Public Management 1995: The Year That Was

Until it was discontinued in 1988, the Australian Journal of Public Administration published an administrative chronicle intended to document the events of the past year in state and commonwealth administrations.
This administrative essay, the first of a projected annual series, has a different, although related purpose. It is organised on a thematic, rather than a state-by-state basis, and attempts to describe and to illuminate the main issues in public administration in Australia as they emerged through the events of 1995.
In a short essay, detail must necessarily be sacrificed in order to capture the main trends. Nevertheless, the major features of the administrative landscape, as they appeared during 1995, have been faithfully recorded.     

Contract City Redux: Weston, Florida, as the Ultimate New Public Management Model City

Contracting out has become an accepted and, indeed, universal method of providing services in both the private and public sectors. Yet rarely has a municipality outsourced just about every service under its direct control—from public safety (police and fire), to solid waste collection and disposal, to parks maintenance, to municipal engineering and legal services. Weston, Florida, a city of some 62,000 residents, operates with just three employees—the city manager and two assistants. Hence the primary role of city manager has changed as well, from day-to-day administrator to contract manager and monitor. This essay describes the contracting operations in Weston and evaluates their efficiency and effectiveness.     

Accountability in Governance Networks: An Assessment of Public,Private, and Nonprofit Emergency Management Practices Following Hurricane Katrina

What is the most effective framework for analyzing complex accountability challenges within governing networks? Recognizing the multiscale and intersector (public, private, and nonprofit) characteristics of these networks, an accountability model is advanced organized around democratic (elected representatives, citizens, and the legal system), market (owners and consumers), as well as administrative (bureaucratic, professional and collaborative) relationships. This concept draws from 2005 events following Hurricane Katrina. Multiple failures of governing networks to plan for and respond to Katrina include a breakdown in democratic, market, and administrative accountability as well as a pervasive confusion over trade‐offs between accountability types emerging from crises. This essay offers several useful recommendations for emergency management planners as well as for those who teach and research.     

我国政府垂直管理的现状、困境与思考

垂直管理由于其在组织结构、领导体制、平衡分权以及加强中央集权方面所发挥的重要职能,从而在我国国家治理过程中发挥了积极的无可替代的作用。然而,由于垂直管理部门组织内部缺乏有效的考核制度、外部缺乏有力的监督机制,导致垂直管理部门与地方政府间矛盾重重,垂直管理混乱。因此,为了进一步深化我国行政体制改革,建设服务型政府,应建立有效的垂直管理部门内部考核机制与外部保障机制,合理界定中央与地方的事权范围,规范垂直管理部门与地方政府间的关系。     

Transformations in Discourse,Figure

This review essay critically maps the Anglophone reception of Lyotard's Discourse, Figure onto the text's own two-part organization. Earlier deconstructive readings tended to focus on the critique of structuralism presented in Discourse, Figure’s first half, under-emphasizing (and even criticizing) the post-Freudian philosophy of desire developed by Lyotard in the text's latter stages. This essay instead presents Lyotard's first major work not as two separable or opposed parts, but as a coherent trajectory responding to a specific philosophical problem, namely, the Hegelian account of sense-perception and signification as outlined in Hyppolite's Logic and Existence. In so doing, this review essay seeks to isolate key references and clarify the stakes for future readings of Lyotard's text.     

Security, Capacity and Post-Market Reforms: Public Management Change in 2003

Public sector change in 2003 was a product of external demands and internal pressures for improvement. The specific areas addressed are responses to security threats in the international environment; strengthening internal capacity, particularly through whole-of-government approaches; and fine-tuning the public management model in part through readjustments to the centre-agency relationship and greater emphasis on horizontal structures and processes.
This is the ninth year an administrative essay has been published in the journal since 1996. Earlier chronicles include: J. Stewart 55(1) 1996; S. Prasser 56(1) 1997; J. Homeshaw 57(3) 1998; J. Moon 58(2) 1999; J. Curtin 59(1) 2000; C. Broughton and J. Chalmers 60(1) 2001; N. Miragliotta 61(1) 2002; and J. Nettercote 62(1) 2003.
In this issue two chronicles are published — the first, by John Halligan and Jill Adams, focuses on external security and internal capacity building. The second assessment by Scott Prasser takes a different view of compliant management, poor decisions and reactive change.     

Location,location, location: the Davis-Hinich model of electoral competition

The Davis-Hinich multidimensional model of electoral competition is the foundation for a very broad set of models in economics, political science, public choice and political economy. This essay reviews some of these models and how they build on and extend the original Davis-Hinich model. It also presents a new extension that makes individual preferences endogenous to the electoral process. The essay concludes with a discussion of the positive and normative implications of endogenous preferences and then returns to the basic theme of the central importance of the early Davis-Hinich papers.     

Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices

The authors engage structural and agentic perspectives to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory as a way of understanding the process of structuring knowledge, this essay focuses on the continuous enactment and reenactment of networks of human and nonhuman actants and the associations that connect them. This thinking is applied to policy issues, which the authors propose should be understood as ways of knowing. The fluidity of such ways of knowing provides opportunities for public managers to use the inclusive practices associated with boundary experiences, boundary objects, and boundary organizations to facilitate deliberation.     

政府与企业职业生涯管理比较研究

政府与企业在组织目的、成本核算、利益来源和组织性质四个方面存在的差异,使其在组织职业生涯管理的职业能力培训、职业生涯管理体系、职业通道设计、职业生涯管理辅助措施四个方面存在不同,为职业生涯管理研究中提供一定的理论依据。     

Reshaping the State: Administrative Reform and New Public Management in France

This essay examines the administrative reform process in France since the late 1980s. The key reforms undertaken during this period have sought to delegate greater managerial autonomy to the ministerial field-service level. We undertook semistructured interviews with officials in the field services of three French ministries (Education, Agriculture, and Infrastructure) in the Champagne-Ardennes region, as well as with members of the wider policy communities. The capacity of the field services to adopt a proactive approach to management reform depended on five key variables: internal organizational dynamics; the attitude of the central services to mesolevel autonomy; the degree of institutional receptivity to change; the type of service delivery, and the extent of penetration in local networks. The Infrastructure Ministry was more receptive to management change than either Education or (especially) Agriculture, a receptivity that reflects the institutional diversity of the French administrative system, and that supports new institutionalist arguments. The essay rejects straightforward convergence to the New Policy Management norm. Changes in public management norms require either endogenous discursive shifts or else need to be interpreted in terms of domestic registers that are acceptable or understandable to those charged with implementing reform.     

Screens in the sky: SAGE,surveillance, and the automation of perceptual,mnemonic, and epistemological labor

This essay investigates the centrality of the U.S. Military in the process of automating the labor of surveillance. The creation of Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an anti-nuclear defense system developed in the 1950s, marked the computerization of the perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor that is necessary for surveillance and is emblematic of screening technologies. The essay situates SAGE in a long history of military surveillance that depended upon media technologies. Building upon the work of Michel Foucault and Freidrich Kittler, it is argued that media are essential for understanding how surveillance is problematized for security.     

Truth-telling,dominant strategies,and iterative Groves mechanisms

Public Choice - This essay demonstrates that if an organization uses a price-decomposition algorithm to solve a decentralized resource allocation problem, in which rewards are those of a Groves...     

Globalization,Cultural Critique,and China

In this essay, I illustrate a way of following discussions of economic globalization into discussions of domestic national issues involving cultural critique, arguing that the character and interests of local sites for transnational exchange are key aspects of analysis and closely associated with the logic of globalization theories. The essay begins with a summary of Saskia Sassen's place-based view of globalization, while in the second section, I consider five aspects of this place-based view in light of Chinese contexts for the international exchange of cultural critique. In the final section, I offer a broader sketch of three commonly discussed views of globalized, transnational forces and their relationships to domestic issues of cultural critique.     

Anarchy,self-governance,and legal titling

Scholars and policymakers prescribe legal titling to improve prospects for economic development and political order. However, a public choice literature exists that has long recognized that self-governance often works well and that the state may not be able to improve upon local economic institutions at reasonable cost. Although the implication that legal titling should proceed with caution is seemingly straightforward, the literature on legal titling does not take anarchy seriously as a policy option. In addition, there is a public choice literature that presumes the state is the most important source of property rights. This essay fills this gap in the property rights literature by applying the concept of “efficient anarchy” to legal titling in Afghanistan. Original fieldwork evidence from rural Afghanistan suggests that anarchy of land governance is a better option than legal titling. The essay concludes by opening up the black box of state building by explaining why it often makes sense to sequence improvements in political capacity and political constraints prior to investing in legal titling.     

