Ensuring Employment Equity: Are Federal Diversity Programs Making a Difference?

Abstract

In the last two decades, many public sector agencies have instituted a wide array of “managing diversity” programs designed to remove barriers to the full participation of women and people of color. Meanwhile, agencies are also increasingly responding to pressure to develop measures to monitor performance of all of their programs. Yet there have been few efforts in place to measure the effectiveness of diversity management programs. This article argues that such an evaluation is essential, and offers a preliminary governmentwide estimation of the success federal agencies have had in breaking down these barriers. We found, for the most part, that there is little evidence that broad‐based diversity programs, nor any of their programmatic components, have created a more equitable work environment for women or people of color. We then examine the programs at two federal agencies with significant diversity efforts, in depth, and find again that the results have been mixed. While not meant to be the final word, we suggest that these findings can serve as the basis for generating greater discussion and analysis of these important, but under‐evaluated, programs.     

Preparing public service agencies for strategic planning

This paper examines the reasons why public sector organizations may not be ready for traditional private sector strategic planning techniques and suggests a typology for diagnosing the CBO's position in relation to planning efforts. It identifies the need for interventions appropriate to the organization climate and begins to explore mechanisms which can be used to facilitate the strategic planning process in public service agencies.     

Increasing Access to Services for Limited English Proficient Persons

Abstract

Recent federal policy initiatives highlight requirements for all United States federal agencies and all recipients of federal funding to proactively accommodate the LEP populations they serve. However, many of the agencies and organizations that receive federal funds are unaware of this obligation or have not taken action to comply with it. Implementing these initiatives, especially in an era of fiscal constraints, poses significant management challenges for public agencies. Local government entities, advocates and community organizations share an obligation to ensure effective access to LEP populations, and can reap mutual benefits through coordinated efforts to do so.     

Administration in the year 2000: serving the client

One component of the increasing emphasis on management in the public sector is an emphasis on serving the “customer” of public sector agencies. Although it is difficult to argue that the clients of the public agencies should not be served courteously and efficiently, there are a number of questions about whether they should be thought of as customers in the same way as in the private sector. Some of those questions are empirical, related to difficulties in clearly identifying the customers of agencies. Other questions are normative, related to the proper definition of the role of the clients of public agencies and the definition of the public interest. These problems require serious rethinking of any simplistic adoption of a customer orientation in government.     

Adoption of comprehensive risk management in local government

In the aftermath of large company failures in the early 2000s, there emerged a new wave of efforts to enhance risk management (RM) and control in enterprises. The normative RM model has been promoted widely to all organisations, including public sector organisations. Using survey data, this article describes and explains the diffusion and adoption of RM innovation in local government in Finland. Our survey results support the argument that if comprehensive RM is not obligatory, it is not widely used in local government. Our analysis reveals that financial constraints explain to some extent the existence of comprehensive RM in municipalities, while structural factors such as the size of municipalities do not, even though RM is slightly more advanced in larger rather than smaller local governments. Slow adoption indicates that comprehensive RM as a managerial innovation lacks immediate benefit when assessed against the efforts and costs of its introduction and maintenance.     

Privatization in developing countries: ideal and reality

In both developed and developing countries, governments finance, produce, and distribute various goods and services. In recent years, the range of goods provided by government has extended widely, covering many goods which do not meet the purist's definition of “public” goods. As the size of the public sector has increased steadily there has been a growing concern about the effectiveness of the public sector's performance as producer. Critics of this rapid growth argue that the public provision of certain goods is inefficient and have proposed that the private sector replace many current public sector activities, that is, that services be privatized. Since Ronald Reagan took office greater privatization efforts have been pursued in the United States. Paralleling this trend has been a strong endorsement by international and bilateral donor agencies for heavier reliance on the private sector in developing countries.

However, the political, institutional, and economic environments of developing nations are markedly different from those of developed countries. It is not clear that the theories and empirical evidence purported to justify privatization in developed countries are applicable to developing countries.

