The Study of Public Administration in Hong Kong and Macao: Evolutionary Paths and Implications

Comparatively speaking, the birth and the growth of public administration programmes, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, in Hong Kong and Macao have been a response to the increasing need for the training of students and civil servants in the discipline of public administration. Since the 1990s, the proliferation of Master of Public Administration (MPA) programmes in both the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions can be explained by the demand for local people to govern the two places in accordance with the principle of ‘one country, two systems’. The content of various MPA programmes also reflects the changing political and administrative circumstances; its public administration focus has been accompanied by core courses training students from a variety of disciplines, ranging from public finance to economics, from public policy analyses to globalization, and from regional planning to a deeper understanding of mainland Chinese government and politics. In both Hong Kong and Macao, some graduates from both the Bachelor and Master programmes have joined the civil service or enhanced their skills in public sector management and governance. Although the medium of instruction varies from one university to another, their programme objective shares one thing in common: the imperative of training existing civil servants and students to join the governments of Hong Kong and Macao. This paper compares and contrasts the development of public administration programmes in Hong Kong and Macao and examines its theoretical implications for the changing relations between politics and public administration.     

Public administration in hong kong: Crises and prospects

Current studies on Hong Kong public administration have overlooked three emerging crises of the administrative system -- the crises of mediocrity, the public service, and the metapolicy -- which may result in a complete collapse of the colonial regime. The analysis reveals the following. Firstly, operating within a paradoxical context, civil servants find it difficult to maximize their contribution. Hard pressed by the delimma of “to strive for excellence or to observe medicoirty,” many choose the latter. Thus, the overall performance of many Hong Kong public agencies and civil servants is unacceptable. Secondly, at the absence of a political theory which redefines the relationship between the political system and socio-economic system and thus the mission of the public service, many civil servants lack commitment to the public service and therefore the norm of medicority is reinforced. And thirdly, the government has reformulated its metapolicy in a way that system overloading is likely, thus making Citizen insubordination probable. It is conclusded that the future of Hong Kong is bleak and that remedial actions are awaiting: the first task is the quest for a new set of political ideology and public philosohgy; the next is reformulation of a new metapolicy, followed by forceful pulbic sector management reform.     

Managing the Public Sector in Hong Kong: Trends and Adjustments

Public sector management in Hong Kong was initially designed to rule the territory as a British colony. A number of changes took place in the last quarter century before Hong Kong's reintegration with China and the nature of public sector management has transformed over this period. An overview of administrative principles and practices and an analysis of changes reveal trends that were influenced by both local and international factors. The framework of traditional public administration in the territory adapted effectively to embrace the principles of new public management without much difficulty. The global economic crisis compelled the government to revise its strategies to expand public spending and adopt a further reduced role in the provision of public services. New social, economic and political challenges are driving Hong Kong to adjust to the changing circumstances and trends, and four noticeable shifts can be identified. They include shifts from an administrative to a political executive, from job cuts to job creation, from financial restraint to increased spending, and from public to private sector provision of public services. The trends are driven by local and international forces as well as the progress of democratization and political awareness in Hong Kong.     

Competency management and civil service professionalism in Dutch central government

Competency management has only recently been introduced into personnel management in Dutch central government. The decentralized nature of Dutch central government and its personnel management systems generates marked variation in the degree to which competency management is being applied across the Dutch civil service. The success or otherwise of competency management schemes in both government departments and the higher civil service in The Netherlands, the Senior Public Service, show mixed results. Although all departments have taken steps in the direction of competency management, a few well-developed programmes are in use. The competency management system of the Senior Public Service, then, serves as a basic tool for its management development programmes. Its aim is to enhance civil service professionalism among senior civil servants. The practical effects of competency management programmes, however, can be questioned. Because competency management links personnel development to pay and career decisions, it could well elicit strategic behaviour by staff members; at worst, it could run the risk of becoming a self-defeating initiative.     

