In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

JoEllen Pope (UNC-Charlotte, Public Policy) is presenting “New Public Disaster Management: Does Managerial Discretion Impact Organizational Performance” in the 8:00 session on Friday. She has a Master of Public Administration with a concentration in Emergency Management. She is a practicing Certified Public Accountant with over twenty years’ experience and served as a firefighter for seven years. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr. Suzanne M. Leland, is titled Flooded with Complexity: Do Organizational Structural Complexity, Coordination, and Managerial Discretion Impact Natural Disaster Preparedness?.  JoEllen will defend her dissertation Fall 2019. She has a publication on political influences over county-level election administration expenditures in the American Journal of Political Science, two at Social Science Quarterly, one at Urban Affairs Review, and another three papers under review. JoEllen researches public finance, emergency preparedness and disaster, and local election administration finance. Here is the abstract of her job market paper, which is the paper being presented at ABFM:

Between 1953 and February 2017, United States presidents declared 2288 major natural disaster declarations and 369 emergency declarations (FEMA, 2017). Hurricane Katrina alone affected 31 colleges and universities in the areas along the Gulf Coast (Kapucu & Khosa, 2013). Improved preparedness performance can impact response effectiveness (Kapucu, 2008). Organizational performance is a global issue regarding how management influences the performance of public organizations and how we measure it (Boyne et. al., 2006). Also, allocation of resources and decision-making are key areas of research (Pugh et al., 1968). Previous literature on public management presents a gap regarding institutions of higher education (IHE). This is especially important since public and private nonprofit colleges include over 90% of enrollment (NCES, 2016). Regarding IHEs and performance of the natural disaster preparedness function, this study asks: How do we measure preparedness outputs? How does budgetary discretion affect performance? How does the centralization of decision-making affect performance? and How does organizational red tape affect it? New public management (NPM) reforms to improve effectiveness and efficient have impacted public sector over last 25 years (Christensen & Laegreid, 2011; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). As a part of NPM, public managerialism claims that there is a similar set of management skills and methods that are applicable to public organizations and there is a shift in emphasis from inputs to outputs and outcomes (Pollitt, 1998; Christensen & Laegreid, 2011). This study uses survey data merged with secondary data on IHEs to perform exploratory factor and regression analysis to answer these questions.

Find more of JoEllen Pope’s research, teaching, and interests see her website here.