In this paper we present a study of privatization using the case of Honduras. We examine the policy shift from “direct administration” to “contracting out” for three construction activities: urban upgrading for housing projects, rural primary schools, and rural roads. The purpose of our study is threefold. First, we test key hypotheses pertaining to the effectiveness of privatization, focusing on three aspects: cost, time, and quality. Second, we identify major factors which affect the performance of this privatization approach. Third, we document the impact of privatization as it influences the political and institutional settings of Honduras. Our main finding is that contracting out in Honduras has not led to the common expectations of its proponents because of institutional barriers and limited competitiveness in the market. These findings suggest that privatization can not produce goods and services efficiently without substantial reform in the market and regulatory procedures. Policy makers also need to consider carefully multiple objectives at the national level in making decisions about privatization.     

STRATEGY FORMATION IN PUBLIC AGENCIES

The main contribution of this study is the identification of three modes of strategy for public agencies based on strategic thought in a corporate environment. Strategic design, internal strategic scanning, and strategic governance embody three distinct modes of strategy relevant in the public sector. Programming actions, combining capabilities, and formation of networks capture the essence of these strategic orientations. By offering an organization‐based view of public sector strategy, this study puts public agencies at the centre of strategic examination. The fundamental unit of analysis within agencies is administrative duty, which connects administrative action with the democratic decision‐making process. These three strategy modes are based on complementary and, in some respects, contradictory theoretical assumptions, but all offer opportunities for confronting the diverse environments faced by public agencies. Each strategic orientation has a distinct approach to such features as the role of management, occupational groups, the environment, and types of capital.     

A Challenging State of Affairs: Public Administration in the Republic of Lebanon

ABSTRACT

This article highlights Lebanon’s administrative challenges and reform efforts, since the end of its Civil War (1975–1990). In recent years, Lebanon and international donors have worked to improve transparency, promote modern management techniques, and encourage the use of information technology throughout the public sector. Despite these efforts, Lebanon’s public institutions remain constrained by the centralization of power, corruption, outdated bureaucratic structures, and deficiencies in administrative knowledge. The success of future reform efforts will depend on whether the Lebanese bureaucracy can overcome the challenges created by regional political tensions, its Syrian refugee crisis, and an increasingly indifferent Lebanese public.     

Admitting a Bad Influence: Contracting the Public Service

Abstract

Emulation of the private sector is a longstanding controversy in public administration, but could it constitute a bad influence, of the kind that parents seek to guard against by scrutinizing their children's peers? Effectiveness provides a perspective on how helpful or harmful private sector influence has been for the public service. The practice of contracting-out under the A-76 process receives particular scrutiny relative to maintaining the effectiveness of public agencies. A second perspective on private sector influence examines, through the theoretical perspective of transaction-cost economics, the promise of cost savings that justified recent acceleration of contracting-out. The author, himself a government contractor, also bases his analysis on personal experience.     

WHAT WORKS BEST WHEN CONTRACTING FOR SERVICES? AN ANALYSIS OF CONTRACTING PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL IN THE US

During the last decade the field of public administration has undergone a period of renewed interest in the topic of performance and effectiveness. Key contributions to the growing stream of research on public sector performance include work focusing on the adoption and implementation of performance measurement in the public sector (see, for example, Julnes and Holzer 2001; Behn 2003 ); theoretical and empirical research on management’s effect on organizational performance (see, for example, O’Toole and Meier 1999; Meier and O’Toole 2002 ); and efforts to identify the determinants of organizational effectiveness (see, for example, Rainey and Steinbauer 1999; Brewer and Selden 2004 ). Surprisingly, this literature includes very few studies that explicitly address the issue of performance in contracting for services (exceptions include Domberger and Hensher 1993; Romzek and Johnstone 2002 ). In the United States alone, hundreds of billions of dollars are contracted out every year, and innumerable policies and programmes are implemented, at least in part, through contractual arrangements between public agencies and private providers ( Savas 2000; DeHoog and Salamon 2002; Kelman 2002; Cooper 2003 ). Moreover, contracting for services appears to be a growing trend in Western Europe and other regions ( Kettl 2000; Savas 2000 ). With the stakes so high, there is a pressing need for research that identifies factors and practices that contribute to success in contracting for services. This paper takes on the challenge by developing a model of contracting performance and testing it using Substantively Weighted Analytic Techniques (SWAT), a new methodology that allows researchers to isolate high performance among a large number of observations in order to identify variables practitioners can manipulate to improve practice ( Meier and Gill 2000 ).     

