WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

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Bin Chen, Feng Wang and Jianmin Song permissions by the Ministry of Education to launch MPA degree programs. These universities enroll about 15,000 to 20,000 students annually to pursue MPA degrees (Jing & Berman, 2008). The literature on China’s MPA education tends to focus on the supply side: program design, curriculum development, and faculty teaching and research. For example, some scholars reviewed the history of China’s MPA education and highlighted its Chinese characteristics (Tong & Straussman, 2003). In addition to pinpointing economic and administrative reforms that have driven the emergence of MPA education in China, Yang (2005) argued that the current status of China’s MPA education reflected a balance of internationalization and localization. Other scholars conducted comparative studies of MPA education in the United States and China in terms of curriculum design (Wang, Guo, & Ma, 1998) and teaching styles (Infeld & Li, 2009). Competing paradigms of New Public Management, New Governance, and Public Values were found to influence course content and pedagogy of China’s MPA curriculum (Wu & He, 2009). By looking into Chinese public administration journal articles, Lu and Chow (2008) pointed to two of the weakest links of China’s public administration research: theory building and knowledge advancement. Jing (2008) further demonstrated six inadequacies of China’s doctoral dissertation research in public administration: research question, validity, theory relevance, causality, importance, and innovativeness. However, less work to date has been done on the demand side—Chinese MPA students; only one study has examined the training experience of 10 Chinese municipal officials in the United States (Ye, Sun, & Wu, 2009). This paper addresses this void by exploring the development of academic and social networks among Chinese MPA students. Like any other professional graduate degree programs, students can benefit from a MPA degree program by acquiring and updating their professional knowledge, obtaining an advanced degree, and developing their social networks. For any effective managers— whether in the public, nonprofit, or for-profit sector—to be successful in their careers, they need to develop their networking competency (Kotter, 1982). Given the exponential growth of MPA programs in China, it is of great theoretical and practical interest to examine whether and how these professional public service training programs would help develop students’ academic and social networks. In this paper, we address this research question: To what extent have academic and social networks been developed among Chinese MPA students? As an exploratory study, we report the findings from a social network survey of 100 students who were enrolled in a Chinese university’s MPA program. By employing a network analytical approach, we examine the structural characteristics of academic and social networks of relationships developed among Chinese MPA students who participated in the survey. How strongly are they connected? Which network is more prevalent, centralized, and cohesive? Does 138 Journal of Public Affairs Education
Exploring Academic and Social Networks the pattern of interactions for one network align with that of interactions for another network? In the following sections, we first review the literature on network development through professional degree programs and then focus our discussion on identifying four types of networks—academic, career advice, friendship, and socio-emotional support formed among Chinese MPA students. After describing the data collection and research method, we present our findings; and we conclude by providing directions for future research. BUILDING NETWORKS THROUGH PROFESSIONAL GRADUATE DEGREE PROGRAMS A key starting point of exploring network building through professional graduate studies involves the social and psychological foundations of human desire for connecting with others. In Maslow’s well-known but controversial theory of hierarchy of human needs, social needs at level 3 refer to the needs for love, affection, and belonging to social units and groups (Maslow, 1954). In his theory of human needs, McClelland (1961) pointed to the human need for affiliation—the need to establish and maintain positive affective relations or friendship with others. Similarly, Herzberg (1968) included quality of interpersonal relations among peers, with supervisors, and with subordinates as one of the factors to motivate people. The recent stream of research on social capital adds a new perspective on the development of social networks through a professional master’s degree program. Social scientists have long used notions of capital (e.g., human capital, cultural capital, and social capital) as organizing concepts to understand the mechanisms that affect life chances of individuals and the well-being of communities. Professional master’s degree programs, such as an MBA or MPA, can increase scholastic, cultural, and social capital for students (Baruch, Bell, & Gray, 2005; Useem & Karabel, 1986). Students who are enrolled in an MPA degree program develop their scholastic capital through acquiring managerial knowledge that is essential for them to function effectively in public and nonprofit organizations. These programs provide students with explicit, theoretical knowledge as well as tacit analytical skills, such as analyzing cases. Cultural capital refers to the value of reputation that people within a society attach to a prestigious graduate degree. As a symbol of status, cultural capital helps individuals climb the social status ladder. Aside from scholastic and cultural capital, students can also benefit from attaining a professional graduate degree by acquiring social capital embedded in their social networks. Social networks are a set of relationships with stable patterns of repeated interactions. Lin (2000, p. 786) defined social capital as investment and use of embedded resources in social relations for expected returns. Social capital is conceptualized as (1) quantity and/or quality of resources that an actor (be it an individual or group or community) can access or use through (2) its location in a social network. Journal of Public Affairs Education 139
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JPAE VOLUME 18 NUMBER 1 JOURNAL OF
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Journal of Public Affairs Education
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FROM THE EDITOR In the symposium in
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NASPAA Presidential Address Annual
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Leading by Example: Modeling Global
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FROM THE GUEST EDITOR FROM THE GUES
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FROM THE GUEST EDITOR A SYMPOSIUM I
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on other fronts, certainly it can h
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Picasso, P. (1937). Guernica. Pictu
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A View from the 50th Street Gate on
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Reflections of a Working-Class Acad
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Reflections of a Working Class Acad
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Reflections of a Working Class Acad
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Class Rooms Kenneth Oldfield Univer
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Class Rooms although I did, but not
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Class Rooms GRADUATE SCHOOL I was u
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Class Rooms the odds this appointee
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Class Rooms The Great Leveler, too
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Class Rooms of higher learning and
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ook (Oldfield & Johnson, 2009). The
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Didactic Changes Class Rooms Pedago
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Admittedly, it will be difficult to
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hooks, b. (2000). Where we stand: C
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Shaw, G. B. (1928). The intelligent
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What’s a Girl Like You Doing in a
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What’s a Girl Like You For exampl
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What’s a Girl Like You full-blown
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What’s a Girl Like You toward ser
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Blue-Collar Teaching in a White-Col
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Blue-Collar Teaching Half of my fam
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Blue-Collar Teaching from physics.
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Blue-Collar Teaching lifelong dream
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Blue-Collar Teaching Before him, in
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Blue-Collar Teaching One may argue
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Blue-Collar Teaching graduation in
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Blue-Collar Teaching advantages oth
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Carrizales, T. (2010). Exploring cu
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Oldfield, K. (2010). Socioeconomic
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Page 111 and 112: REFERENCES Ashwander v. Tennessee V
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Stories from Local Public Managers
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and writing the proposal for the co
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Another echoes: Stories from Local
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I think communication is one of the
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it was achieved. The assessment of
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Fulbright Program for Foreign Stude
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Review of Moral Controversies in Am
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application of those foundations to
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Information for Contributors The Jo
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