INTRODUCTION: EXPLOITING IT IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION - TOWARDS THE INFORMATION POLITY?

This introduction to the theme issue on Towards the Information Polity? Public Administration in the information age presents the case for the systematic academic investigation of the changing relationships which characterize the ‘information polity’. This perspective on the information polity focuses on the significance of new kinds of informational resources and flows in government, and their interaction with broad directions of reform in contemporary public administration, including the new public management. It is argued that, whereas the literature of business strategy has emphasized the economic logic by which ‘informatization’ encourages organizational transformation, the articles in this issue demonstrate the importance of wider cultural, organizational and political factors to understanding processes of informatization and the changing nature of the emergent ‘information polity’.     

E-Government for Lowering Administrative Burden: An Empirical Research on European Rural Businesses

Administrative burden reduction is in the policy agenda in European countries and international organizations. The objectives of this article are to measure administrative burden of rural businesses in three European case studies and to assess the use of semantic electronic government services for its reduction. The main findings are that rural businesses do not perceive the administrative burden significance for entrepreneurship; public administration could implement semantic electronic government services to reduce rural businesses’ administrative burden; and future administrative burden reduction policies should take into account the type and location of businesses to achieve an efficient business environment.     

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.     

REFORMING PUBLIC SERVICES IN THE UK: BRINGING IN THE THIRD SECTOR

In the UK, the government continues its project to reform public services. Earlier projects have focused on the modernization of public sector organizations; in the latest round of reform, New Labour has focused on widening choice and the personalization of services. To this end, the government has been working with Third Sector (TS) organizations to expand their role in shaping, commissioning and delivering public services. The government’s vision is predicated on a normative assertion, that, unlike traditional public sector organizations, TS bodies create public value by being more innovative, are inspired by altruistic aims and values, and have greater commitment to their clients. This paper reviews recent policy and questions whether the government’s policy is flawed, contradictory and risks damaging the attributes of the TS admired by New Labour.     

Public Organizations, Multiple Constituencies, And Governance

Public organizations vary considerably. Yet little attention has been paid to the systematic analysis of this diversity. Drawing on case studies of four public organizations and a survey on all central government organizations in Denmark, variations in tasks, environments, constituencies, and central governance are conceptualized. Public organization tasks can be analysed at three levels ranging from user-oriented outputs, general outputs which can further be divided into policy goals, scope of profile, standard setting and capital accumulation, to the normative base of the public sector. Public organizations vary with regard to the emphasis put on level of output and on how the different aspects of the tasks are interrelated. Variations in constituencies and exchange cycles with the environment are further related to different task profiles. Finally it is shown that central oversight organizations compete with other actors in the public organizations' environment in the governance of public organizations. From an organizational point of view 'the state' appears to have a humble and remote position.     

Organization termination in the nonprofit setting: the dissolution of children's rehabilitation services

Public and business sector organizations are the primary subjects of the existing literature on organization termination. This article considers the applicability of the termination literature to the nonprofit organization context. In particular, the literatures of public administration (public agency termination), organization theory (life cycles of organizations), and business administration (firm failure) are used to examine the termination experience of a specific nonprofit agency, Children's Rehabilitation Services (CRS). After more than thirty years of providing residential treatment services to boys with emotional problems, the agency merged with another nonprofit rather than face bankruptcy. To understand the causes of CRS's termination, financial factors, deleon's (1978) obstacles to termination, life cycle theory and the role of the agency's changing environment are studied. The case of CRS illustrates many of the findings of the organization termination literature and introduces a new point essential to consideration of termination in the nonprofit context: the importance of the selection of decision makers with competencies appropriate for the given life cycle stage of the organization.     

Decentralized Recruitment and Selection in Thailand: Friend or Foe to Local Public Administration?

This article draws attention to the advantages and disadvantages derived from decentralized recruitment and selection for a form of local public administrative unit, the municipality. This was examined within the context of Thailand, a unitary transitional country where bureaucratization and centralization had been the norms in its public administrative system for centuries. It argues that local fiscal management and reformed local government structure would not be successful when executed by incompetent local civil servants. To summarize, recruitment and selection function as a “vacuum” and “filter” that organizations employ to obtain proficient and skilled human resources for their organizations. In Thailand at the local level, it appears that discussions of recruitment and selection functions barely disguise the inept procedures that occur in reality. These are grounded in actions looking towards recentralization, local-cronyism, and nepotism that have traditionally rooted and underpinned the Thai local administration in the area of personnel administration.     