Empowering employees through the performance appraisal process

Increasing demands are being placed on many public servants as civil service organizations seek to increase productivity and operate with fewer levels of management. Moves away from traditional bureaucratic organization structures are often accompanied by attempts to develop a more empowering culture. These typically involve leadership initiatives adapted from the private sector in areas such as vision, values, participation and trust. In order to be successful, however, such initiatives need to be supported by corresponding changes in the systems which underpin human resource management. One of the most important of these is the performance appraisal system. This article describes how performance appraisal can be used to assist in empowering employees, using as an example the Corporate Finance Office of the New Zealand Department of Social Welfare.     

Satisfaction with and Success of Employee Training from a Public Service Motivation Perspective

New public management requires modernization processes, including modern human resource practices, to enhance public sector performance. According to human capital theory, well-qualified and highly motivated public sector employees improve institutional performance; this study investigates the extent to which employee training as human resource practice can enhance one component of employees’ public service motivation (PSM), namely public interest, and their competencies as employee outcome. We examine public interest as a mediator or a moderator of the relationship between satisfaction with employee training and the resulting competence gain. The findings indicate a positive direct effect of satisfaction with employee training on competence gains and a mediating effect of public interest.     

Recognizing Innate Transformational Traits in Public Administrative Services: Are We Doing Right?

ABSTRACT

With shifting paradigm, public administration needs even more transformational leaders. A large part of an individual’s leadership potential refers to innate personality traits which are brought out by relevant nurturing processes. Environment, favorable or unfavorable, interacts with these processes and impacts the flourishing of natural potential. Experience promotes the positive growth of innate potential that one possesses. Using data from India, this article looks into the systematic impact of public administrative training institutes on the development of top-tier civil servants. By comparing the performance of officers in public administration training academy possessing innate personality traits suitable for transformational leadership vis-à-vis innate personality traits suitable for transactional leadership, we test whether current training evaluation promotes transformational innate personality traits and suggests the implications. Interestingly, our mix-method study evaluating the entry-level induction training of public administrative leaders reveals that there is a gap between theory and praxis.     

Ethics, values and behaviours: comparison of three case studies examining the paucity of leadership in government

Three societies with similar initiatives for public service re-configuration and reform – the UK, Canada and Australia – are examined to highlight the many-faceted issues of public service ethics and the different approaches these governments have taken to re-building public trust and enhancing public service ethics in times of rapid change. These efforts for re-building an ethical public service are scrutinized according to four criteria for effectively leading change. Changes of public service values are also analysed as well as their implications for public servants.
Effectively, applied leadership is identified as the pillar of ethical practice – emphasizing the need for quality leadership development through on-the-job experience. Although legislation and codification are seen as necessary for building an ethical infrastructure that can help employees out of encountered dilemmas, the way forward is seen as nurturing an environment of trust and vigilance in which ethics are promoted through exemplary behaviour of leaders and employees alike.     

Performance pledges–power to the consumer or a quagmire in public service legitimation?

One of the latest initiatives in Hong Kong's public sector reform is the launch of “performance pledges” in 1992, which have essentially been modelled on citizen's charters in the United Kingdom. While the stated aims of performance pledges, citizen's charters, or similar initiatives, are to raise the standard of public services and to make such services answer better to the needs of ordinary people, hence “empowering” the public service consumers, this latest consumerist trend in public management has more far-reaching implications, both in terms of the organization as well as the legitimation of public service provision. This article examines such implications, with specific reference to the Hong Kong situation, and argues that the outcome of the development seems to point to the empowerment of public managers rather than the consumers as the official rhetoric would imply.     

Does Ideology Matter? Incentive,Efficiency and Management in the Public Sector

Contracting out has become increasingly popular as a strategy for public sector management for reducing costs, alleviating the burden on government agencies providing services, as well as taking advantage of the practices that have succeeded in the private sector. Generally, the system of management in capitalist liberal democratic systems of government that emphasize rule of law, transparency, performance measurement, and accountability are expected to be more efficient, while socialist regimes are considered to be inefficient due to the lack of these features. This article compares two dissimilar cases of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Shenzhen Special Economic Zone of China. An examination of the management of contract in the area of public housing in these cities reveal that the socialist city of Shenzhen has achieved a higher level of efficiency, while capitalist Hong Kong lags behind in establishing an effective system of management of contracts in the public sector. The finding challenges the traditional assumptions related to efficiency under different ideological regimes.     

