9/18/07 - Meier wins award for research on practices of aggressive managers

Kenneth J. Meier, distinguished professor of political science, has received two awards for papers that question the tactics of an aggressive manager.

The Academy of Public Management awarded Meier the Accenture International Journal of Public Management award for Networking in the Penumbra: Public Management, Cooptative Links, and Distributional Consequences. The paper was co-authored with Larry O’Toole. Meier also received the 2007 Herbert Kaufmann award for his paper Management Theory and Occam's Razor: How Public Organizations Buffer the Environment.

“Much of the management literature celebrates the aggressive manager who takes chances and innovates. Our studies call this into question in two ways,” Meier said.

“Occam's Razor finds that managers who focus on stability rather than change actually generate the greatest increases in performance,” Meier said. “Networking in the Penumbra examines managers who aggressively work the organization’s environment and we show that such behavior has tradeoffs, that environmental actors have their own agendas,” Meier said.

Meier earned his Ph.D. in political science at Syracuse University. He joined Texas A&M University in 1998 and is currently the Charles H. Gregory Chair in Liberal Arts. Meier also directs the Texas Educational Excellence Project and the Carlos Cantu Hispanic Education and Opportunity Endowment.

His research is characterized by a multi-disciplinary approach that combines both empirical and normative questions. He uses institutional theories of politics applied to a wide range of substantive issues to determine who gets what, when and how. Key themes in his studies include representation, institutional governance, equity and institutional interaction.

For the past three years, Meier has held a joint appointment as a professor of public management at the Cardiff University School of Business in Wales. He is also a member of the National Academy of Public Administration.

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