2004 Award Committee: Ann Chih Lin, University of Michigan, Chair; Kenneth J. Meier, Texas A&M University; and Donald Rosenthal.

Recipient: Neal D. Woods, University of South Carolina

Dissertation: "Rethinking Regulation: Institutions and Interests in State Regulatory Enforcement."

Dissertation Chair: Edward T. Jennings, Jr., University of Kentucky

Recipient: Young Han Chun, Chung-Ang University

Dissertation: "Goal Ambiguity in Public Organizations: Dimensions, Antecedents, and Comparisons."

Dissertation Chair: Hal G. Rainey, University of Georgia

Citation: The Award Committee is happy to recognize Young Han Chun and Neal Derrick Woods as joint winners of the Leonard D. White Dissertation Award. These dissertations aptly illustrate how new methods and inventive operationalization can help us to explore the agencies that do the government's work and the resolutions they bring to pressing social questions of the day.

The dissertation by Young Han Chun, "Goal Ambiguity in Public Organizations: Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences," brings an impressive array of intellectual resources and a commendable appreciation of the intellectual debate to the task of mission definition in public organizations. Chun observes that organizational missions can be ambiguous in many ways: in the clarity of the mission, in the priority given to different tasks, in the ways progress is to be measured, and in the actions that must be taken to accomplish the mission. He shows that structural characteristics of agencies - the importance of revenue-generating activities, regulatory responsibility, competition among constituencies, independence, and agency longevity - are linked to different kinds of ambiguity and thus face different performance challenges. Chun then goes farther, linking these types of ambiguity to evaluations of agency work, including measures such as customer service, managerial performance, and red tape, as assessed by government employees. Chun uses careful, appropriate, yet creative ways to measure theoretical concepts and collects both organizational and individual level data to test his hypotheses. In the tradition of Herbert Simon, he brings a critical and systematic eye to organization theory, discarding its shibboleths and extending its claims.

The dissertation by Neal Derrick Woods, "Rethinking Regulation: Institutions and Interests in State Regulatory Enforcement," ranges over a broad literature to explore the question of federal delegation of authority to states in regulatory enforcement. Woods argues that the success of delegation will depend not only on the strength and ideology of the players (the federal government, state governments, and business interests), but on the political institutions through which the players act. In a theoretically significant extension of the literature on political control of the bureaucracy, he explores the phenomenon of state-level political control of state agencies and compares this influence to federal oversight activity and to the competitive actions of neighboring states. The dissertation compiles and analyzes an extensive database of state-level enforcement of federal mining and worker safety regulations from 1985-1999, finding clear evidence that the ability of governors and other elected officials to control state bureaucracies has more of an impact on enforcement than federal oversight. He also discovers that political control does not consistently correspond to industry interests, leading to an important set of new questions about the political implications of enforcement activity.