For the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted in 2004 or 2005 in the field of public administration.

Award Committee: Catherine E. Rudder, George Mason University, chair; Charles W. Gossett, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Gary Mucciaroni, Temple University

Recipient: David Pitts, Georgia State University

Title: "Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Ethnicity in Public Organizations"

Citation: The Leonard D. White Award for the best dissertation in the field of public administration is accorded this year to David W. Pitts. The award committee unanimously selected his work, "Diversity, Representation & Performance: Evidence about Ethnicity in Public Organizations," as the superior choice in a rich field of nominated dissertations. Written under the direction of Laurence J. O'Toole, Jr., this manuscript serves as a model for design and execution of original research.  The framing of the research questions, the embedding of hypotheses in theory, the breadth and succinctness of the literature review, the scrupulousness in the choice and use of methods, the thoughtful specification and testing of models, the care taken in interpreting the findings, the quality and clarity of exposition, and the significance of the project—each aspect of the undertaking reflects a mature intelligence and portends a future of penetrating, significant scholarship emanating from Dr. Pitts. 

The topic of this dissertation, the impact of ethnic diversity on organizational performance, is explored, first, by making a careful but uncommonly made distinction between ethnic diversity and ethnic representation, two overlapping but discrete concepts. Discussions about diversity often confuse the two. Ethnic diversity refers to variety, while ethnic representation connotes correspondence. Thus, the more the ethnic variety among teachers in a school district, the more diversity.  However, representation can be understood in this context as the degree to which teachers’ ethnicity reflects that of their students. 

Pitts takes a subset of public organizations, public school districts in Texas, and separately assesses the impact of diversity and representation on the school districts’ performance—as measured by student dropout rates, standardized test scores, and college-bound rates. He finds that diversity of teachers produces a significant and negative impact on districts’ performance whereas representation has a salutary effect.  Importantly, neither diversity nor representation of managers (assistant principals, principals, and district superintendents) seems to matter much.  The key to performance is for those who directly deliver services, the teachers, to reflect the ethnicity of the clientele they are serving, their students. 

Pitts takes great care in discussing his findings and their applicability more broadly. He is appropriately cautious and sets forth a series of worthy future research questions that one can only hope that he will pursue, as the policy implications are substantial. If, for example, unmediated ethnic diversity produces low performing organizations, and if, normatively, such diversity is desirable, what interventions might effectively reverse this relationship between diversity and performance? Or, to give another example, if diversity is imposed as a conscious policy to be helpful to public clients, might ethnic representation of the clientele be a better way to serve them? Beyond ethnicity, do Pitts’ findings hold for other types of diversity such as gender? Are schools sufficiently similar to other public organizations that the implications of Pitts’ research could usefully be extended to them? 

In sum, Pitts has produced a provocative, tidy piece of scholarship that is worth emulating but that, as good research does, raises as many questions as it answers.