The Limits to Public Value,or Rescuing Responsible Government from the Platonic Guardians

In various guises, public value has become extraordinarily popular in recent years. We challenge the relevance and usefulness of the approach in Westminster systems with their dominant hierarchies of control, strong roles for ministers, and tight authorising regimes underpinned by disciplined two‐party systems. We start by spelling out the core assumptions behind the public value approach. We identify two key confusions; about public value as theory, and in defining ‘public managers’. We identify five linked core assumptions in public value: the benign view of large‐scale organisations; the primacy of management; the relevance of private sector experience; the downgrading of party politics; and public servants as Platonic guardians. We then focus on the last two assumptions because they are the least applicable in Westminster systems. We defend the ‘primacy of party politics’ and we criticise the notion that public managers should play the role of Platonic guardians deciding the public interest. The final section of the article presents a ‘ladder of public value’ by which to gauge the utility of the approach for public managers in Westminster systems.     

Public Value and the Ideal State: Rescuing Public Value from Ambiguity

Public value theory has had its supporters and critics, with debate about the use of strategic management by public managers and confusion about the meaning of public value. This paper formalises Moore (1995) into a simple theory. That theory introduces the concept of an ‘ideal state.’ The ideal state is a simple means of describing and analysing public value, using a graphical presentation. In an ideal state roles are clear and public value is optimised. Insights from that ideal state are then applied to a more real world to clarify the nature of public value and to consider the appropriate use of strategic management by public servants. The conclusion is that public value theory provides some justification for strategic management, but the paper also demonstrates the limits to strategic management by officials.     

Public Value Management: A Case Study of Transitional Change in Disability Sector Reform in Western Australia

This paper contributes to the study of public value management (PVM). PVM is distinguished from other approaches to public administration in its focus on establishing community networks and collaborative capacity building for the creation of public value. We explore PVM through a case study of a public–community sector partnership strategy called the positive behaviour framework (PBF), a state government initiative designed to transform services for people with disabilities. The development and implementation of the PBF is analysed via a transitional change or ‘sector awareness’ model. Each phase of the model is illustrated through ‘positive stories’ that depict key moments in the change process and in the activities that public sector managers employed to raise awareness, build capacity, and promote collaboration. We discuss the implications of the study for disability sector change management and for the further study of the PVM approach to public sector administration.     

Institutional Constraints,Managerial Choices,and Conflicts in Public Sector Supply Chains

In this research, we compare the governance mechanisms that public sector managers and private sector managers leverage when responding to conflict in supply chain relationships. We find evidence that public sector managers are more likely than private sector managers to rely on written (formal) contract mechanisms, but that both public and private managers use relational (informal) governance mechanisms to similar extents. We also find that managers from both sectors perceive an improvement to the quality of the exchange relationship when a relational approach is emphasized in managing the conflict. Our research provides an important contribution to our understanding about the actions public managers take in dealing with supply chain conflicts and suggests potential policy alternatives to foster contracting efficiency and effectiveness.     

A Knowledge‐Based Approach to Public Value Management: A Case Study of Change Implementation in Disability Services in Western Australia

This paper provides a knowledge‐based perspective to understanding public value management (PVM). As distinct from other approaches to public administration, PVM focuses on collaborative capacity building for the creation of public value. To develop the notion of PVM further, we explore the role of a knowledge‐based strategy in a case study of change implementation in 18 disability service organisations in Western Australia. Our findings show important inter‐relationships between knowledge management strategy, adopting a person‐centred approach to service provision, and sustainability of change implementation. We discuss the implications of the study for disability sector change management and for the further exploration of the strategic role of knowledge management capabilities in the study and practice of PVM in public sector administration. The paper explores the relationship between an organisation's knowledge capture and sharing systems and processes and its ability to implement change in a way that generates long‐term benefits for both public sector employees (e.g., engaging with key stakeholders to generate innovative solutions for serving client needs) and clients (i.e., increased well‐being through better service design and support).     

New Millennium,New Public Management and the New Zealand Model

Recently the much‐discussed ‘New Zealand model’ of new public management (NPM) has become significantly revised. It now lacks the theoretical coherence and the market‐led focus that it relied on between 1987 and 1996. Labour‐led governments since 1999 have undertaken gradual and pragmatic – yet significant – changes in public management structures and principles, refining and sometimes reversing the model implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This article does a ‘stock‐take’ of public management developments in New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, and argues that New Zealand can no longer be viewed as a leading exponent of market‐led NPM. Some NPM principles have been refined, but others have been quietly abandoned. The new National‐led government appears unwilling to undertake radical reforms, and, while it may seek a greater role for the private sector, looks set to continue with the ‘gradual and pragmatic’ approach adopted since 1999.     

