Profile

Michael Musheno's most recent book project, Navigating Conflict: How Youth Handle Trouble in a High Poverty School, was published by the University of Chicago Press in spring of 2018. It is co-authored with Calvin Morrill and focuses on how youth from high poverty neighborhoods navigate conflict on their own terms, conditioned through sustained efforts by peers and adults to build and maintain social inclusion and trust across the history of a 100-year old public high school. The book is based on a sixteen-year field research project.

In collaboration with Lars Tummers of Utrecht University, and Victor Bekkers and Evelien Vink of Erasmus University, The Netherlands, Musheno completed a cross-national study of how social workers and teachers in The Netherlands and California cope with competing demands of 21st Century public service delivery. The research team’s initial refereed publication on this project, “Coping During Public Service Delivery: A Conceptualization and Systematic Review of the Literature,” appears in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (25, 1 2015).

Musheno continues his long-term collaboration with Steven Maynard-Moody on the judgments and decision-making of state frontline workers with new emphases on the significance of institutional norms, how institutionalism and worker agency intersect, and the perspectives of clients as well as workers. Their recent collaborations appear in peer-review journals and anthologies published in Europe and the US (see CV for details). They are currently working on a new edition of their award-winning book, Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Frontlines of Public Service. Recently, Musheno also collaborated with Professor Xiaowei Zang of the City University of Hong Kong in a five-city field study of law abidance related to frontline decision-making of urban police officers and supervisors in China. Their completed study, “Exploring Frontline Work in China,” appears in the peer-reviewed journal, Public Administration (DOI: 10.11.11/padm.12340, 2017).