REINVENTING EXCELLENCE OR HOW BESTSELLERS THWART THE SEARCH FOR LESSONS TO TRANSFORM THE PUBLIC SECTOR

What makes a best-seller in the study of public management? In the 1980s there was Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (1982), In Search of Excellence. In the 1990s there is David Osborne and Ted Gaebler (1992), Reinventing Government. Throughout this period managing the public sector remained a live issue, many books of great interest and merit were published on the topic, but none had an equivalent impact. Earlier contributions to this symposium have discussed the practical application and strengths and weakness of Reinventing Government. This article discusses two other books both of which could make an important contribution to improving public sector management: Gareth Morgan (1993), Imginization and Robert E. Lane (1991), The Market Experience. The discussion has two objectives: to show the relevance of each book and to identify the distinguishing characteristics of a best-seller.     

UNDERSTANDING GOVERNMENT: FOUR INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS IN THE STUDY OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

In this article a conceptual map of the identity of the study of public administration is developed that encompasses its theoretical diversity and richness. It organizes public administration scholarship into four main intellectual traditions: practical wisdom, practical experience, scientific knowledge and relativist perspectives. The objective is to outline the study’s fundamental heterodoxy and interdisciplinarity. While the study clearly has strong national components everywhere, the four main intellectual traditions go across and beyond national traditions of government and of its study.     

THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE SECTOR CLEAVAGE REVISITED: THE IMPACT OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT ON POLITICAL ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOUR IN 11 WEST EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

This study explores a refined model of public/private sector cleavage voting. Assuming that market and work experiences are crucial for people to develop common political views, it investigates three contexts that shape government employees' willingness to vote as a single constituency: the branch of public sector production, the occupational status, and the type of service economy. Estimation results obtained from regressions on European Social Survey (ESS) data indicate that government employees in public health, education and service production rather than public administration utilize sector cleavage voting. Regardless of their actual occupational status, public health and education employees show persistently stronger attitudes in favour of expanding state responsibility. With respect to party choice, stronger signs of alignment along the sector cleavage are observed in Social Democratic service economies. In sum, the public/private sector cleavage continues to matter in a more complex way than a simple sector dichotomy would suggest.     

PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS IN THE ROAD TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: EVIDENCE FROM PUBLIC SECTOR PROCUREMENT

This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding key psychological barriers to implementing sustainable development in procurement process by local government and health care authorities. This task is an important one as a comprehension of psychological barriers is a prerequisite for understanding how individuals engage with the often more visible technical, budgetary or regulatory barriers in sustainable procurement. The article highlights how progress towards sustainable procurement is hampered by a combination of (1) individual factors; (2) organizational factors; (3) small group adaptation processes; (4) adaptation processes within the organization; and (5) external adaptation processes between organizations. The framework thus contributes to filling the conceptual space between human agent and organizational structure by pointing to the importance of cognitive filters and ideational resources that interact at various levels within an organization and in the complex network of formal or informal partners that surround it.     

THE DIFFICULT TRANSFORMATION OF STATE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN PORTUGAL. EUROPEANIZATION AND THE PERSISTENCE OF NEO‐PATRIMONIALISM

Portugal has been characterized by a late discontinuous democratization process. This contribution discusses the case of state and public administration reform in Portugal by using approaches from democratization, modernization and Europeanization theories. In order to understand the Portuguese case, the concept of ‘neo‐patrimonialism’ is used. We characterize Portuguese public administration as still having ‘neo‐patrimonial’ features, and therefore is still in transition from old closed‐minded practices such as particularistic decision making or clientelistic relationships to new open‐minded ones. The ‘new’ governance agenda combines new public management instruments and a growing flexibilization of public administration towards networks with non‐statal actors and has certainly led to some improvement in the quality of the services associated with public administration. Although is still too early to assess, top‐down and horizontal Europeanization processes, particularly since the late 1990s, may have contributed to a more reflexive approach in moving towards a more endogenous strategic vision based on the needs of the Portuguese state and public administration.     

THE FINAL OUTCOMES OF THE REVIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN NORTHERN IRELAND. TENSIONS AND COMPATIBILITY WITH DEVOLUTION,PARITY AND MODERNIZATION

In terms of the configuration of structures and the distribution of functions for the delivery of public services, the final decisions on the Review of Public Administration in Northern Ireland encompass significant changes compared to those proposed in 2005. This article places that review in the context of a devolved system of public administration. It identifies four different phases of the review process which have had a differential impact on the predominant themes, principles and structures. A range of tensions are identified, particularly between the proposals for structural change in the final outcomes and earlier recommendations, and also between the final decisions on structural changes and the guiding principles set out as underpinning these changes. The review proposals can be located within the public service reforms of the UK government and a number of perspectives are suggested for evaluating the extent to which the outcomes of the review are compatible with key components of the modernizing and devolution agendas of the UK government.     

GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO DO ITS JOB. A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GOVERNANCE SHIFTS IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR

Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments' responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy‐making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education.     

WHY PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT SERVICES ALWAYS FAIL. DOUBLE‐SIDED ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION AND THE PLACEMENT OF LOW‐SKILL WORKERS IN SIX EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

It has been a general finding across Europe that very few job matches are facilitated by public employment services (PES).The article explains this failure by highlighting the existence of a double‐sided asymmetric information problem on the labour market. It is argued that although a PES potentially reduces search costs, both employers and employees have strong incentives not to use PES. The reason is that employers try to avoid the ‘worst’ employees, and employees try to avoid the ‘worst’ employers. Therefore these services get caught in a low‐end equilibrium that is almost impossible to escape. The mechanisms leading to this low‐end equilibrium are illustrated by means of qualitative interviews with 40 private employers in six European countries.