Citizen Trust in Civil Servants: A Cross-National Examination

How trusting of civil servants are citizens in North America and Europe? What individual-level and national-level attributes correlate with trust in civil servants? To answer these questions, data from national samples across 21 countries are taken from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2006 Role of Government module and are analyzed by estimating multilevel binary logistic regression models. Trust is correlated with both subjective (at the individual-level) and objective (at the national-level) indicators of performance. The quality of institutions also matters as countries with lower levels of public sector corruption experience higher levels of trust in the civil service.     

TIME FOR EU MATTERS: THE EUROPEANIZATION OF DUTCH CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

To what extent does the European Union (EU) affect national governments? This article seeks to answer this question by assessing the Europeanization of Dutch central government. Using data from a large‐scale survey among civil servants, we assess to what extent the EU affects the structure and culture of governmental organizations, as well as the activities of individual civil servants. On the basis of this analysis, we conclude that the impact of the EU both on individual civil servants and on organizations in Dutch central government is two‐sided: a small core of civil servants and organizations are deeply involved in EU‐related activities and this exists alongside a much broader base of civil servants and organizations that are less affected by the EU. These differences appear more clearly on the level of daily working practices than on the level of formal organizational structures. Nevertheless, the impact of European integration on government organizations remains limited to particular organizations and particular civil servants within central government.     

Civil Service and Civil Society Collaboration: A Comparative Analysis of Disaster Management Results in China and the United States

This article explores the way natural disasters provide an opportunity to address relations between civil society and the state as mutually empowering. Such opportunity can be reinforced when civil servants help to mobilize the interests of marginalized communities into disaster management and collaborate with active civil associations in seeking to reduce disaster vulnerabilities. This requires that public administration be able to respond to disaster in an effective and equitable way. Civil servants should be capable of being socially reliable by building and maintaining trust in relationships with communities and civil organizations. Using the Gulf Coast Hurricanes (United States) in 2005 and the Wenchuan Earthquake (China) in 2008 as case studies, this article comparatively addresses the significance of public administration's role in developing mutual empowerment in state and civil society relations in the face of adversity. Given the fact that civil service capacity becomes a crucial factor in determining state-civil society relations, it also has important implications for the potential of democratization in China.     

How a demanding employment relationship relates to affective commitment in public organizations: A multilevel analysis

It has recently been recognized in the public administration literature that multiple reforms coexist in public organizations, ranging from the Weberian bureaucracy to New Public Management and, more recently, new public governance. This study develops a typology of the employment relationship with features of these macro‐level changes and tests their impact on the civil servant's affective commitment by including the individual‐level social exchange relationship. This multilevel model is tested with data from 936 employees in a public organization. The findings confirm the existence of different approaches to the employment relationship: overdemanding, mutual investment and moderately demanding. Civil servants in a mutual investment employment relationship are most affectively committed, and civil servants in a moderately demanding employment relationship benefit most from a positive social exchange relationship. Implications for public management theory and practice are discussed.     

Contract Management from the Perspectives of Bureaucrats and Contractors: A Case Study of Hong Kong

New Public Management (NPM) encourages private sector participation in the provision and delivery of public services through outsourcing. Bureaucrats and contractors assess the values, processes, and outcomes of contract management differently. This study adopts transaction cost economics (TCE), the resource-based view (RBV), and the principal–agent theory to analyze Hong Kong bureaucrats’ and contractors’ views on contract management. It finds that both groups are critical of the existing contract management system in Hong Kong. The study shows that the government’s neglect of the risks is causing transaction costs because it lacks a proper monitoring mechanism, two-way communication channels, and appropriate training, and because of contract complications and issues of accountability. There is insufficient proof to assert that the government purposefully conceals these risks, but they are not properly addressed.     