Network Governance of Private Sector Development Policy Implementation in Singapore

The discussion examines private sector development policy implementation in Singapore, examining the new role of the government's economic development agencies from the point of changing relationships among public and non-state actors in the policy arena. Singapore's model of private sector development consists of an exclusive network of partnerships among economic development agencies and between these agencies and private sector actors, such as business and organized labour, as integral policy stakeholders. As Singapore has moved within the past 15 years towards its articulated goal of becoming a knowledge-based economy and an industrial hub in the Asia Pacific region, the country's model of network governance is undergoing a gradual reconfiguration to include a greater role for local enterprises in the policy process. The changing institutional mechanics of network governance surrounding the new model of private sector development in Singapore are examined, along with the highlights of some implications surrounding this shift.     

ORGANIZATIONAL STATUS AND PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF THE SWEDISH PHARMACIES

In recent years, studies of the relationship between organizational status and success have focused largely on organizations transferring from the public to the private sectors: pharmacies in Sweden provide a case study of organizational status change in the reverse direction. Popular belief suggests progressive deterioration in the performance of an organization where ownership changes from owner-manager to public corporation, market conditions change from competition to monopoly, and internal management becomes increasingly command orientated. This article explores change in various performance and organizational variables in the National Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies, from its creation in 1971 until 1990. The corporation displays a high degree of stability amongst its senior management team, task specialization amongst employees is low, whilst standardization of working methods is high. Decentralization of authority has occurred over several years. A review of several measures of success, including productivity, financial ratios and innovation, demonstrates substantial progress over the period, comparing favourably with other Swedish public sector organizations. It is concluded that public sector ownership and monopoly supply need not result in deteriorating performance and lack of innovation, provided that criteria for success are clearly stated and properly monitored.     

Planning, Performance And Public Services

The policies of the Labour government in the UK place renewed emphasis on rational planning in the public sector. The government’s assumption is that this approach to decision making will lead to improvements in performance. Although the theoretical costs and benefits of rational planning have been widely debated in the public administration literature, no systematic empirical research on the impact of planning on the performance of public organizations has been conducted. By contrast, the relationship between rational planning and the success of private firms has been investigated extensively. A meta‐analysis and critical review of this evidence suggests that planning is generally associated with superior performance. However, important questions remain unresolved. For example, under what circumstances does planning work best, and which elements of planning are most important? Therefore, although it may be appropriate to encourage public agencies to consider carefully the potential benefits of planning, rational processes should not be imposed upon them.     

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.     

The Public Sector In An In-Between Time: Searching For New Public Values

A number of new governance structures has been introduced in the Danish public sector. These include contract agencies, user boards, boards of directors, marketization, corporatization, involving voluntary organizations in public services, EU-funded state border crossing co-operation, and Europeanization in many forms. Despite their obvious dissimilarities, these governance structures have one thing in common: they challenge the foundations of the public sector and territorial representative democracy by blurring the distinctions between politics and administration; between public and private; and between national and international. If politicians and voters are deprived of the capacity to make these distinctions, political responsibility is bound to fade away. Also, each new governance structure down-loads degrees of indeterminateness in the public sector since they may interact in unforeseen ways and introduce new actors, roles and practices in the public sector. This may cause the development of a more flexible public sector marked by 'local' appropriateness and adaptability but also by a multitude of inconsistent models and principles. To avoid the latter, a general discourse on values and their institutional requirements and the invention of public 'domains' is needed.     

