Arthur J Sementelli
Biographic Data
| ID | 4451522 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arthur J Sementelli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Arthur J |
| FAMILY NAME | Sementelli |
| SIGNATURE | SEMENTELLI A J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida Atlantic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9464-8160 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Overcoming Title 42 and the 2022‐3 Venezuelan Migrant Expulsion Spectacle: A Border Securocracy Case Study
On October 12, 2022, the Biden administration abruptly changed course and announced that Venezuelan refugees would be immediately subject to Title 42—the policy that effectively means that those migrants would be summarily forced to return, or expelled, to Mexico. For FY 2022, Customs and Border Protection apprehended and/or expelled a total of 2,766,582 enforcement actions (CBP FY 2022). The resulting media spectacle illustrates another example …
Revisiting the policy implications of Covid‐19, asylum seekers, and migrants on the Mexico–U.S. border: Creating (and maintaining) states of exception in the Trump and Biden administrations
Somebody is watching me: Framing surveillance as rent-seeking behavior
Purpose This paper examines how contemporary workplace surveillance can simultaneously incentivize and commodify workforce behavior. Specifically, workplace surveillance is reconceptualized as rent-seeking, which offers a framework for analyzing novel employer-employee relationships stemming from alternate views of risk and reward. Design/methodology/approach The case of workplace microchipping is studied qualitatively as a backdrop for theorizin…
Covid ‐19, asylum seekers, and migrants on the Mexico–U.S. border: Creating states of exception
Neutrality narratives, gender, and fear of cuckoldry in public administration
Administration draws its legitimacy from neutrality in cultural contexts where power relations are shaped by gendered norms. Neutrality bestows legitimacy where power is vested in the male generative force and is heritable. In the public sphere, neutrality renders administration nonthreatening to politicians and justifies administrators’ use of discretion despite their lack of democratic accountability and oversight. We examine historical and cul…
Marking to remember: Territoriality and failure to forget
This paper links parallel discussions of territoriality and organizational forgetting to examine why public organizations may experience difficulties during political shifts using public accounts of the U.S. EPA. To accomplish this task, the metaphor of tattoo removal is explored through the criminal justice literature. In particular, tattoo removal provides an analogous set of concepts to understand, frame, and evaluate the enduring physical and…
Life imitates art: Yojimbo , critical management, and contractors
Organization studies have consistently drawn from literature and film as tools to understand, explain, and analyze organizational phenomena. With that goal in mind, this article illustrates how Yojimbo, a movie by Akira Kurosawa, provides a critical representation of work and organizations as a context for how micro emancipation might be undertaken in contemporary organizational settings. The argument revolves around the claim that contractors mi…
Rethinking Habermas, from the ideal to the individual: A practical application of critical management theory
Contemporary public administration has much to do with routine. Daily circumstances afford us a perennial onslaught of quotidian tasks, which become routine or typical over time. The sedimentation of typical responses has provided a relatively stable and durable public sector, generally geared towards achieving larger public interests. However, buried within these sedimented practices are communication structures, often obscuring the relationship…
Accounting for the Horsemen of the Administrative Apocalypse
Administrators exhibiting dark personalities challenge arguments for accountability, particularly those reliant on technical rationality or an internal ethos. During periods of rapid change, organizations remain exposed to abuses of power potentially culminating in an administrative apocalypse. The dark tetrad of narcissists, Machiavellians, everyday sadists, and subclinical psychopaths serve as the harbingers of destruction in the face of limite…
Faculty in Tamara-Land: Taylorism, Ritual, and Performance
More than twenty year after a postmodern analysis of Disney, we find more examples of Tamara emerging in different environments. One such environment is higher education, where the combination of political rather than technical deskilling drives the re-creation of the university as a knowledge factory, opening new fronts for emancipatory struggle outside more thoroughly examined professions. This has been exacerbated by a politicized “narrative d…
Fear Responses: Intersubjectivity, and the Hollow State
Fear responses increasingly have driven both citizens and governments to make personalized “buy” or “sell” decisions in the context of the border for political and economic ends. These buy or sell decisions often serve as a “balm” to demonstrate government is taking action within prevailing political narratives. More explicitly, shifting narratives about what should be feared allow individuals, states, and economic actors to repackage “fears” to …
Just Like Paradise? Reflections on Idealized Governance and Other Funhouse Mirrors
