Hello! My name is Dr. Morris Bidjerano and I am a faculty member of the School of Public Policy and Administration at Walden University. I previously held academic appointments with the Central Michigan University, University at Albany – SUNY, College of St. Rose, and Sofia University in Bulgaria. Past professional experiences also include program evaluation for the Evaluation Consortium of the University at Albany, SUNY Research Foundation, policy and management analysis for the Intergovernmental Studies Program of the Rockefeller College in Albany, NY, and service on the Board of Consultants for the Center for International Development, SUNY Central.

Serving in various capacities at Walden as a Dissertation Committee Chair, Dissertation Committee Member, University Research Reviewer, and Ph.D. Residencies Faculty, I am currently working with several doctoral students, who use in their dissertations Dr. Bill Benet’s Polarities of Democracy (POD) model as a theoretical framework and Barry Johnson’s Polarity Management approach as a conceptual framework. I am a longtime fan of the polarity and paradoxical type of thinking, and was first introduced to it through my research and instruction on the Competing Values Framework (CVF) of organizational effectiveness, which is similarly based on polarity pairs and shares identical assumptions to those of the POD. Drawing on the CVF and Barry Johnson’s polarity management ideas, I have adopted a paradoxical interpretive approach to collaboration in public management that has consistently featured in his publications and conference presentations.

My Institute Fellowship Project involved interpretation, conceptualization, and operationalization of the justice and due process polarity in the POD model, as well designing an assessment-ready map for it. I am planning on adopting, further refining, and contextualizing this and other polarity maps developed by the Institute fellows in my continuous work as a mentor and advisor of doctoral studies at Walden. I also envision application of the Institute for Polarities of Democracy and Polarity Partnerships assessment instruments in potential future action research projects with several nonprofit organizations run by former doctoral students both in the US and internationally.