Marketing-oriented planning in public administration: The case of the state development agency

Noting that concepts from marketing are not often found in the public management: literature, the authors present a multi-stage marketing-oriented planning model which can be used in the public sector. the mods1 is applied to the case of industrial development agencies, wit11 emphasis on the use of the model in recruiting foreign direct investment. The model includes the determination of organization mission, goals and objectives, resources, and growth strategies as elements of the management planning process. The marketing planning stage of the model includes opportunity analysis, positioning for target markets, marketing mix selection, and control. The two main stages of the process are mediated by factors in the internal and external environments of the organization.     

What's the Problem in Public Sector Workforce Recruitment? A Multi-Sector Comparative Analysis of Managerial Perceptions

Public sector workforce recruitment is problematic, but the nature of that problem is not clearly defined. Workforce recruitment is essentially a matching problem that requires managers to recruit desired employees in available labor pools. This research asks whether sectoral differences and competition for labor affect whether public managers frame the major problem of workforce recruitment as the size, qualifications, or work ethic of the labor pool. Using survey data from about 2,300 managers from two US states, problem attributions are modeled using multinomial logit. The findings suggest that the public and nonprofit sectors find it more problematic to recruit qualified employees than the private sector, but public and nonprofit agencies hold a comparative advantage over the private sector in recruiting employees with sufficient work ethic. Therefore, public and nonprofit managers should emphasize retention and training to leverage their comparative advantage in recruiting employees with work ethic while addressing a comparative disadvantage in recruiting qualified employees.     

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP IN THE ENGLISH PUBLIC SECTOR: PARADOX OR POSSIBILITY?

Our study explores the possibility for the enactment of entrepreneurial leadership in the English public sector under the Labour government’s modernization agenda. To substantiate our analysis, we draw upon data gathered from leaders in three public sector arenas – the National Health Service, secondary schools, and further education (FE) colleges. Our study proposes a definition of public sector entrepreneurship that extends beyond existing literature. In essence, we contend that public sector entrepreneurship is characterized by the combination of three distinct agencies: ‘stakeholder’, ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘political’. The public sector entrepreneur identifies market opportunities within the political landscape, optimizes the performance‐enhancing potential of innovation for the public sector organization, and carries stakeholders in a way that both permits risk and recognizes the stewardship of public sector resources.     

Small Countries,Big Performers: In Search of Shared Strategic Public Sector HRM Practices in Successful Small Countries

This article compares strategic public sector HRM practices between 10 small countries that have consistently shown extraordinary economic, social, and governance performance. The fact that these small countries, which are traditionally considered to be disadvantaged, have become benchmarks of good government suggests they have uniquely maximized and leveraged their key resource: people. In search of novel lessons, we assess through secondary data how their public sectors have organized and institutionalized four key HRM activities: 1) selection, 2) appraisal, 3) training, and 4) compensation, and whether they engage in strategic, centralized efforts to architect and “bundle” these activities. Our exploratory case study findings show that these high performing countries employ various integrated efforts to attract the best and brightest into their public sectors, and train and reward them well, although they differ in terms of their centralization dynamics. We conclude our article with seven propositions for future research and implications for emerging small countries.     

Self-Care in Public and Community Sector Workplaces

Key aspects of modern public service and community workplaces associated with significant levels of distress are identified. This includes the transformation of public sector and community agencies under the aegis of new public management (NPM). Using a child protection case study, it is argued that NPM ethos generates stressful workplaces and “uncomfortable knowledge” adding pressure to a system already in crisis. It is also argued that while there is value in self-care practices like debriefing, “boundary maintenance,” and “work-life balance,” one critical aspect of self-care associated with the virtue ethics tradition is missing. This gap in the literature and practice needs attention.