The New Public Management: a bibliographical essay for Latin American (and other) scholars

The New Public Management is a field of professional and policy discussion—conducted internationally—about public management policy, executive leadership, design of programmatic organizations, and government operations. Scholars specializing in public administration/political science have contributed to this discussion for a decade; however, their contribution has yet to be examined as a whole. The paper—a bibliographical essay, rather than a literature review—attempts to fill this gap. Studies published in the 1990–96 period are examined in detail, while subsequent works are briefly discussed. The paper aims to help scholars situated outside the original English-speaking precincts of the NPM discussion to benefit from and contribute to this maturing literature. This aim is pursued here in three main ways: first, by reviewing each study’s distinctive methodological and theoretical approach; second, by contrasting each item with a common benchmark; and, third, by including two studies about Latin America within the review. The bibliographical essay can be used for envisioning the public administration/political science contribution to the NPM discussion in its second decade, as well.     

The Elusive Pursuit of Incentive Systems: Research on the Cadre Management Regime in Post-Mao China

Journal of Chinese Political Science - This essay reviews recent scholarship on four key components of the post-Mao party state’s cadre management regime—nomenklatura system, cadre...     

Manfred Frank,Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,and Jean-Luc Nancy: Prolegomena to a French-German Dialogue

Abstract

This essay works to set up a debate between the German philosopher Manfred Frank and the French philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. At stake in the debate is the concept of freedom. The essay begins by explaining Frank's subject-based concept of freedom and then it presents the perfectly opposed non-subjective ontological concept of freedom that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy forward. In the end, in the interest of threading a way through this impasse, and following the cue of these three philosophers, we turn to the early German Romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel to help us reconceptualise freedom. Following their cue, I draw on the strengths of Frank and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy while avoiding their dangerous extremes.     

Animal body,inhuman face

In the present essay, I apply various concepts associated with the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari to an inquiry concerning what I call the ‘ontology’ of musical creation and performance. Specifically, I utilize both the theory and approach of ‘schizoanalysis’, which so pervasively marks co-operative works such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoid becomes the model for my musician-performer. This ‘schizoid musician’ is the one who has the ability to apprehend that of a ‘musical space’, a central theme of the essay. Some additional clarification is needed as well. Although I surely offer this essay to the reader as a thoroughly honest, and hopefully provocative, attempt, it is also something of an indebted experiment. That is, the ‘after’ of my essay's title-as in ‘after Deleuze and Guattari’-has essentially two meanings. The first, and obvious meaning: I write after Deleuze and Guattari in that I inherit, to whatever extent, their thought. I grapple with their ideas. The second, and perhaps more unconventionally risky (because potentially easily misconstrued as representative of a kind of blind fidelity): I write after Deleuze and Guattari in the way that a painter paints ‘after’ another painter, in the way that a composer composes ‘after’ another composer, and so on. In one sense, the selective utilization of a sensibility associated with the schizophrenic condition provided the 'silent partner' and underlying guiding influence for Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Thus, this essay is, in part, a modest attempt at yet another 'fold' (to use a term of Deleuze's) in a philosophical inquiry-some kind theoretical exemplar of ‘difference and repetition’ (or, difference in repetition). This indebtedness notwithstanding, the reader will notice the scholarly utilization of Deleuze and Guattari also in terms of a silent partner, a guiding influence, and less in terms of a source that is explicitly acknowledged or referenced. This was an intentional part of the experiment from the beginning. Of course, other thinkers, on the other hand, will come to occupy such a space in the essay.     

Posner,Bentham and the rule of economy

Law and economics is a prominent but understudied discourse of liberal government. This essay examines the work of Richard Posner, with special attention to his rediscovery of Jeremy Bentham as a founder of law and economics. Posner's new reading of Bentham accurately identifies Bentham as a fellow anti-juridical theorist of government and a fellow believer in the rule of economy. But Bentham's economy makes room for a range of disciplinary appropriations, and Posner's does not. Posner's economy is entirely defined and exhausted by a particular economic doctrine. The essay suggests that civil society has been over-emphasized in the literature contrasting classical and contemporary liberalism. Instead, it turns attention to a common understanding of law as a non-autonomous and flexible tactic of economic government and to the role of the various sciences that can inform it.     

The spatial distribution of public services: A structural model of voting,educational production,and the government's allocation of educational inputs

This essay analyzes the intrajurisdictional allocation of public resources by a governmental agency, using education as the example. The agency's decision is guided, in part, by the pReferences of voters within each subarea of the jurisdiction. Voter's choices are influenced by the likely allocation of additional resources resulting from passage of a tax levy, and the tax cost of the levy. After deriving predictions of the relationships between the variables of the model, we estimate a simultaneous equation system. Included are equations specifying the educational production function, voting decisions, and bureaucratic resource allocation. This essay also notes the biases present in prior studies that only considered the ‘demand side’ of voting models.