Research on psychology and philosophy, particularly discussions of lived experiences, can inform contemporary reflection on utopia in public administration. Deconstructing religious, historical, and literary perspectives on utopia can illuminate discussions and illustrate the relativistic nature of utopia and the consequences for the administrative state. Using the cases of constitutionalism and neomanagerialism as examples, this article deconstr…
A critical examination of social media adoption in government: Introducing omnipresence
Public Service, Struggle, and Existenz: Mapping the Individual
Understanding and conceptualizing what it means to be an "individual" remains a critical yet understudied area for public administration. The existential perspective of Karl Jaspers can provide a dynamic, broader philosophical map to organize, under-stand, and discuss the often implicit assumptions that have existed and continue to exist regarding individuals and their relation to governance. Considering Jaspers's work creates the possibility to …
Antiessentialism, Parrhesia, and Citizenship
The rise of antiessentialism can have specific consequences regarding economies of power and identity (Anderson, 1992). One discovers that as certain antiessentialist practices and discourses emerge, a body politic and its membership can also change, reflecting different political, social, or economic goals. A mechanism to cope with these realities, parrhesia is understood as a notion of truth or free speech unbounded by rhetoric. It requires a "…
Symposium introduction
Naming Water: Understanding How Nomenclature Influences Rights and Policy Choices
Water management has increasingly become a hot button issue in the United States and worldwide. Access, use, and conservation issues continually emerge as societies grow and change. A key aspect of the debate revolves around what water “is.” Naming water as a mineral, as a public good, or as a commodity fundamentally changes its nature, shifting access among citizens, governments, and private firms. This essay discusses some of the issues, proble…
Just Green Iguanas: The Associated Costs and Policy Implications of Exotic Invasive Wildlife in South Florida
Invasive exotic species have begun to emerge as a policy issue at the federal, state, and local levels. Although invasive species are often understood as a function of the damage they cause to localized ecosystems, this study diverges by discussing the infrastructural damage caused by an invasive exotic species, the green iguana ( Iguana iguana). Specifically, the authors discuss the magnitude and scope of damage caused by iguana burrows on canal…
Toward a Taxonomy of Disaster and Crisis Theories
This article frames and defines the role of public administration theory in disaster planning and response. It is argued that there is little if any systematic theorizing in disaster planning and response beyond mainstream heuristics and possibly ad hoc classification schemes. By offering a basic taxonomy of existing disaster management theory literature, this article points toward opportunities for future theoretical development. Specifically, t…
Managing Blurred Environments: How Usufruct Can Help Address Postmodern Conditions
Scholars often offer ideas for public administration focusing on the changing relationships between public and private sectors. These ideas have grown into discourses including the new public management and others. Scholars also tend to differ in their view of what public administration should be, fostering conflict. If one considers these discourses collectively through the lens of managing resources in a blurred environment, it can provide a sp…
Distortions of Progress: Evolutionary Theories and Public Administration
Evolution and evolutionary theories in the social sciences in general, and applied fields in particular, are often grounded in the discredited (in biology) Lamarckian conceptualization. Lamarckian ideas of progress, with their associated teleology and totalizing influences, tend not to be useful for public administration. This article proposes that public administration instead consider an alternative image of evolution that enables the practical…
A Geographic Information Systems–Guided Cost-Effectiveness Analysis For Waterborne Asbestos Remediation
Many local governments must simultaneously (a) maintain acceptable levels of service, (b) replace potentially hazardous materials used in infrastructure construction, and (c) finance expanded services. Geographic information systems (GIS) can help agencies prioritize and develop cost-effective responses to maintain quality municipal services. Its effective use requires cooperation among city departments to integrate and develop layers of infrastr…
Power, Emancipation and the Administrative State
Until recently, critical theorists have conceived of power in terms of domination. Public bureaucracies were thought to play a central role in domination as they mediated on behalf of dominant interests both by embodying and enforcing the dominant ideology, and by reinforcing society-wide practices of domination. Habermas, however, has suggested that one particular form of power, “communicative power,” might be emancipatory rather than domineerin…
Recasting Critical Theory: Veblen, Deconstruction, and the Theory-Praxis Gap
This paper contends that Thorstein Veblen’s economic and social thought constitute a remarkably advanced form of critical theory. This “evolutionary critical theory” shares the goals, methods, assumptions, and critiques of thought associated with modern critical theory as it has developed out of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. However, it is more comprehensive in its critical approach, denying both that emancipation and responsive de…
