Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

McCue, Clifford P.

Abstract

This dissertation examines task specialization in the public administration profession through studying the job tasks that a public procurement practitioner performs, manages, and both performs and manages. The purpose of this dissertation was to establish a baseline to benchmark what these practitioners actually do on their jobs. Factor analysis was used to study a data set of 2,549 respondents that were administered a survey by the Universal Public Procurement Certification Council (UPPCC) in 2012. The research question to be answered involved addressing what job tasks public procurement practitioners perform, manage, and both perform and manage. Hypotheses were examined that predicted task specialization existing within public procurement to the extent that practitioners in more senior job positions display more task specialization and that practitioners from larger organizations also display more task specialization. A review of literature discusses the alternative perspectives on what constitutes professionalism in the public sector. The reasons for focusing on public procurement professionalism were subsequently presented through the literature. The various views of what entails professionalism in public administration were discussed as to responsibility (Stivers, 1994), sociological issues (Simon, 1947), constitutional issues (Lowi, 1995; Rohr, 1986), technical specialization and empirical rigor (Parsons, 1939), as means of contextualizing the nature of public administrators’ roles and responsibilities in conjunction with the job tasks that are executed. Factor analysis was conducted on 75 job tasks in order to identify relationships between practitioner job tasks for the purposes of finding out what it is that public procurement practitioners actually do for their work. The job tasks found to share relationships may be grouped together for further inquiry into the nature of the relationships between job tasks and overarching competency areas of related job tasks. Additionally, factor analyses were conducted to identify relationships between job tasks in public procurement and control variables such as organization size and job position, which were predicted to impact whether or not practitioners perform, manage, both perform and manage, or do neither, for each of the job tasks surveyed.

Extent

342 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00004748

Format

pdf

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