Conference Agenda

Ideas of Public Service Ethos (PSE) have been long standing in public administration pedagogies, in university courses and prominently in training for frontline public servants as well as being more traditionally associated with civil servants. Though PSE scholarship has drawn on the philosophical and historical roots of the idea, dating back to Aristotle, relatively little research has interrogated the relationship between pedagogy and PSE (Shand, Parker and Elliott, 2022). PSE has been examined in terms of Covid response as well as changes to delivery of public services and public management in the light of reforms and managerialism as well as collaborative changes in delivery (Shand et al., 2022). However, despite these recent conceptual advances in recent PSE research, there remains a yawning gap in the literature addressing our own experiences of PSE as academics in teaching public administration. Here, this paper seeks to rectify this gap in established thinking through providing an autobiographical diary account of an academic’s experiences of PSE in public administration pedagogy. Following the Covid – 19 pandemic, pedagogy has become more hybrid and shone a light on ideas of PSE in pedagogy as colleagues and students alike faced new challenges in teaching and learning, leading to ideas of duty, public service and duty to students, colleagues, as well as to our institutions and to our discipline. This paper puts forward an empirical account of an academic’s individual experiences of PSE in delivering public administration pedagogy, and through the empirical account then moves on to reimagine the conceptual importance of PSE in public administration pedagogy to those that design and deliver public administration programmes. In doing so, the paper seeks to reframe the concept of PSE through developing an understanding of autobiographical PSE in public administration pedagogy and then examining the conceptual importance of these accounts and reflections of how individual experiences and interpretations of PSE inform public administration pedagogy. The paper then charts future research agendas such as comparative experiences of public administration pedagogies and PSE.

The professionalism of street-level bureaucrats is undergoing significant development. The effectiveness of their work increasingly depends on their ability to transcend their own professional boundaries (Van Meerkerk & Edelenbos, 2018; Williams, 2012) and to create meaningful connections with public professionals and stakeholders from other disciplines and sectors (Noordegraaf, 2020). This is particularly the case for public professionals involved in providing services to clients with multiple 'wicked' problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973), where the question arises as to how the various problems interact with one another, what the best solutions are, and which professionals can contribute at what point to liberating clients from their wicked situation (Alford & Head, 2017; Bannink and Trommel, 2019).

For many professionals, the transition to connective, boundary-spanning professionalism is a significant step. This new professionalism not only transcends the long-dominant NPM-managerial logic but challenges professionals to embrace, where necessary, the 'logic of inappropriateness' (van der Steen, Peeters & Twist, 2010) and to develop and apply not so much managerial, but communication and improvisation skills (Boutellier, 2012; Wachhaus, 2011; Williams, 2012). In recent years, we have therefore conducted various action research and action learning projects in the field of social welfare and (re)turn to work to explore whether and how it is possible to support street-level bureaucrats in developing the attitudes and skills that align with this new professionalism. This need arises from the assumption that for professionals who have been driven by business-oriented performance and output for years, it is not easy to break free from this long-standing organizational culture (Garud, Hardy & Maguire, 2016; Bevir & Rhodes, 2016) and shift towards a form of professionalism where the focus is not on (personal) organizational output, but on collective outcomes and the creation of public value. This represents not only a shift in personal perspectives and actions but also in the relationship with actors in their own and other organizations and their clients.

In this paper, we present the educational tools we developed and the didactic strategies we employed to inspire, familiarize, and challenge professionals to adopt and practice connective, boundary-spanning professionalism. We conducted a learning trajectory four times with welfare and labor market (re)integration professionals, involving more than 100 participants in total. From the systematic questioning and monitoring of the development of participants in our program as part of our action research, we sought to answer the question of which tools and didactic strategies were sufficient to empower participants to develop into connective, boundary-spanning professionals. We learned that our traditional teaching approach, primarily focusing on knowledge dissemination, was insufficiently effective. This cognitive approach barely aligned with the working and learning styles of the, often very motivated,

participating professionals. Only after engaging a highly experienced role model were we able to sufficiently connect with the participants, breaking their reluctance and resistance (Gino & Staats, 2019) and turning connective professionalism into a viable perspective for them.

One challenge in graduate program management is student recruitment. The challenge is further complicated when recruiting for Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs given the declining trust in public organizations and the lack of competitive wages for public servants. In this study, we explore the recruitment of students for MPA programs using an experiment of 231 undergraduate students. In the experiment, we test how intrinsic reward messages compared to extrinsic reward messages influence student interest in attending a MPA program. We also consider how these messages differ across gender. Our findings show the recruitment material should be intrinsically grounded as a way to encourage interest. Furthermore, we find that direct exposure to MPA programs maximizes general interest in enrolling.

The proposed paper examines the pivotal role of civil servants' training and the implementation of consultation workshops in enhancing democratic governance in Greece. Civil servants are at the forefront of policy implementation and public service delivery, so their capacity to engage effectively with citizens is critical for fostering an inclusive democratic environment. Civil servants play also a crucial role in the functioning of democratic systems by ensuring the effective delivery of public services, upholding the principles of good governance, and facilitating citizen engagement. Training of civil servants is essential for fostering a professional workforce equipped to address the complex challenges of contemporary governance as the new data that is being formed in the public sector environment is a major challenge not only for civil servants but also for the public sector education and training institutions in general (Komseli, 2020). Civil servnants’ training in Greece focuses on enhancing skills such as leadership, ethical decision-making, communication, and adaptability to changes, thereby aligning their competencies with the evolving needs of society. These competencies are related to new technologies, as well as awareness and orientation skills and increase the sense of responsibility for security in the management of the large amount of citizens' data and protect the public interest.

The need for more participatory and open forms of governance has led in recent years to the increasing adoption of crowdsourcing and open consultation practices in policy-making processes (Seltzer & Mahmoudi, 2013). In the greek context, EKDDA has adopted innovative methods of citizen and stakeholder participation, introducing consultation workshops as a methology for designing innovative solutions to public problems. The concept of "open government" is based on transparency, participation and cooperation (OECD, 2016) and consultation workshops promote these principles by acting as meeting places for public officials, citizens and experts to co-create public policies (Tõnurist et al., 2017). The innovative consultation workshops aim to gather proposals and views through interactive methods that utilize modern technologies. In the era of digital transformation, crowdsourcing has emerged as a central mechanism for harnessing collective intelligence (Brabham, 2013) and is an innovative approach that combines the principles of participatory democracy with the use of technology. With this methodology, the collection of opinions, ideas and solutions is done by a wide range of citizens, facilitating the integration of different perspectives into public policies (Brabham, 2013).

The study provides insights from the implementation of the training program (TP) regarding consultation and from the consultation workshops.

The research is guided by questions such as:

 What is the aim of the TP and the topics related?

 How participants evaluate the training and what are their evaluation comments?

 What is the experience of organizing the consultation workshops?

 What guidelines were used to organize the consultation workshops and what were the deliverables?

The paper concludes with recommendations on enhancing training frameworks and consultation practices to strengthen democratic governance because investing in the training of civil servants and implementing workshops of consultation are fundamental to strengthening democracy.