Private Sector Imprinting: An Examination of the Impacts of Private Sector Job Experience on Public Manager's Work Attitudes

What are the attitudes of public managers who have had full‐time private sector work experience? Public managers with private sector work experience report different perspectives when compared to their counterparts who have spent their entire careers in the public sector. Though private sector work experience negatively correlates with job satisfaction, it only does so for the “new switcher,” whose last job was in the private sector. As careers advance, the negative impact seems to wane, leaving a public sector workforce that, in part as a result of their private sector work experience, are relatively more intrinsically motivated and involved in their jobs. We conclude with discussion of implications for human resources management.     

Regulating Public Services: How Public Managers Respond to External Performance Assessment

Performance management systems have become a key component of contemporary public administration. However, there has been only limited analysis of the social construction of performance by public managers who are subject to them. This article examines the ways in which public managers create, maintain, and disrupt performance management practices. The authors find that managers make external performance assessments perform for themselves by constantly negotiating boundaries in ways that combine bureaucratic and managerial rationales. The authors argue that the ways in which organizational boundaries are constructed are fundamental to understanding the success or failure of performance management systems and the transformation of managerial ways of thinking about performance into a logic of improvement through which contemporary public sector reforms become embedded.     

Implementing Open Innovation in the Public Sector: The Case of Challenge.gov

As part of the Open Government Initiative, the Barack Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase the innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers are employing a new policy instrument called Challenge.gov to implement open innovation concepts invented in the private sector to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and to leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. The authors highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, the administrator of the Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, this Administrative Profile features the work of Tammi Marcoullier, program manager for Challenge.gov , and Karen Trebon, deputy program manager, and their role as change agents who mediate collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies as they navigate the political and legal environments of their local agencies. The profile provides insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems, as well as lessons learned for designing open innovation processes in the public sector.     

On Justification Work: How Compromising Enables Public Managers to Deal with Conflicting Values

In the public administration literature, a variety of responses to value conflicts have been described, such as trade‐offs, decoupling values, and incrementalism. Yet little attention has been paid to the possibility of constructive compromises that enable public managers to deal with conflicting values simultaneously rather than separately. The authors use Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's theory of justification to extend current conceptualizations of management of conflicting values. On the basis of a qualitative study of daily practices of Dutch health care managers (executives and middle managers), they show how compromises are constructed and justified to significant others. Because compromises are fragile and open to criticism, managers have to perform continuous “justification work” that entails not only the use of rhetoric but also the adaption of behavior and material objects. By inscribing compromises into objects and behavior, managers are able to solidify compromises, thereby creating temporary stability in times of public sector change.     

Perceptions of Public and Private Performance: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Media, politicians, and reform proponents frequently assert that public sector organizations are inefficient and burdened by administrative procedures. But are negative stereotypes of the public sector reflected in people's perceptions of public service provision? Given the methodological challenges of isolating the perception of publicness from other factors related to public organizations, little is known about whether public organizations have a negative image. The authors use a survey experimental design to isolate the effect of publicness on perceptions of the performance of hospitals. The results suggest that public sector organizations have a negative image on productivity‐related aspects of performance but not on normative aspects of performance. As this article is a randomized experiment, it provides strong evidence regarding the causal nature of the relationship between publicness and perceptions of performance. Implications for researchers aiming to understand these mechanisms and for public managers concerned about the image of their organization are discussed.     

公共管理的由来及其与公共行政的内在差异--由传统公共行政到公共管理研究之一

产生并服务于当代西方国家政府改革实践的公共管理,促进了行政科学理论研究的重大变化.这种转变,既丰富了行政科学研究的视野与研究方法,也带来了公共事务治理理念与治理模式的变革,从而为公共事务的有效治理、公共利益的有效实现,开辟了广阔的社会资源和发展前景.本文拟对公共管理的由来、特性及其与传统公共行政的内在差异,进行学理意义上的简要梳理和归纳.     

Comparing Public and Private Managers' Leadership Styles: Understanding the Role of Job Context

ABSTRACT

Comparing public and private managers is a major subject in the public management literature, but there have been only a few empirical studies of the differences in their respective leadership styles. Traditionally, leadership style is explained by the characteristics of the manager, the employees, and their job. This study explains leadership by the manager's job context: the degree of job complexity, role clarity, and job autonomy. We argue that differences in job context explain the use of different leadership styles in the public and private sector. To clearly specify the importance of sector, the study investigates direct, mediating, and moderating effects. Based on a survey of Danish public and private managers with 949 respondents, this article shows that job context variables vary significantly between public and private sector managers. The article provides some explanations for why public managers use more participative leadership, while private ones use more directive leadership.     

More than Writing on a Wall: Evaluating the Role that Codes of Ethics Play in Securing Accountability of Public Sector Decision‐Makers

This article argues that the essential factors of a public service code of ethics can be divided into five categories. These categories or principles are fairness, transparency, responsibility, efficiency and conflict of interest. These principles are identified in this article as being the basic elements of democratic accountability in relation to public sector decision‐making. The issues explored are not only the obstacles that the public service decision‐maker faces in internalising these principles but, also, the challenges for a pro‐active management in fostering such internalisation.     

Do Partners in PPPs view Public and Private Management Differently?

