Reinventing the Proverbs of Government

The field of public administration has a long history of popular reform movements. Many of these reforms have failed to deliver the improvements promised. The current "reinventing government" reforms, which follow largely from the writings of David Osborne and his coauthors, claim to establish a new governmental paradigm based on liberating employees and citizens to do their best and using new management methods to get the most out of what government does. However, a careful analysis of Osborne's chief works, Reinventing Government and Banishing Bureaucracy, reveals that their advice cannot be applied because it is inconsistent. No new paradigm is established, and, more importantly, because of the ahistorical nature of these texts, Osborne proposes discredited ideas for administrative reform and misleads the reader concerning the significance of his observations.     

Reinventing Government: City Manager Attitudes and Actions

With the aim of helping move research from rhetoric to empirical reality, this article reports results of a national survey of city managers on attitudes towards and actions taken to implement principles of reinventing government. A large majority of managers support key principles of reinvention. A smaller proportion of managers has taken actions to recommend adoption of reinvention programs in their budget proposals to council. Managers' action-taking is influenced by certain characteristics of city managers, their communities, and their governments, including managers' attitudes and experiences, slack resources, and region.     

电子化政府:政府再造新范式

电子化政府不仅是一个新概念,而且是一种新的政府管理模式,其内涵在于建立一个虚拟政府,为公民提供方便、 高质量的公共服务。电子化政府的建立成为世界范围内政府再造的新趋势。本文分析了电子政府对政府治理和服务的创 新,进一步提出了我国构建电子政府的政策选择。     

Reinventing Amtrak: The politics of survival

This article argues that Amtrak's design as a “quasi-public, for-profit” corporation was seriously flawed from its beginnings. The corporation was isolated from America's private railroads, and isolated from trust-funding financial mechanisms that supported highways, airports, and mass transit. It depended on powerful Democratic congressional patrons and labor union support for protection from Republican executive budget cuts. But these allies pushed Amtrak into running far more costly service than was good for its bottom line. The corporation was already engaged in an internal reorganization designed to bring it closer to its customers, when the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election launched an external effort to reorient and restructure Amtrak. There are three possible outcomes of the two-sided reinvention process: status quo and continued slow decline; partnership based on new relationships between Amtrak, federal and state governments, and the private sector; and privatization which might still require substantial public expenditures for some time. Synchronizing the opportunities created by both the internal and the external reinvention efforts is the key to whether Amtrak can emerge as a viable and valuable provider of rail transportation in the 21st century.     

Accountability in Public Service Quasi‐markets: The Case of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme

Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represents the latest in a worldwide shift towards individualised funding models for the delivery of care services. However, market‐based models for care deliveries bring new considerations and dilemmas for accountability. Drawing on previous work by Dickinson et al. (2014), we examine a range of accountability dilemmas developing within the early implementation of the NDIS. These relate to accountability for the following: care outcomes, the spending of public money, care workers, and advocacy and market function. Examining these accountability dilemmas reveals differences in underpinning assumptions within the design and on‐going implementation of the NDIS, suggesting a plurality of logics within the scheme, which are in tension with one another. The contribution of this paper is to set out the accountability dilemmas, analyse them according to their underpinning logics, and present the NDIS as having potential to be a hybrid institution (Skelcher and Smith 2015). How these dilemmas will be settled is crucial to the implementation and ultimate operation of the scheme.     

公共图书馆政府信息公开服务工作的思考

介绍了政府信息公开与公共图书馆的关系,分析了公共图书馆政府信息公开服务工作现状,提出了积极主动开展政府信息公开服务工作的措施.     

转型期政府行政模式重构的生态分析

当前,我国正处在从传统向现代转型的时期,经济、政治、社会、文化结构发生了整体性变迁。与此相应,政府行政模式也经历着一个重新构建的过程。实现政府行政模式的转型与重构,应该把握与行政模式相关的基本生态要素的影响与作用,构建以服务、有限、引导、公开、满意为特征的全新行政模式。     

Public Administration, the History of Ideas, and the Reinventing Government Movement

Public administration writers, with some notable exceptions, generally have not paid a great deal of attention to the history of ideas. However, public administration inquiry is profoundly affected by longstanding political and social ideas. This article shows how the idea of the state as a purposive association—that is to say, a collective enterprise that is driven by some set of substantive ends or purposes—has helped to shape the thinking and discourse of some public administration writers, particularly those of the reinventing government movement. The implications of this for public administration inquiry and education are examined.     

