Trevor L. Brown
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Associate Professor and Associate
Director for Academic Affairs and Research 350C Page Hall 1810 College Road The Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210-1336 Phone: 614-292-4533 Email: brown.2296@osu.edu |
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Background
Trevor L. Brown is an Associate Professor at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Professor Brown also serves as the Associate Director for Academic Affairs and Research. Professor Brown received a Joint Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Science from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. Prior to his position in the Glenn School, Professor Brown served as the U.S. manager of the Parliamentary Development Project, a foreign aid organization that provides technical assistance on democratic practices to the national parliament of Ukraine. Professor Brown currently serves as the Associate Project Executive. In addition, Professor Brown recently worked in collaboration with international and Ukrainian experts to complete an assessment of the public administration education and training system in Ukraine for the Eurasia Foundation. Professor Brown has also conducted evaluations in other areas, including serving as the research design consultant and principal author of the 2002 City of Columbus Citizen Satisfaction Survey on behalf of the Center for Survey Research at the Ohio State University. As described below, Professor Brown also conducts research on government contracting and contract management. To that end, Professor Brown gave testimony on the Small Business Administration's contracting programs to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business in September of 2007. |
Research
Professor Brown has two research foci, one on government contracting and contract management, the other on democratization and institutional development.
Government Contracting and Contract Management Professor Brown, in collaboration with Matthew Potoski of Iowa State University, employs a transaction costs framework to explain why governments decide to “buy” some services and “make” others. Services with low transaction costs are ripe candidates for contracting; services with high transaction costs make contracting more complex and risky. While governments contract most frequently for low transaction cost services, they also contract for high transaction cost services. Professors Brown and Potoski then extend the transaction cost framework beyond the basic “make-or-buy” decision to explain how governments address factors that risk contract failure once they decide to contract. Their research shows that transaction cost theory helps explain both pre and post-contract government behavior. More recently, Professors Brown and Potoski have begun to collaborate with David Van Slyke of Syracuse University to investigate contracting and contract management across a wide range of government services.
Selected Papers on Government Contracting and Contract Management Trust and Contract Completeness in the Public Sector (with Matt Potoski and David Van Slyke) Managing Public Service Contracts: Aligning Values, Institutions, and Markets (with Matt Potoski and David Van Slyke) Contracting for Management: Assessing Management Capacity under Alternative Service Delivery Arrangements (with Matt Potoski) Transaction Costs and Contracting: The Practitioner Perspective (with Matt Potoski) Contract-Management Capacity in Municipal and County Governments (with Matt Potoski)
Democratization and Institutional Development Professor Brown's second research
focus examines how nations transitioning to democracy organize their
political institutions. Specifically Professor Brown, in collaboration with Charles Wise of the Glenn
School, has analyzed the transition to democracy and the development of
democratic political institutions in
Selected Papers in Democratization and Institutional Development Constitutional Courts and Legislative-Executive Relations: The Case of Ukraine (with Charles Wise) Elite Attitudes and Democratic Stability: Analyzing Legislators' Attitudes towards the Separation of Powers in Ukraine (with Vladimir Pigenko and Charles Wise) Building Civic Infrastructure: Implementing Community Partnership Grant Programs in South Africa (with Charles Adams and Michael Bell)
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Teaching
Professor Brown teaches doctoral, masters and undergraduate level courses on public management, organizational theory, and democratic development.
PPM 809 -
Policy/Management Capstone II This course provides students who have completed PPM 808 - Policy/Management Capstone I an opportunity to enhance their ability to communicate analytical information to a variety of audiences. Students will have an opportunity to practice: writing a news release, interviewing, providing testimony, and displaying analytical information on a web-based platform. The course is co-taught by Professor Brown, Dr. Debra Jasper and Ms. Betsy Hubbard of the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at the Glenn School.
PPM 810 - Managing Public Organizations This course is designed to enable students to diagnosis problems and identify strategies to improve the performance and operation of public sector organizations. Through the course, students will acquire or hone some of the skills needed to be a successful manager in a rapidly changing public sector. The course builds from the traditional strategic planning approach of identifying “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats” to examine the current “state of the art” in strategic management reform in the public sector. The primary means through which students will come to understand public sector strategic management will be through case analysis.
PPM 880.06 - Organizational Theory This course provides a survey of the major perspectives in organizational theory. While organizational theory is too broad to completely cover in a one-quarter course, through overview chapters and some of the classics of the field the course covers much of the diversity of organizational theory perspectives. The course also identifies several of the "big questions" in public management. The course readings also include empirical applications of the theories to highlight different methodological approaches to researching organizations.
PPM 812 – Strategy for Public Organizations This course provides students with a strategic perspective on the management and leadership of public sector organizations. The course adopts the viewpoint of an upper level manager – an individual charged with diagnosing complex situations and resolving them in ways that enhance organizational performance. The course focuses on how upper level managers can position their organization to achieve desired program outcomes through standard strategic management techniques (e.g. the balanced scorecard, strategy maps, logic models).
PPM/IS 670 -- Rebuilding Failed and Weak States This course tackles the question of
how to design policies and programs to rebuild failed and weak states into
functioning, if not vibrant, democracies.
In particular, this class examines the programmatic efforts of one of
the primary development organs – the U.S. Agency for International
Development – in three settings:
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