STEERING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE WITH DEFECTIVE MAPS

Governments control public expenditure on definitions different from those of General Government Expenditure, the national accounts aggregate. After a prolonged period of relatively stable definitions for its public expenditure control aggregate, the UK government has recently revised this twice, substituting the New Planning Total for the Old Planning Total in 1990 and then moving in 1993 to the New Control Total. This article evaluates the justifications offered for these revisions and evaluates alternative explanations. The search for presentational gains and recourse to definitional change as an escape from problems feature prominently among the latter. Moreover, the fundamental ongoing changes in the form of public service delivery have major implications for the articulation of delivery agencies with public expenditure planning. There has been a marked loss of information and of transparency, notably with regard to forward information about function and economic category. Data continuity has been broken, and year-on-year changes to cash plans cannot be properly analysed. Transferring expenditure away from general government to where it is‘out of reach’in the expectation of efficiency gains further complicates monitoring. The channels of public accountability are blocked, in part by information overload and in part by information suppression. The existing arrangements, whether by accident or design, confer enormous discretion upon UK government through control of information flows.     

Public Policies, Private Strategies and Local Public Spending Bodies

Local Public Spending Bodies (LPSBs) occupy an important position in the contemporary structures of governance in the UK. As exemplars of many of the diverse characteristics of the New Public Management, LPSBs inhabit the fuzzy space between the public and private spheres, both in terms of organizational structure and service delivery. One finding from recent research into the internal governance of three kinds of LPSBs – Further Education Colleges, Housing Associations and Training and Enterprise Councils – was that the language of strategy predominated over that of policy on the boards of such organizations. In this article we assess the significance of this finding. We contend that the two terms are not interchangeable and that a vital distinction needs to be maintained between them. Specifically we argue that policy refers to collections of decisions grounded in public values whereas the concept of strategy, particularly as currently understood in the context of the New Public Management, refers to the positioning of an organization in its struggle to survive and grow. We conclude that LPSBs have been invited to behave strategically within a framework of increasingly centralized policy objectives and resource allocations.     

Mapping Organizational Change in the State: Challenges and Classifications

The article discusses possible answers to the question of what constitutes different types of change of state organizations. Drawing upon contributions from organization theory and public administration, classifications of different types of births, survivals, and deaths, are discussed and outlined, providing a mapping of organizational change in state administration along the horizontal as well as the vertical dimension. As an illustration, the article also shows how a detailed classification has been used in the Norwegian State Administration Database.     

How empowering leadership reduces employee silence in public organizations

The intentional withholding of critical work‐related information can have serious negative consequences in public organizations. Yet, few studies have examined why public employees intentionally remain silent about problems and how to prevent such behaviour. This article provides insights into how managers may lower employee silence in government organizations. We develop a model that suggests that empowering leadership by frontline supervisors reduces public employee silence, by improving employee trust in their supervisors, granting employees control over their jobs, and strengthening identification with the organization. We test the model in two cross‐sectional studies with data collected from all employees working in two local governments in the United States. We find empirical support for the model in both studies. We discuss the implications of the research results for public management scholarship and practice.     

THE PUBLIC MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES OF CONTRACTING WITH NONPROFITS for SOCIAL SERVICES

ABSTRACT

States and municipalities increasingly pursue privatization as a way to deliver public goods and services because of two expected outcomes, reduced costs and quality improvements. Several reasons are frequently cited for these anticipated benefits ranging from market competition to increased management flexibility and discretion to fewer rules and regulations. One policy area in which government has privatized many services through contracting with nonprofit organizations is social services. Contracted services are as diverse as providing shelters for the homeless, vocational education and job retraining, domestic violence services, refugee esettlement, child and elder abuse services, and food banks. A proliferation of public administration and nonprofit organizational scholarship has examined a range of issues associated with the government-nonprofit social service contracting relationship, not the least of which are topics related to management, measurement, and accountability. This article examines the public management challenges and implications of contracting with nonprofit organizations for the delivery of social services.     

Emerging Challenges to the Public Capacity in the Era of Evolving Public Administration: Toward Collaborative Public Management

New paradigms of public administration have been introduced in government in order to cure administrative ills around the world. Various trajectories of public sector reforms have been actively introduced in many countries and the benefit of shifting to new paradigms of public administration has been well documented. However, the cost or the consequence of public sector reforms remains understudied. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to deal with the consequences of the paradigm change of public administration and government reform because the author sees that the public capacity has declined or at least not improved in recent years while a wide range of innovations have been carried out by many governments under the New Public Management and governance perspectives. This article first looks at the evolution of public administration and its implication, followed by a discussion on government reform and its unintended consequences, and governance change in South Korea. Then various issues on new challenges such as the lack of the public capacity, and new tasks such as capacity building and calls for curriculum development, will be elaborated, followed by conclusions.     

A GENDER ANALYSIS OF WOMEN IN PUBLIC–PRIVATE–VOLUNTARY SECTOR ‘PARTNERSHIPS’

The nature of work and traditional notions of the public sector have been changing with increasing collaborative governance and delivery of public services among public, private and voluntary sector organizations. In the UK, governments at national and devolved levels of government have adopted collaborative governance for service delivery through various networks and partnerships. This article explores collaborative governance from a gender perspective, specifically the perceptions of women in public–private–voluntary sector partnerships. While previous research in this area has explored aspects of collaborative governance such as power, trust, accountability, decision‐making, performance, exchange of information and participation, there is very little research on women within these networks. The article therefore provides a gendered analysis, disaggregating survey data to better understand the dynamics, for women, of collaborative governance and partnerships among public, private and voluntary sector organizations.     