服务型政府的构建——农村基层政府"再造"

"现代国家"构建的视阈中,农村基层政府的产生是国家向农村社会汲取资源的历史性的需要,而现实中农村基层政府的存在合理性则来自于乡村社会对于公共产品和公共服务的需求,因此面临着合法性危机和治理能力问题的乡镇政府必须通过革命性变革的政府"再造"完成从"汲取型政府"向"服务型政府"模式的转变和功能的转换。而政府"再造"面临的主要困境是财政制度、行政管理体制、民意表达机制等方面的制度短缺或不足,因此制度的改革和创新成为必然选择。     

构建和谐社会与建设服务型政府

社会主义和谐社会是民主社会、法治社会、科学社会,它能够激发社会活力,促进社会公平和正义,增强社会的法律意识和诚信意识,维护社会安定团结。在构建社会主义和谐社会的过程中,要发挥政府的主导作用,主导不是统治,而主要是为社会和谐提供服务。     

Suited to Serve: The Antecedents and Perceptions of Public Service Motivation in National Service

While research suggests that public service motivation may be a dynamic trait in individuals, particularly early in their careers, other recent research has found that PSM may be relatively stable upon entry into the workforce (Vogel and Kroll 2016). To identify more precisely the decision point among individuals considering a public service career, the present study uses the antecedents of public service motivation framework (Perry 1997) to predict participation in AmeriCorps, a voluntary national service program in the United States. Findings reveal that antecedent conditions of PSM, including the prevalence of seeing family members and mentors help others as well as participation in student government, predict whether an individual will join an AmeriCorps programs. Many of these self-reported motivations support the argument that people attracted to public service hold strong other-regarding values. These findings suggest that human resources managers would be wise to consider these antecedent conditions to public service motivation when identifying pools of talent for recruiting and selecting prospective employees.     

The Case Against Privatizing National Security

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Pentagon has accelerated efforts to outsource weapons, battlefield and base support operations, and troop training, invoking competition-based savings and better quality. I review the arguments for and against such privatization and summarize recent Pentagon outsourcing experience. I conclude that the current enthusiasm for privatization is driven largely by commercial concerns and lobbying rather than real gains to the nation and citizens, that it poses dangers of monopolization and undue political influence, and that current contracting practices lack verification and mandatory evaluation safeguards to deliver promised results.     

Central-Local Government Relations in Transition: The Case of Swedish Child Care

The provision of subsidized child care has grown to become asizeable economic activity in Sweden during recent decades.This paper examines the changed financial relation betweencentral and local governments and the impact of child-caregrants on local government behaviour. We find that during anearlier regime, with a system of matching grants, localgovernments responded strongly to the incentives of the rules.This resulted in both intended and unintended outcomes, aswell as a distortion of information to the central government.Experiences from a recent transition of regime towards a kindof closed block grant system, illustrates new types ofadaptive behaviour but also the problem of finding a formulafor a fair allocation of resources among local governments.When designing a block grant system a distinction must be madebetween expenditures and resource needs; cost expenditure datado not necessarily reflect resource needs in cases where thereare national categorical equity goals related to socialservices of a merit-want character.     

Local Government in Transformation: The Case of Constitutional Reform in Yugoslavia

The previous communal system in Yugoslavia (since 1955) did not prove viable. Owing to its great size (nearly 500 km² and more than 40,000 inhabitants), municipality in this period didn't affirm itself as a real community. Having many abilities in developmental planning, it was at the same time dependent on the state in the spheres of finance and normative regulations. The difference between the sphere of local government (LG) and state politics was substantially blurred.
Given the changing social conditions (introduction of market economy, political pluralism and the forms of parliamentarian democracy), the need for repeated establishment of the system of local government based on the altered position of citizens in the political system becomes evident. In this environment it is necessary to reestimate the experiences of LG in particular Yugoslav regions (republics) before World War II, and simultaneously, take selectively into account the experiences and development in other developed European countries.
This article compares the constitutional regulations of LG among particular Yugoslav republics, and between them and the characteristic orientations in other European countries, enlightening it with the aspect of actual processes and demands of centralization and decentralization, regionalism, moving the regulation of communal and other everyday needs closer to the people in LG, all in the sense of post-behavioristic trends of the "bottom-up" approach to the processes of decision-making.     

Variations in Organizational Participation in Government: The Case of Denmark*

The main purpose of this article is to refine, modify, and elaborate some central propositions and assumptions in the scholarly debate on corporatism or corporate pluralism. The empirical base is a data archive containing information on practically all interest groups in Denmark. Hypotheses are formulated and tested concerning variations in direct representation and participation of interest groups in public policy-making across (a) types of interest groups, (b) organizational resources, (c) organizational structures, and{d) political issue areas. Contrary to prevailing propositions in the literature on corporatism, the Danish case shows that corporate structures and practices go hand in hand with a system of interest groups characterized by myriads of interest groups, and an overall, rather decentralized structure.     

服务型政府建设探讨

建设服务型政府,根本在于坚持为民服务,实行民主行政,建立责任政府;关键在于完善服务型政府体系;重点在于加强制度建设,优化服务流程,突出公共性。