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This article provides a decade by decade examination of major themes in the public personnel literature as published in two leading journals: Public Administration Review and Review of Public Personnel Administration. The article also highlights research addressing issues related to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

While gender has emerged as an important research subject, the development of a feminist theory has been slow. This paper calls for a commitment to the development of a feminist theory of public administration. As part of this development, the author argues that the field also must embrace research focused on the intersection of multiple identity categories such as race and class.

Despite a long and storied history, patronage and the functions it plays in American politics and public administration are still very much a mystery. This paper examines how patronage has been used and understood in American political science and public administration. The author calls for a reexamination of the concept based on developments found in the field of anthropology. In an effort to generate future scholarship, the author introduces a typology of patronage styles based on this reexamination.

AbstractContemporarily, the word "woke" has moved into the popular lexicon, largely to mean aware of and ideally doing something about systemic racism. After the George Floyd murder, and many other state‐sanctioned murders of Black Americans, protests erupted globally, and public administrators responded either with actionable policy changes or sometimes symbolic, "woke" statements that did little to alter the system. In this conceptual paper, we explore the reasons for this via Baudrillard's phases of the image, showing how the word "woke" has moved from roots in the Black community to being weaponized today via its disconnection from this reality, thus trending toward its own hyperreality. In this final phase, the word "woke" has no connection to its former reality, leading to the passage of legislation that upholds White power structures.