David Schachter

This is a commentary to an article in Public Administration Review about Danish public service employee motivation. The piece that we commented on noted that there are two dimensions for how Danish public service employees can choose to do their work, and that these motivations can shift over time: the author identified public service work being done either through direct service production/delivery or through service regulation/policy. Almost all possible public service jobs in Denmark are in governmental agencies.

Many schools have experiential learning projects, often termed “capstones,” where
students combine theory and practice for the benefit of an outside agency. New
York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service (NYU
Wagner) has devoted a great deal of thought and effort to strengthening and
sustaining its Capstone program from the students’ perspective, and it has seen
significant improvement. But we knew less about whether the project work our
students performed was helpful to participating Capstone client organizations, as well as what factors made certain projects more successful from the clients’ point of view. In an effort to assess and understand this perspective, we undertook a post-project survey of recent Capstone clients. The results indicate very strongly that the services offered and tools created by our Capstone teams are useful to these outside agencies, and the feedback offers indications of how to increase the
value of these projects going forward.