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As director of the Policy Research Institute and professor of administration at University of Kansas, history graduate Steven Maynard-Moody’71 spends much of his time on studying policy.
“We look at how policy is formed, how it is implemented, and how culture and policy interface,” he says.
For eight years Maynard-Moody has focused specifically on how culture and law interface. The end result of that research is a book he co-authored with Michael Musheno, Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service. It has been recognized with awards from both the political science and public administration fields.
The book looks at how government employees make sense of their work and how they account for their decisions and actions. It examines the role that street-level bureaucrats play in the public policy process.
“To do the research Michael and I got a grant from the National Science Foundation,” Maynard-Moody explains. “We combined an area of research with an alternative way of looking at things from a methodology standpoint.”
Maynard-Moody and Musheno used stories as a means of doing research.
“Narrative was a means of discovery for us,” Maynard-Moody says. “We collected stories of fairness. Stories are good because people think narratively from a cognitive standpoint. By asking a fairness question we got rich, conflicted, complex narratives about how people made judgments.”
The book reflects the interdisciplinary approach that Maynard-Moody began to develop at Lafayette.
“I was never stuck in traditional intellectual barriers,” he says. “At Lafayette there was a good, free flow of ideas. I was engaged in many disciplines there and my research has taken the same approach. I hope my work is meaningful and real because it is engaged scholarship and not just intellectualism for itself.”
Maynard-Moody says that Lafayette prepared him with the solid writing background that he has depended on throughout his career. College was a time of significant personal and intellectual growth, he adds.
Maynard-Moody is currently working on a project that examines police stops – from both the citizen and officer perspectives.