Framing Discourse in Budgetary Processes: Warrants for Normalization and Conformity
Using a modified form of Burkeian cluster analysis, a study of discourse in local government budgetary processes uncovered three warrants that were used for normalization and coriformity (persuasion, conservatism, and expenise). These warrants encourage panicipants in budgetary processes to appear to be consistent with institutional goals and values in order to receive desired financial outcomes. Therefore, administrators have incentives to emplo…
A critical examination of social media adoption in government: Introducing omnipresence
Power, Emancipation and the Administrative State
Until recently, critical theorists have conceived of power in terms of domination. Public bureaucracies were thought to play a central role in domination as they mediated on behalf of dominant interests both by embodying and enforcing the dominant ideology, and by reinforcing society-wide practices of domination. Habermas, however, has suggested that one particular form of power, “communicative power,” might be emancipatory rather than domineerin…
Fear Responses: Intersubjectivity, and the Hollow State
Fear responses increasingly have driven both citizens and governments to make personalized “buy” or “sell” decisions in the context of the border for political and economic ends. These buy or sell decisions often serve as a “balm” to demonstrate government is taking action within prevailing political narratives. More explicitly, shifting narratives about what should be feared allow individuals, states, and economic actors to repackage “fears” to …
Public Service, Struggle, and Existenz: Mapping the Individual
Understanding and conceptualizing what it means to be an "individual" remains a critical yet understudied area for public administration. The existential perspective of Karl Jaspers can provide a dynamic, broader philosophical map to organize, under-stand, and discuss the often implicit assumptions that have existed and continue to exist regarding individuals and their relation to governance. Considering Jaspers's work creates the possibility to …
Distortions of Progress: Evolutionary Theories and Public Administration
Evolution and evolutionary theories in the social sciences in general, and applied fields in particular, are often grounded in the discredited (in biology) Lamarckian conceptualization. Lamarckian ideas of progress, with their associated teleology and totalizing influences, tend not to be useful for public administration. This article proposes that public administration instead consider an alternative image of evolution that enables the practical…
Recasting Critical Theory: Veblen, Deconstruction, and the Theory-Praxis Gap
This paper contends that Thorstein Veblen’s economic and social thought constitute a remarkably advanced form of critical theory. This “evolutionary critical theory” shares the goals, methods, assumptions, and critiques of thought associated with modern critical theory as it has developed out of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. However, it is more comprehensive in its critical approach, denying both that emancipation and responsive de…
Just Like Paradise? Reflections on Idealized Governance and Other Funhouse Mirrors
Research on psychology and philosophy, particularly discussions of lived experiences, can inform contemporary reflection on utopia in public administration. Deconstructing religious, historical, and literary perspectives on utopia can illuminate discussions and illustrate the relativistic nature of utopia and the consequences for the administrative state. Using the cases of constitutionalism and neomanagerialism as examples, this article deconstr…
Antiessentialism, Parrhesia, and Citizenship
The rise of antiessentialism can have specific consequences regarding economies of power and identity (Anderson, 1992). One discovers that as certain antiessentialist practices and discourses emerge, a body politic and its membership can also change, reflecting different political, social, or economic goals. A mechanism to cope with these realities, parrhesia is understood as a notion of truth or free speech unbounded by rhetoric. It requires a "…
Symposium introduction
Toward a Taxonomy of Disaster and Crisis Theories
This article frames and defines the role of public administration theory in disaster planning and response. It is argued that there is little if any systematic theorizing in disaster planning and response beyond mainstream heuristics and possibly ad hoc classification schemes. By offering a basic taxonomy of existing disaster management theory literature, this article points toward opportunities for future theoretical development. Specifically, t…
Managing Blurred Environments: How Usufruct Can Help Address Postmodern Conditions
Scholars often offer ideas for public administration focusing on the changing relationships between public and private sectors. These ideas have grown into discourses including the new public management and others. Scholars also tend to differ in their view of what public administration should be, fostering conflict. If one considers these discourses collectively through the lens of managing resources in a blurred environment, it can provide a sp…
Framing Discourse in Budgetary Processes: Warrants for Normalization and Conformity
