical challenges for tomorrow, and that collectively people have far more agency in and influence over the complex systems we live in than is often acknowledged.
Journal Article
Does Transparency Lead to Pay Compression?
This paper asks whether pay disclosure in the public sector changes wage setting at the top of the distribution. I examine a 2010 California mandate that required municipal salaries to be posted online. Among top managers, disclosure led to approximately 7 percent average compensation declines, and a 75 percent increase in their quit rate, relative to managers in cities that had already disclosed salaries. The wage cuts were largely nominal. Wage cuts were larger in cities with higher initial compensation, but not in cities where compensation was initially out of line with (measured) fundamentals. The response is more consistent with public aversion to high compensation than the effects of increased accountability.
Journal Article
Contracting or Public Delivery? The Importance of Service, Market, and Management Characteristics
Analysis of local government contracting decisions typically focuses on transactions costs related to service characteristics, especially asset specificity and difficulty of contract management. This analysis expands the focus to include market characteristics (competition), citizen characteristics (public interest in the service delivery process), and place characteristics (metro status and public management) and finds these are the more important factors. A 2007 survey of US city managers' rankings of 67 services by transactions costs, competition, and citizen interest is combined with a 2007 national survey of city managers' sourcing decisions (direct public, intergovernment cooperation, for-profit and nonprofit contracting). Multinomial logit models of service delivery sourcing choice find that metro status and competition are key explanatory variables. Intergovernmental cooperation represents an important public market alternative when contract management is difficult and competition is low. For profit contracting is less common when citizen interest is high and competition is low. Governments with professional managers appear more effective in addressing these broader transactions costs of citizen interests, political and labor opposition, and market management.
Journal Article
Strategic concepts as micro-level tools in strategic sensemaking
Research summary: The purpose of this article is to illuminate the role of concepts in strategic sensemaking. Based on a longitudinal real-time study of a city organization, we demonstrate how the concept of \"selfresponsibility\" played a crucial role in strategic sensemaking. We develop a theoretical model that elucidates how strategic concepts are used in meaning-making, and how such concepts may be mobilized for the legitimation of strategic change. Our main contribution is to offer strategic concepts as a missing micro-level component of the language-based view of strategic processes and practices. By so doing, our analysis also adds to studies on strategic ambiguity and advances research on vocabularies. Managerial summary: Our analysis helps to understand the role of strategic concepts, that is, specific words or phrases with established and at least partly shared meanings, in an organization's strategy process. We show how adopting the concept \"self-responsibility\" helped managers in a city organization to make sense of environmental challenges and to promote change. Our analysis highlights how such concepts involve ambiguity that can help managers to establish common ground, but can also hinder implementation of specific decisions and actions if it grows over time. We suggest that under environmental changes, development of new strategic concepts may be crucial in helping managers to collectively deal with environmental changes and to articulate a new strategic direction for the organization.
Journal Article