Public Affairs Faculty

Lois Recascino Wise Professor Director, West European Studies Director, European Union Center of Excellence Ph.D., Indiana University, 1982

Lois Wise’s research and teaching interests center on the broad area of public management. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in pubic management and managing workforce diversity. Much of her scholarly work is comparative with a focus on public management reforms. A number of her studies examine bureaucratic behavior. She also has had a long interest in the effects of human diversity broadly defined on organizational performance and effective management. Her current work applies diversity scholarship to the digital divide and issues related to accessibility and responsiveness in the context of E-government. A relatively new prong to her research program focuses on the effects of globalization on the public work force. This includes studies of insourcing foreign professionals into the U.S. public and nonprofit sectors and studies of the effects new laws and policies regarding workforce mobility and citizenship requirements for civil servants and other employees of central governments. In addition to two books, she has published more than 30 articles in many different journals in the fields of public administration and human resource management and contributed more than 20 chapters to edited volumes in the United States and abroad. Her research has been supported by grants from both international and domestic sources. She is a former Fulbright Scholar (Sweden) (1992), recipient of the Swedish Institute Jubilee Prize (1995), the Swedish Bicentennial Fund Research Award (1985), and an Inaugural Fellow, Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership (2005).

Professor Wise has served as consultant to public and private sector organizations in the United States and abroad including long-term projects with the National Institute of Justice in the USA, The Swedish Agency for Government Employers, and the Swedish Local Government Association (Kommunförbundet). Professor Wise joined the SPEA faculty in 1982 but has also served as visiting professor at the University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University, Göteborgs University, University of Örebro, and Umeå University.

Awards

Recent Publications

Rubaii-Barrett, Nadia, and Lois Recascino Wise. (Forthcoming). “Disability Access and E-Government: An Empirical Analysis of State Practices.” Journal of Disability Policy Studies.

Rubaii-Barrett, Nadia, and Lois R. Wise. (Forthcoming). “From Want Ads to Websites: What Diversity Messages are State Governments Projecting?” Review of Public Personnel Administration.

Lægreid, Per and Lois R. Wise. (2007). “Reforming Human Resource Management in Civil Service Systems: Recruitment, Mobility, and Representativeness,” in Jos Raadschelders, Theo Toonen, and Fritz van der Meer (Eds.), chapter 12, Comparative Civil Service Systems in the 21st Century. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.

Wise, Lois R. (Forthcoming 2007). “Representative Bureaucracy,” in Peter, B. Guy, and Jon Pierre (Eds.), Handbook of Public Administration, 2nd edition. London: Sage.

Wise, Lois R. and Barbara Lamb. (2006). “Job Mobility Assignments: Mechanisms for Human Resource Capacity Development,” in A. Farazmand (Ed.), Strategic Public Personnel Administration: Building and Maintaining Strategic Human Capital for the 21st Century, vol. 2, pp. 281-299. Greenwood Press /Praeger.

Rubaii-Barrett, Nadia, and Lois R. Wise. (2006). “Language Minorities and the Digital Divide: A Study of State E-Government Accessibility,” Journal of Public Management and Social Policy, 12(2): 5-27 (Fall).

Rubaii-Barrett, Nadia, and Lois R. Wise. (2005). “State Government Websites: Are They Helping Diversity Recruitment Efforts?” PA Times, June pp 5.6.

Wise, Lois Recascino. (2004). “Bureaucratic Posture: On the Need for a Composite Theory of Bureaucratic Behavior,” Public Administration Review, 64(6): 669-680 (November/December).

Pitts, David and Lois R. Wise (2004). “Diversity in Professional Schools: A Case Study of Public Affairs & Law,” Journal of Public Affairs Education, 10 (2):125-42.

Christensen, Tom, Per Lægreid, and Lois R. Wise. (2003). “Evaluating Public Sector Reforms in Central Governments: The Context and Characteristics of Evaluation Practice in Norway, Sweden and the United States of America,” in Hellmut Wollmann (Ed.), Evaluating Public Management Reforms, pp. 56-79. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Wise, Lois R. (2003). “Representative Bureaucracy,” in B. Guy. Peters and Jon Pierre (Eds.), International Handbook of Public Administration, pp 343-53. London: Sage.