OBSERVATION,THE POLICE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: INTRODUCTION

This conversation about the merits of ethnography in police studies began at the ‘Ethnography in Policing’ panel at the Political Studies Association Conference held in Leeds in 2005. Subsequent correspondence and occasional one‐to‐one meetings led to this symposium.     

THE LIMITATIONS OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT NETWORKS

With regard to public management network theory development, among the most important issues that remain is a recognition of the limitations of networks. Networks often find reasonable solution approaches, but then run into operational, performance, or legal barriers that prevent the next action step. Networks face challenges in converting solutions into policy energy, assessing internal effectiveness, surmounting the inevitable process blockages, mission drift, and so on. While research on network management continues unabated, it is necessary to consider how networks are limited and challenged, and how/when these limitations can be overcome.     

GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: THE SOUTH ASIAN CONTEXT

Public management in South Asia has had a chequered history. Emerging out of a past influenced by foreign domination, the countries of the region were recognized as separate nations after the conclusion of the Second War. Independence brought new challenges and responsibilities, and the region found it extremely difficult to make a complete break from the past, and establish a sound system of governance upon the existing practices and institutions for public management. Political, social, economic and ethnic problems posed formidable obstacles in the way of establishing and reforming institutions, refining processes and strategies of management, and guiding the region toward a more efficient and effective system. Considering the aims and objectives of good governance, this paper establishes the importance of public management as an essential tool in the process. Faced with a variety of political, economic and social problems, the governments of South Asia are striving to keep up with the trend of establishing a system of good governance. This is usually done by streamlining the structure of public management and developing a collaborative relationship between the political leadership and the civil service.     

OUTCOME-BASED PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND THE BALANCE OF POWERS IN THE CONTEXT OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY

We argue that direct democracy forms a specific context for NPM reform, with the voting population as a third agent beside legislature and executive constituting a considerable limit to the legislature's political steering capacity. In this context we expect that NPM will lead to a shift in political power between sovereign, legislature and administration. This article investigates the possibilities of outcome-based public management to ameliorate public action under these circumstances. The findings of the analysis of the NPM reform in the Swiss city of Bern indicate that problems of outcome-based public management are accentuated in a direct democratic system. The puzzling finding is that while the political players themselves see a shift in power between the electorate, legislature and executive, they are doing nothing to compensate this shift.     

THE FUTURE OF PORTUGUESE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND A NEW AGENDA FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION SCIENCES IN THE 21st CENTURY

This paper addresses the changing role of the Portuguese state, the present priority assigned to the process of reform and the new challenges to be overcome by public administration. Such processes are demanding a new agenda for education and research in public administration sciences, shifting from the public law paradigm to an interdisciplinary problem‐solving approach and giving special attention to 10 key areas of study, which we describe in the final section of the paper. It should be noted here that the opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the position of their institutions.     

CHANGE IN THE MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICES

This article identifies the main themes in recent changes in public sector management and shows the extent of the challenge to past organizational assumptions. While recognizing the objectives of the changes could bring benefits if realized, it argues that there are a series of issues that are unresolved. The language of consumerism, the development of government by contracts, the form of performance management and the use of quasi-markets are seen as creating problems. These are seen as deriving from an attempt to apply approaches drawn from the private sector to the public domain. It is argued that they need to be balanced by approaches that recognize the values of the public sector.     

FRAMING AND COUNTER‐FRAMING NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF GERMANY

In this paper I explore the conflict between managerial and bureaucratic models of public sector management from the discursive perspective in institutional theory. Taking the under‐researched case of Germany, I conduct a textual analysis of seminal publications in the discourse on public sector reform and reveal the subversive framing conflict which accompanies the proliferation of private managerial models in the public sector. As the most general result, a frame which advocates the transfer of business‐like managerial practices clashes with a counter‐frame which opposes this managerialization. I elucidate how these competing frames are composed, which of their components are core and which are peripheral, how the frames relate to each other, and which broader discourses they exploit for legitimization purposes. The results imply that the often assumed superiority of managerial over bureaucratic control is constructed through discourse rather than being a law‐like regularity.     

THE SHIFTING STATE: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN A TIME OF CHANGE

This is the keynote address given by the Right Hon The Lord Scarman, OBE, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and the RIPA's President, at the Institute's Conference on'The Shifting State: Rules, Roles and Boundaries in the 198s', held at the University of Aston, 14–15 September 1984.     

THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR UK PUBLIC SERVICES MODERNIZATION: THE CASE OF PATIENT SAFETY AND SERVICE QUALITY

This article assesses the contribution of management of knowledge across organizational and professional boundaries towards improved public services. We empirically investigate the potential for knowledge sharing within the context of the NHS modernization agenda, taking as our focus the current ‘patient safety’ policy agenda. Specifically, we evaluate the introduction of a knowledge management system, namely the National Reporting and Learning System (NRSL) and its impact in the area of operating theatres within a university teaching hospital. We suggest that government policy in this area needs to reflect more upon limits to the management of knowledge and issues of the nature of knowledge, professional cultures and institutional power and politics.     

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 MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS: A LITERATURE REVIEW

This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organizations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analysed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome, and leadership of change. We identified whether the articles referred to different orders of change, as well as their methods and theory employed. Our findings concentrate on the lack of detail on change processes and outcomes and the gap between the common theories used to study change. We propose an agenda for the study of change management in public organizations that focuses on its complex nature by building theoretical bridges and performing more in‐depth empirical and comparative studies on change processes.     

THE REFORM OF FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IN THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION: A PUBLIC MANAGEMENT POLICY CYCLE CASE STUDY

Since the mid‐1990s during the Santer, Prodi, and Barroso presidencies, the European Commission has experienced several public management policy cycles. Included on the Barroso Commission's (2004–2008) policy agenda was the reform of internal financial control, prompted by significant irregularities in budget execution signalled repeatedly by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) in its annual Declaration of Assurance (DAS) and Annual Reports. This led to a declared Barroso Commission strategic objective of achieving a ‘positive DAS' by 2009. The proposed solution was ‘integrated internal control’ based on an international reference point within the accounting and auditing professions. The result was a centrally co‐ordinated Commission project aiming to reform management and audit practices within both the Commission and EU member states. This article reports on the ‘positive DAS' and ‘integrated internal control’ policy cycle and explains its agenda‐setting, alternative‐specification, and decisional processes.     

THE TREASURY AND PUBLIC INVESTMENT: A PERSPECTIVE ON INTER-WAR ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT

This paper examines certain administrative constraints which hampered inter-war governments in their operation of public works policies and reinforced their opposition to even more ambitious Keynesian employment programmes. The stabilizing effectiveness of public investment is assessed, as is central government's ability to promote greater capital expenditure by the local authorities, the principal agencies for public investment. To this end, a special study is made of the large-scale public works programmes proposed by Mosley in 1930 and Lloyd George in 1935. It is concluded that there were cogent administrative and political reasons why such programmes were viewed as inappropriate solutions to unemployment between the wars, apart from the more nominally cited economic-theoretic foundations of orthodox opposition to Keynesian policies.     

INTRODUCTION: DETERMINANTS OF PERFORMANCE IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS

The performance of public organizations is one of the key topics in public administration research and practice. This topic was examined at the 'The Determinants of Performance in Public Organizations II' conference held at the University of Hong Kong in December 2006. The conference was held in association with the Public Management Research Association . In the present symposium we introduce four of the articles presented at conference. The articles explore: network performance (Kenis and Provan), goal ambiguity (Lee et al .), environmental shocks (Meier and O'Toole), and diversity (Pitts and Jarry). Alongside this we spotlight the importance of this field and introduce three research themes—contingency theory, measurement and data, and analysis.     

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC EDUCATION: A CATALYST FOR THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SWEDISH SCHOOL PRINCIPALS

New Public Management (NPM) is one of the most significant reforms in public welfare in recent times. Making individual civil servants more dependent on the directions of the local manager than on common professional standards, previous sociological research argues that NPM results in a ‘deprofessionalization’ of civil servants. Taking a somewhat different approach, recent public administration research indicates that NPM may, at the same time, enhance the professional status of welfare managers. By integrating the literature on the sociology of professions and public administration, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the influence of NPM using the example of a professional project for school principals in Sweden. Taking a process‐oriented methodological approach, the result shows that Swedish school principals gained increased support for their professional project by the introduction of NPM. The article argues that NPM can function as a catalyst for welfare managers' professional projects.     

PUBLIC VALUE AND POLITICAL ASTUTENESS IN THE WORK OF PUBLIC MANAGERS: THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE

The public value framework, with its call for more entrepreneurial activities by public managers, has attracted concern and criticism about its implicit breaching of the politics/administration dichotomy. This article explores the role of political astuteness not only in discerning and creating public value, but also in enabling public managers to be sensitive to the dichotomy. We employ a conceptual framework to identify the skills of political astuteness, and then articulate these in relation to identifying and generating public value. Drawing on a survey of 1,012 public managers in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and in‐depth interviews with 42 of them, we examine the perceptions and capabilities of public managers in producing value for the public while traversing the line (or zone) between politics and administration. We conclude that political astuteness is essential to both creating value and maintaining allegiance to democratic principles.