Mary E. Guy

Mary Ellen Guy (born ca. 1950) is an American political scientist, and Professor the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. After her MA in Rehabilitation Counseling from University of Florida, and another MA in psychology from University of South Carolina, she obtained her Ph.D. degree in political science from University of South Carolina. She is known for her work in public Management, organizational behavior, and human resources. She currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Affairs Education.

Quotes edit

Most public service jobs require interpersonal contact that is either face-to-face or voice-to-voice - relational work that goes beyond testable job skills but is essential for job completion. This unique book focuses on this emotional labor and what it takes to perform it.The authors weave a powerful narrative of stories from the trenches gleaned through interviews, focus groups, and survey data. They go beyond the veneer of service delivery to the real, live, person-to-person interactions that give meaning to public service.For anyone who has ever felt apathetic toward government work, the words of caseworkers, investigators, administrators, attorneys, correctional staff, and 9/11 call-takers all show the human dimension of bureaucratic work and underscore what it means to work "with feeling."
- Mary E. Guy, Meredith A. Newman, and Sharon H. Mastracci. Emotional labor: Putting the service in public service. Routledge, 2014; abstract.

"Three steps forward, two steps backward: The status of women's integration into public management." 1993 edit

Mary E. Guy, "Three steps forward, two steps backward: The status of women's integration into public management." Public Administration Review (1993): 285-292.

Is there symmetry between women and men in public management in terms of opportunity, power, and numbers? Mary Guy examines two decades of affirmative action initiatives. She finds the number of women in decision-making positions disproportionately low when compared to their numbers in the public work force. Women's integration into the fabric of American governance has been marked by surges of progress followed by periods of quiescence. Her article compares the status of women to that of men in career public management positions and argues that women have a long way to go before they will reach parity.
- p. 285; Abstract

"Ties that bind: The link between public administration and political science." 2003 edit

Mary E. Guy, "Ties that bind: The link between public administration and political science." Journal of Politics 65.3 (2003): 641-655

A century ago two fields, political science and public administration, were one. At the 1939 meeting of the American Political Science Association, public administration created its own professional organization, and the two fields’ paths have since diverged.
- p. 641.

When I was president of the American Society for Public Administration, I grappled with questions of where that field was going, how it could make itself relevant to those who must steer the business of government on a daily basis, to those who must respond to citizens 24/7... Now I find myself asking a similar question, but this time in terms of political science. Happily, I see glimmers of light, giving hope that the field is returning to that which made it relevant in the first place: a search for guidance and truths about what it takes, as first Woodrow Wilson (1887), then Marshall Dimock (1937), and more recently John Rohr (1986) remind us, to "run a constitution."
- p. 642-3.

When Woodrow Wilson wrote his essay “The Study of Administration” in 1887, he attempted to square the needs of a complex industrial nation with the demands of a democratic political culture (Felker 1993). With a vision of administration untouched by politics, he prescribed their separation. Frank Goodnow’s book Politics and Administration (1900) elaborated on this dichotomy, and Leonard White’s (1926) work made the separation of politics and administration an article of faith in the first textbook on the subject. This is emblematic of a turn public administration made at its inception, a decision paralleled by political science as it embraced the “god” of science and ignored the truth of context, history, values, and, messiest of all, unforeseen, unpredictable exigencies.
- p. 643.

The man instrumental in the creation of the Brookings Institution, Charles E. Merriam, sought to move toward a “science of politics.” In his presidential address to APSA in 1921, he spoke of what he called a pressing problem, the reconstruction of the methods of political study (Merriam 1921, 174). Thus began a trend that placed increasing emphasis on the development of theories and testable hypotheses.
- p. 644.

By the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, political science courses had begun appearing on college campuses. This was followed by the establishment of political science departments and degree programs.
- p. 644

As a subfield, public administration first appeared separately in the annual listing of doctoral dissertations in the American Political Science Review in 1936.
- p. 646

Throughout the 1940s, discourse produced a redefinition and reconstruction of issues. Shifting from the philosophical to the positivist, behavioralism drove the paradigm through which political science research would be conducted and legitimated... Theoretical science replaced the original intent of reform as the raison d’etre of the field.
- p. 647-8

External links edit

Mary Guy, Academics, University of Colorado Denver