Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., PhD
Sydney Stein, Jr. Professor of Public Management Emeritus, Harris School and the School of Social Service Administration (SSA)Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., is the Sydney Stein, Jr., Professor of Public Management Emeritus in the Harris School and the School of Social Service Administration (SSA). He taught at the University of Chicago from 1983 to 2002 (serving as dean of SSA from 1983-1988). He chaired the Harris School Ph.D. Committee and directed the SSA Management Institute and the Harris School's Center for Urban Research and Policy Studies and its biannual policy conference, the Chicago Assembly. Lynn is a former professor of public policy and chairman of the Public Policy Program at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and former George H. W. Bush Chair and Professor of Public Affairs in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He has also held faculty positions at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Lynn currently holds part-time appointments as the Sid Richardson Research Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and as Professor of Public Management at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
For ten years Lynn held senior positions with the U.S. federal government, including deputy assistant secretary of defense; director of program analysis at the National Security Council; assistant secretary at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and assistant secretary at the Department of the Interior. For his public service, he received the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Medal and a Presidential Certificate of Distinguished Achievement. Subsequently, he has been a consultant to federal, state, and local agencies and foundations and to the World Bank. He has served on the boards of community nonprofit organizations and been an expert witness in litigation involving child welfare administration. Lynn has also organized and served on the faculties of executive and management development institutes and seminars in the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. He has also chaired National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committees on Child Development Research and Public Policy and on National Urban Policy and was a member of the NRC Committee on Education Finance: Equity, Adequacy and Productivity.
Lynn is the first recipient of the H. George Frederickson award for career contributions to public management scholarship of the Public Management Research Association (2005). He is also the recipient of the American Society for Public Administration's Dwight Waldo Award (2006) and Paul Van Riper Award (2007) and of the American Political Science Association's John Gaus Lectureship (2007) for lifetime contributions to public administration and management research and service. He received the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management's Vernon Prize and has been a "teacher of the year" at both the Harris School and the Bush School.
Lynn is the author of several books, including, The State and Human Services; Designing Public Policy; Managing the Public's Business; Managing Public Policy; Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession (which was named best book of 1997 by the Public and Nonprofit Sector Division of the Academy of Management); Teaching and Learning With Cases: A Guide Book (which has been translated into Chinese), and Public Management: Old and New. He is co-author of The President as Policy Maker and Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research (coauthored with Harris School alumnae Carolyn Hill, Ph.D.'01. and Carolyn J. Heinrich, A.M.'91, Ph.D.'95), Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution, and a textbook Public Manaagement: A Three-Dimensional Approach (coauthored with Hill), and editor or coeditor of the National Research Council's publications, Knowledge and Policy: The Uncertain Connection, Urban Change and Poverty, and Inner-City Poverty in the United States, of Governance and Performance: New Perspectives, The Art of Governance: Analyzing Management and Administration, and of The Oxford Handbook of Public Management. He has published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes on his primary research interests: governance and public management, public policy analysis and planning, and social welfare policy and administration. Current projects include essays on governance, bureaucracy, and public administration theory and research on the determinants of government performance.
Lynn is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate (with honors) of the University of California at Berkeley and holds a PhD in economics from Yale University. He is past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and former book review editor of its journal, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Society of Public Administration, the American Political Science Association, the Public Management Research Association, and the International Research Society for Public Management. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals and professional associations.
Contact Information
1155 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