Generalists and specialists in executive politics: Why ambitious meta‐policies so often fail

This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.     

Performance-Related Payments in Local Governments: Do They Improve Performance or Only Increase Salary?

Personnel policies in public sector organizations are fundamental to improving public services, since they have an impact on both individual and organizational performance. Within the broad area of Human Resources Management (HRM), Performance-Related Pay Systems (PRPSs) are widely considered one of the cornerstones of public sector managerial reforms. Monetary incentives should be paid for performance achievements of single employees and/or teams, according to a defined set of objectives. While the role and appropriateness of PRPSs in the public sector have been widely discussed in the literature, in some countries monetary incentives have been used as a tool to increase individual salaries, without considering them as a motivating instrument in a wider HRM system. A small number of studies have been conducted to understand the limitations of this form of incentives and to investigate whether it can be replaced by different and more effective incentives in order to avoid the de-motivating effect caused by money, as recognized in the literature. This study tries to fill this gap investigating, through twenty-five interviews to informed respondents the effectiveness of existing PRPSs at Local government level in Italy both in terms of performance and motivation and the possibility to substitute monetary with non-monetary incentives. The findings suggest that the limitations of monetary incentives have been widely recognized, but it is still difficult to replace them with different and more effective alternatives.     

Private administration of a public function: The news election service

The United States government has no elections office and does not attempt to administer congressional and presidential elections. The responsibility for the administration of elections and certification of winners in the United States national elections rests with the states. The states divide election administration responsibilities between state and local election officials, whose objective is an efficiently administered honest election, with the ballots correctly tabulated. The formal structure of election administration in the United States is not capable of providing tirely results of the presidential and congressional election. Similar structural difficulties in other policy areas often result in ad hoc operating agreements or informal cooperation among agencies at different levels of the federal system. In the case of election administration, however, the public officials have abdicated responsibility for election night aqgregation of the national Vote totals to a private organization, News Election Service, which is owned by five major news organizations. This private organization performs without a contract, without public compensation, and without supervision by public officials. It makes decisions concerning its duties according to its own criteria. The questions of responsibility and accountability have not arisen in part because of the private organization's performance record and in part because the responsibility was assumed gradually over a lengthy period without ever being evaluated as an item on the public agenda.     

Public Services, Quangos And Women: A Concern For Local Government

The past eighteen years have witnessed a shift in the locus of much public sector service provision from elected and heavily regulated local government to the more opaque, appointed sector of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (QUANGOs). This shift has been the basis of much debate about the nature of democratic accountability and whether the users of public services are empowered by such decentralization. What has yet to be considered is how the displacement of local authority representation and service delivery may affect different groups of service users. This article is concerned with such issues in relation to women as consumers of public services who, from genuine political as well as expedient motivations, have been relatively well represented by local authorities. The concern here is that as decision making moves away from public view, the need to be seen to accommodate difference is lost, and representative diversity will suffer.     

Obstacles and Opportunities for Sustaining Performance Management Systems

Measuring performance in public organizations has been a growing trend for several decades. Designing, adopting, and implementing this style of management system have been the topic of much practitioner and academic deliberation. One struggle those determined to adopt performance measurement and management systems have faced, though, is the ability to sustain them over time and actually engrain them into their decision-making frameworks. Countless barriers to long-term success exist for public organizations and this article seeks to identify and categorize them. Using a mixed-method survey design, this research shows which factors are the most important to organizations hoping to build a performance system that can stand the test of time. Capacity, knowledge, and buy-in limitations pose serious threats to these reforms and it takes a concerted effort to cultivate not only support from employees and management to pursue performance management but the technical and conceptual capacity to design the right system for the organization.     

Representative Bureaucracy in the Public Service? A Critical Analysis of the Challenges Confronting Women in the Civil Service of Ghana

In the public administration literature, the debate concerning the representation of minorities in the public bureaucracy continues to attract attention. The idea is that passive representation may lead to active representation with the later helping to develop policies and programs that will benefit minorities. Consequently, a number of governments have been implementing policies to enhance the involvement of minorities in public services. The Ghana government has not been left out in this endeavor. Since 1957, it has continued to institute measures to ensure a fair gender representation in the bureaucracy. This notwithstanding, the upper echelons of the bureaucracy continue to be dominated by males despite the over representation of women at the lower levels. What are the challenges confronting women in the public sector that make it difficult to achieve active representation? In this article, we examine the challenges confronting women to achieve active representation from a representative bureaucracy perspective.