Using a modified form of Burkeian cluster analysis, a study of discourse in local government budgetary processes uncovered three warrants that were used for normalization and coriformity (persuasion, conservatism, and expenise). These warrants encourage panicipants in budgetary processes to appear to be consistent with institutional goals and values in order to receive desired financial outcomes. Therefore, administrators have incentives to emplo…
Recasting Critical Theory: Veblen, Deconstruction, and the Theory-Praxis Gap
This paper contends that Thorstein Veblen’s economic and social thought constitute a remarkably advanced form of critical theory. This “evolutionary critical theory” shares the goals, methods, assumptions, and critiques of thought associated with modern critical theory as it has developed out of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. However, it is more comprehensive in its critical approach, denying both that emancipation and responsive de…
Framing Discourse in Budgetary Processes: Warrants for Normalization and Conformity
Using a modified form of Burkeian cluster analysis, a study of discourse in local government budgetary processes uncovered three warrants that were used for normalization and coriformity (persuasion, conservatism, and expenise). These warrants encourage panicipants in budgetary processes to appear to be consistent with institutional goals and values in order to receive desired financial outcomes. Therefore, administrators have incentives to emplo…
Solidarity and Difference: The Politics of Enlightenment in the Aftermath of Modernity
Power, Emancipation and the Administrative State
Until recently, critical theorists have conceived of power in terms of domination. Public bureaucracies were thought to play a central role in domination as they mediated on behalf of dominant interests both by embodying and enforcing the dominant ideology, and by reinforcing society-wide practices of domination. Habermas, however, has suggested that one particular form of power, “communicative power,” might be emancipatory rather than domineerin…
A Geographic Information Systems–Guided Cost-Effectiveness Analysis For Waterborne Asbestos Remediation
Many local governments must simultaneously (a) maintain acceptable levels of service, (b) replace potentially hazardous materials used in infrastructure construction, and (c) finance expanded services. Geographic information systems (GIS) can help agencies prioritize and develop cost-effective responses to maintain quality municipal services. Its effective use requires cooperation among city departments to integrate and develop layers of infrastr…
Toward a Taxonomy of Disaster and Crisis Theories
This article frames and defines the role of public administration theory in disaster planning and response. It is argued that there is little if any systematic theorizing in disaster planning and response beyond mainstream heuristics and possibly ad hoc classification schemes. By offering a basic taxonomy of existing disaster management theory literature, this article points toward opportunities for future theoretical development. Specifically, t…
Managing Blurred Environments: How Usufruct Can Help Address Postmodern Conditions
Scholars often offer ideas for public administration focusing on the changing relationships between public and private sectors. These ideas have grown into discourses including the new public management and others. Scholars also tend to differ in their view of what public administration should be, fostering conflict. If one considers these discourses collectively through the lens of managing resources in a blurred environment, it can provide a sp…
Distortions of Progress: Evolutionary Theories and Public Administration
Evolution and evolutionary theories in the social sciences in general, and applied fields in particular, are often grounded in the discredited (in biology) Lamarckian conceptualization. Lamarckian ideas of progress, with their associated teleology and totalizing influences, tend not to be useful for public administration. This article proposes that public administration instead consider an alternative image of evolution that enables the practical…
Naming Water: Understanding How Nomenclature Influences Rights and Policy Choices
Water management has increasingly become a hot button issue in the United States and worldwide. Access, use, and conservation issues continually emerge as societies grow and change. A key aspect of the debate revolves around what water “is.” Naming water as a mineral, as a public good, or as a commodity fundamentally changes its nature, shifting access among citizens, governments, and private firms. This essay discusses some of the issues, proble…
Just Green Iguanas: The Associated Costs and Policy Implications of Exotic Invasive Wildlife in South Florida
Invasive exotic species have begun to emerge as a policy issue at the federal, state, and local levels. Although invasive species are often understood as a function of the damage they cause to localized ecosystems, this study diverges by discussing the infrastructural damage caused by an invasive exotic species, the green iguana ( Iguana iguana). Specifically, the authors discuss the magnitude and scope of damage caused by iguana burrows on canal…
Antiessentialism, Parrhesia, and Citizenship
The rise of antiessentialism can have specific consequences regarding economies of power and identity (Anderson, 1992). One discovers that as certain antiessentialist practices and discourses emerge, a body politic and its membership can also change, reflecting different political, social, or economic goals. A mechanism to cope with these realities, parrhesia is understood as a notion of truth or free speech unbounded by rhetoric. It requires a "…
Symposium introduction