Differences between public and private management have been studied extensively by comparing sectors, but not within cross‐sectoral collaborative arrangements. As participants in such arrangements have actually experienced both management styles, examining their perceptions of how these styles differ may contribute innovatively to existing literature. This paper compares such perceptions between public and private sector project members (N = 63) involved in four PPPs in the Netherlands. We assess (1) to what extent and under which conditions these project members view public and private management differently and (2) how they evaluate these differences. By triangulating quantitative and qualitative interview data, we examine Boyne's classical hypotheses and find that more than two‐thirds of the statements making reference to these hypotheses offer support for them; more so, the vast majority of such statements evaluate sectoral differences negatively. Intriguingly, type of PPP is a stronger determinant of perceived differences than the manager's sector of origin.     

Balanced Scorecard Implementation in a Local Government Authority: Issues and Challenges

Over the last decade the balanced scorecard (BSC) has emerged as a popular strategic performance measurement and control system within various public sector organisations as it assists in effectively implementing strategy and in measuring performance. This article investigates whether the implementation of a BSC has been of value to a large Local Government Authority (LGA) within Australia. The research takes a thematic approach to identify the issues, challenges and lessons learnt in relation to the design and implementation of the BSC, which is accomplished through a review of annual reports, published relevant documents and semi‐structured interviews with 13 senior managers of various programs and divisions within the LGA. Future research opportunities are also identified in this area.     

We’re Not all Happy Yet: Attitudes to Work,Leadership, and High Performance Work Practices among Managers in the Public Sector

This article explores the attitudes of male and female managers in the public sector toward high performance Human Resource Management (HRM) policies and practices, work, and organisational leadership, and compares these attitudes to those of managers in the private sector. It finds that female public sector managers are most positive about high performance HRM policies and practices. Male public sector managers are less positive than female managers in the public sector and male and female managers in the private sector across all the measures. Psychological contract theory suggests either the changes associated with high performance HRM policies and practices, or attempts to decrease the disadvantage felt by women in the public sector may have resulted in a sense of disadvantage among some men in the sector, and created a changed, more transactional psychological contract between these men and their organisation. Strategies are needed to reengage public sector men.     

Public versus Private Managers: How Public and Private Managers Differ in Leadership Behavior

This article aims to find out whether there are behavioral differences between public and private sector managers. Two groups of public managers (managers of social insurance agencies and public school principals) and a group of private managers (two samples) are investigated. Behavioral dimensions are investigated including leadership style (task, relationship, and change orientation), decision‐making style (the functions of sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling), and motivation profile (achievement, affiliation, and power motivation). An analysis of data from 459 managers in four organizations in Sweden reveal significant differences in behavior between public and private managers. However, no significant differences in leadership behavior are discovered among public managers. Possible explanations for such differences and similarities are explored.     

A Multidimensional Reputation Barometer for Public Agencies: A Validated Instrument

Reputation is of growing interest for the study of public bureaucracies, but a measurement that can discern between the subdimensions of reputation and is validated on real-life audiences has remained elusive. The authors deductively build, test, and cross-validate a survey instrument through two surveys of 2,100 key stakeholders of the European Chemicals Agency, the European Union chemicals regulator. This empirical tool measures an agency's reputation and its building blocks. This scale represents an important contribution to reputation literature, as it allows scholars to distinguish and measure which aspects of reputation public organizations are “known for” and build their claim to authority on, as well as how the profiles of public organizations differ. The authors find that direct stakeholder contact with the agency is necessary for stakeholders to be able to evaluate the separate dimensions of reputation independently. Evidence for Practice

• This study equips practitioners with a reputation barometer tailored to the public sector. It allows them to measure the reputation of their organization, in a differentiated fashion, among different stakeholder groups.
• While public organizations increasingly engage in reputation management activities, a potential caveat that emerges from our exercise is that managers might be steering in non-astute directions. While our study shows that, as for private actors, “performance matters,” procedural and moral aspects also weigh heavily in the eyes of stakeholders when it comes to public regulators.
• To secure a positive organizational image and the authority crucial for public agencies to operate, the performance management turn in the public sector may need to be supplemented by an enhanced organizational attention to procedural and moral aspects.

     

Towards a Model Public Sector Integrity Commission

This article examines the current debate in Australia about public sector integrity and the idea of a standing anticorruption commission. From this debate the article outlines a specific type of ‘public sector integrity commission’ that in principle should have the necessary powers and techniques at its disposal to minimise corruption while ensuring efficiency and fairness. The debate has been most active in jurisdictions that have not had an anticorruption commission – mainly in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania – but debate about integrity commissions has occurred in all jurisdictions. The authors argue that anticorruption commissions are essential to ensure the integrity of the public sector and that a model commission should: cover all elements of the public sector; independently investigate serious and mid‐level complaints; have own motion powers to investigate any matter; have summary authority to apply administrative sanctions; make use of a range of investigative tools; not be tasked with combating major and organised crime; and be held accountable to citizens through a parliamentary committee and a parliamentary inspector.