Review of public budgeting and financial management

User charge is an alternative option to privatizing public service provision. But its use as a policy instrument, compared with that of asset sales or contracting out, for instance, is less researched and documented. This paper tries to fill the gap. By contrasting the experiences of employing user charge for two public services in Hong Kong with diametrically opposing results, this paper offers preliminary conclusions on several lessons, which governments, in their drive toward improved efficiency, can learn in commercializing their trading activities. Implications to public policy making are also suggested. These include: the user-pays principle has to be applied equitably, the public service market has to remain depoliticized, the management has to be transformed to behave more entrepreneurially, and the users have to be educated.     

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM IN POST-1997 HONG KONG: POLITICAL CHALLENGES,MANAGERIAL RESPONSES?

One of the major reforms promoted by the new Special Administrative Region government of Hong Kong after the 1997 handover is that of the civil service. The March 1999 civil service reform consultation document outlined a number of proposed changes ranging from entry and exit, disciplinary measures, performance management, to performance-based reward system and training and development. This article examines the external and domestic forces (and crises) inducing the reform, and puts the discussion within the context of post-1997 political challenges to bureaucratic power. Given that the civil service stands at the outer firing line bearing the brunt of such challenges which interface with a mixture of legitimacy, accountability, probity and operational deficiencies, the significance of the present reform cannot be fully understood within a narrow managerial discourse of reform for greater efficiency and flexibility. The reform in fact represents managerial solutions to problems essentially of a “political” nature.     

Bubbling up or cascading down? Public servants,political advisers and politicization

One of the strands in the growing scholarship on political advisers in parliamentary democracies proposes that advisers can reduce the risk of civil service politicization by furnishing partisan advice to ministers, freeing civil servants to focus on the provision of expert competence. This benign narrative generates a significant hypothesis, which is that the institutionalization of the partisan role diminishes the risk of civil service politicization. That hypothesis has yet to be fully tested. Several studies have assessed the impact of advisers' actions on civil service impartiality, but the consequences of bureaucrats' own agency for that dependent variable have received far less attention. Drawing on data from a survey of New Zealand public servants, this article challenges the assumption in the political advisers literature that civil service politicization is primarily driven by exogenous factors and calls for a more nuanced theoretical approach to endogenous aspects of politicization.     

A Tale of Two Cities: Bureaucratisation in Mayor-Council and Council-Manager Municipalities

This paper presents a theory that predicts under what circumstances self-interested politicians ‘bureaucratise’ their administrations, in the sense that they delegate the powers to hire, fire and promote public employees to autonomous bodies (like civil service commissions). The main testable proposition is that, in polities with a higher concentration of powers, politicians will bureaucratise their administrations to overcome time inconsistency problems in their relationships with public employees. This prediction is tested with data drawn from US municipalities, where two main types of local governments co-exist: mayor-council and council-manager. Results show that municipal governments with a higher concentration of powers (i.e. mayor-council) tend to have more bureaucratised administrations.     

TOWARDS AN ACCOUNTABLE AND QUALITY PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN HONG KONG: REDRESSING ADMINISTRATIVE GRIEVANCES THROUGH THE OMBUDSMAN

ABSTRACT

Following considerable public pressure, in 1989, the Hong Kong government followed many other countries and established an Ombudsman. The establishment of the post has to be seen in the context of the political awakening of Hong Kong and demands for a more accountable and client-oriented public service. Previously, complaints of maladministration in Hong Kong were dealt with under a diffuse and fragmentary system which lacked effective powers. Effective legal action against the government for maladministration is also severely constrained by a number of factors. This article traces the growth of the Ombudsman concept and jurisdiction in Western countries over the last few decades and outlines the structure and jurisdiction of the Ombudsman's office in Hong Kong by way of comparison. The effectiveness of the Hong Kong Ombudsman is then evaluated by a detailed analysis of his achievements over the last ten years in combating maladministration, and his role in three high profile cases. These cases also elucidate some of the limitations inherent in the Ombudsman's role. Lastly the future of the Ombudsman in Hong Kong is explored. It is concluded that the Office of Ombudsman has scored initial success in Hong Kong public administration, and has enhanced government efficiency as well as satisfying public needs and filling a major gap in the system of public redress. However, problems of continuing resources and mapping out a sustainable ethos remain.