Public Service, Struggle, and Existenz: Mapping the Individual
Understanding and conceptualizing what it means to be an "individual" remains a critical yet understudied area for public administration. The existential perspective of Karl Jaspers can provide a dynamic, broader philosophical map to organize, under-stand, and discuss the often implicit assumptions that have existed and continue to exist regarding individuals and their relation to governance. Considering Jaspers's work creates the possibility to …
A critical examination of social media adoption in government: Introducing omnipresence
Just Like Paradise? Reflections on Idealized Governance and Other Funhouse Mirrors
Research on psychology and philosophy, particularly discussions of lived experiences, can inform contemporary reflection on utopia in public administration. Deconstructing religious, historical, and literary perspectives on utopia can illuminate discussions and illustrate the relativistic nature of utopia and the consequences for the administrative state. Using the cases of constitutionalism and neomanagerialism as examples, this article deconstr…
Fear Responses: Intersubjectivity, and the Hollow State
Fear responses increasingly have driven both citizens and governments to make personalized “buy” or “sell” decisions in the context of the border for political and economic ends. These buy or sell decisions often serve as a “balm” to demonstrate government is taking action within prevailing political narratives. More explicitly, shifting narratives about what should be feared allow individuals, states, and economic actors to repackage “fears” to …
Faculty in Tamara-Land: Taylorism, Ritual, and Performance
More than twenty year after a postmodern analysis of Disney, we find more examples of Tamara emerging in different environments. One such environment is higher education, where the combination of political rather than technical deskilling drives the re-creation of the university as a knowledge factory, opening new fronts for emancipatory struggle outside more thoroughly examined professions. This has been exacerbated by a politicized “narrative d…
Accounting for the Horsemen of the Administrative Apocalypse
Administrators exhibiting dark personalities challenge arguments for accountability, particularly those reliant on technical rationality or an internal ethos. During periods of rapid change, organizations remain exposed to abuses of power potentially culminating in an administrative apocalypse. The dark tetrad of narcissists, Machiavellians, everyday sadists, and subclinical psychopaths serve as the harbingers of destruction in the face of limite…
Life imitates art: Yojimbo , critical management, and contractors
Organization studies have consistently drawn from literature and film as tools to understand, explain, and analyze organizational phenomena. With that goal in mind, this article illustrates how Yojimbo, a movie by Akira Kurosawa, provides a critical representation of work and organizations as a context for how micro emancipation might be undertaken in contemporary organizational settings. The argument revolves around the claim that contractors mi…
Rethinking Habermas, from the ideal to the individual: A practical application of critical management theory
Contemporary public administration has much to do with routine. Daily circumstances afford us a perennial onslaught of quotidian tasks, which become routine or typical over time. The sedimentation of typical responses has provided a relatively stable and durable public sector, generally geared towards achieving larger public interests. However, buried within these sedimented practices are communication structures, often obscuring the relationship…
Marking to remember: Territoriality and failure to forget
This paper links parallel discussions of territoriality and organizational forgetting to examine why public organizations may experience difficulties during political shifts using public accounts of the U.S. EPA. To accomplish this task, the metaphor of tattoo removal is explored through the criminal justice literature. In particular, tattoo removal provides an analogous set of concepts to understand, frame, and evaluate the enduring physical and…
Covid ‐19, asylum seekers, and migrants on the Mexico–U.S. border: Creating states of exception
Neutrality narratives, gender, and fear of cuckoldry in public administration
Administration draws its legitimacy from neutrality in cultural contexts where power relations are shaped by gendered norms. Neutrality bestows legitimacy where power is vested in the male generative force and is heritable. In the public sphere, neutrality renders administration nonthreatening to politicians and justifies administrators’ use of discretion despite their lack of democratic accountability and oversight. We examine historical and cul…
Revisiting the policy implications of Covid‐19, asylum seekers, and migrants on the Mexico–U.S. border: Creating (and maintaining) states of exception in the Trump and Biden administrations
Somebody is watching me: Framing surveillance as rent-seeking behavior
Purpose This paper examines how contemporary workplace surveillance can simultaneously incentivize and commodify workforce behavior. Specifically, workplace surveillance is reconceptualized as rent-seeking, which offers a framework for analyzing novel employer-employee relationships stemming from alternate views of risk and reward. Design/methodology/approach The case of workplace microchipping is studied qualitatively as a backdrop for theorizin…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Public relations (8 works)