The Best Dissertation Award

Current Recipient

Miyeon Song, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina

Professor Miyeon Song is the recipient of the 2020 PMRA Best Dissertation Award. Professor Song’s dissertation, Managing Public Services: The Role of Nonprofit, For-Profit, and Governmental Organizations, addresses how organizations from the three sectors contribute to and are credited with successful public service provision and delivery.

Drawing on the context of the U.S. healthcare system, Professor Song provides compelling theoretical and empirical insights into the environmental, managerial, and individual-perceptual dynamics that shape service quality. Song’s findings extend and underscore the pivotal role of publicness. Public and nonprofit organizations face unique challenges–at the environmental and individual level–but organizations in these sectors also draw on unique managerial strategies and environmental advantages. For example, Dr. Song’s findings underscore that market competition can be negative for for-profit service deliverers, but beneficial for government and nonprofit service organizations.

The committee was particularly impressed with Dr. Song’s use of archival and original data to bring together multiple, pressing lines of PA inquiry: organizational performance, citizen perceptions, publicness, environmental contingencies and networking.

Professor Song’s dissertation has practical relevance in terms of health care delivery but also in approaching service-delivery across the wide variety of policy areas where public, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations operate.

Song is a graduate of Texas A&M University. Her dissertation committee was comprised of Professors Kenneth J. Meier, Ian R. Turner, Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon, and Justin B. Bullock.

Past Recipients:

2019 – Andrea Headley, Assistant Professor, John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

2018 – Huafang Li, Assistant Professor, Grand Valley State University