Public Personnel Management: Current Concerns, Future Challenges

Public Personnel Management has served as an essential, concise reader for public personnel and human resource management courses in the fields of public administration, political science, and public policy for more than 30 years. Since the first edition published in 1991, the book has provided professors and students alike with an in-depth look at cutting-edge developments beyond standard textbook coverage, to cultivate a broad understanding of the key management and policy issues facing public and nonprofit HRM today. Original chapters are written expressly for the text by leading public administration scholars, each focusing on specific and sometimes controversial concerns for public personnel management, such as social equity, labor relations, public employee rights, and the operation of nonprofits.

Now in an extensively revised seventh edition, Public Personnel Management presents new, original chapters to examine developments of interest to researchers and practitioners alike, including: new ways of working (NWW), remote work, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on public service workforces, work-life balance, patterns of discrimination and employees’ perceptions of fairness, affirmative action, generational differences in the workforce, and – as the field of public personnel management becomes more internationalized – chapters addressing human resource management across Europe and a chapter on NWW practices in Switzerland. These, together with other chapters, ensure that Public Personnel Management will remain a field-defining book for the next 30 years.

Norma M. Riccucci is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor at the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of several books in the areas of public sector human resource management and public management, including Managing Diversity in Public Sector Workforces, (2nd edition, 2021) and with co-authors Katherine C. Naff and Madinah F. Hamidullah of Public Personnel Management in Government, (8th edition, 2020). Riccucci has received several national awards including the Public Management Research Association’s H. George Frederickson Award and the American Political Science Association’s John Gaus Award. In June of 2022, she was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa from IDHEAP, the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA).