People and Performance: Challenges for the Future Public Service— the Report from the Wye River Conference

What are the key challenges for the public sector at present, and what will the future public service look like if it is to meet these challenges? These questions were put to public‐sector leaders at a conference at the Wye River Plantation in June 1999. The leaders agreed on aspects of a broad vision for the future and the urgent need for a detailed debate on the transition questions that arose.     

INFORMAL SECTOR TAX ADMINISTRATION IN ZIMBABWE

Governments have to raise revenue to finance public goods. This study analyses the challenges that Zimbabwe, like most developing countries, faces in attempting to collect taxes from its informal sector. Because the so‐called informal sector forms a large and sometimes growing component of the economy, collecting sufficient revenues to fund expenditure requires tax authorities to seek ways to collect revenues from those earning their incomes in the informal sector. There has been an attempt to collect taxes from the informal sector in Zimbabwe over the past 8 years. Although the actual amount collected from this sector has increased, an evaluation of the way taxes are administered needs to go beyond the amount of revenue collected. It needs to also look at issues such as the proportion of the informal sector paying these taxes, the amount collected as a proportion of total revenues, the costs incurred in collecting these taxes and the tax administration's ability to encourage quasi‐voluntary compliance. This study indicates that the levels of evasion (confirmed by the informal sector associations themselves), selective application of tax regulations and corruption are alarmingly high. These factors, together with the very high tax rates and sheer ignorance, operate as a serious disincentive in informal sector tax compliance resulting in very low revenues from this sector. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Governance in the Post‐Soviet Era: Challenges and Opportunities

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's demise, the countries formerly comprising it embarked on massive reforms to transition from socialist to market‐driven economies. This transition also required substantial transformation of their governance systems. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors reflect on critical reforms in human resource management, ethics management, and anti‐corruption, and highlight successful initiatives in these fields. They also discuss the role of the Astana Civil Service Hub in helping the countries in the region to jointly look for solutions to common governance challenges and to learn from policies and strategies that proved effective for their peers. The authors conclude by identifying the common elements of effective public administration reforms in the post‐Soviet setting.     

E‐government and public service quality in Ghana

This article contributes to the growing discourse on the potential of e‐government to transform the operations of public sector institutions, thereby improving public services. It does so by conceptualizing public service quality into efficiency, economy (cost reduction), customer satisfaction, and service accessibility and draws on qualitative data from the Ghanaian narrative for illustration. As previous studies have demonstrated, this study also affirms the potential of e‐government in improving public services delivery by increasing efficiency, reducing the cost of operations, expanding access to services, and achieving customer satisfaction. Yet, there remains a repertoire of challenges such as weak ICT infrastructure especially in towns and villages, incessant power outages and illiteracy, which are drawbacks to fully harnessing the benefits of e‐government in Ghana. The study recommends that these challenges should feature prominently in e‐government policies to increase the chances of solving them.     

The Link Between Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment: Differences Between Public and Private Sector Employees

ABSTRACT

Employees in the public and private sectors experience different working conditions and employment relationships. Therefore, it can be assumed that their attitudes toward their job and organizations, and relationships between them, are different. The existing literature has identified the relationship between organizational commitment and job satisfaction as interesting in this context. The present field study examines the satisfaction–commitment link with respect to differences between private and public sector employees. A sample of 617 Greek employees (257 from the private sector and 360 from the public sector) completed standardized questionnaires. Results confirmed the hypothesized relationship differences: Extrinsic satisfaction and intrinsic satisfaction are more strongly related to affective commitment and normative commitment for public sector employees than for private sector ones. The results are discussed, limitations are considered, and directions for future research are proposed.     

Community‐Based Organizations and Institutional Work in the Remote Rural West

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long‐dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community‐based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California–based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state‐ or industry‐led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions.     

Top‐Down Self‐Organization: State Logics,Substitutional Delegation,and Private Governance in Russia

This study investigates the counterintuitive emergence of self‐regulation in the Russian construction sector. Despite its proclivity for centralizing political authority, the government acted as the catalyst for the delegation of regulatory powers to private industry groups. The article argues that a factor little considered in extant literature—namely, a weak and corrupt bureaucracy—is key to explaining why the normally control‐oriented executive branch began to promote private governance despite industry's preference for continued state regulation. The article's signal contribution is to theoretically explain and empirically demonstrate how a government's prior inability to establish intrastate control over an ineffective and bribable public bureaucracy creates incentives for political authorities to search for alternative means for policy implementation outside of existing state agencies. These findings are important for understanding the impetus and logic behind particular regulatory shifts in countries where the state apparatus is both deficient and corrupt.     

Diffusion of Corporate Risk‐Management Characteristics: Perspectives of Chief Audit Executives through a Survey Approach

This study examines how corporate risk‐management characteristics in Australian public universities have diffused under an environment of conflicting management cultures. The findings reveal that corporate risk‐management characteristics have diffused in a pluralist form to satisfy stakeholders of different management approaches across its governance levels as opposed to a unilateral form aligned to the corporate approach. The accepted practice of this adapted version challenges the existing notion that the adoption of corporate control processes in the public sector is problematic, and provides insights into the emergence of a hybrid control process to address the needs of multiple stakeholders. These findings have policy implications for defining a new hybrid governance‐control paradigm for the public sector as an alternative to the corporate‐influenced control paradigm, and provide avenues for further research to confirm the phenomenon with other corporate control processes, public‐sector entities, and if so its impact on effective governance.     

Managing and Leading in the Next Century

A 'quick scan' of the literature on management and leadership reveals a wealth of writings ¹ This article offers a broad overview and some thoughts, based on personal observation and experience, on future management and leadership needs in the Australian public sector. The present article first outlines, by way of illustration, some key pressures for continuing change within Australia's public sector and their possible implications for future management needs. Second, it addresses the distinction between 'management' and 'leadership'; and suggests that while the requirements placed on public sector management will continue to change, the skills required of public sector leaders are essentially timeless (and differ, in some respects, from private sector stereotypes of 'leadership').
Finally the article suggests why and how we should be seeking to develop 'leadership in depth' within public sector organisations, drawing on some illustrations from the Australian Department of Administrative Services.     

Public–Private Partnerships in Urban Infrastructures: Reconciling Private Sector Participation and Sustainability

The speed and scale of urbanization provide serious challenges for governments all over the world with regard to the realization, maintenance, and operation of public urban infrastructures. These infrastructures are needed to keep up with living standards and to create conditions for sustainable development. The lack of public funds and the inefficiencies of public service provision have given rise to initiatives to stimulate private parties to invest their resources in public urban infrastructures. However, private sector participation creates a whole range of new challenges. The potential benefits are countered by concerns about the compatibility of the private sector's focus on short-term return on investment with the long-term perspective needed to realize sustainability targets. On the basis of a review of literature on experiences with private sector participation in urban infrastructure projects, this article identifies governance practices that help or hinder the reconciliation of private sector participation in urban infrastructure projects with the objective to increase the sustainability of the urban environment.     

The Other Side of the Coin: NGOs,Rights‐Based Approaches,and Public Administration

The majority of the world's population resides in low‐ and middle‐income countries, where the problem of sustainable development is among the most pressing public administration challenges. As principal actors within the international development community, transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play a leading role in piloting a wide variety of development‐focused strategies. During the past decade, many of these transnational NGOs, along with the United Nations, have embraced a rights‐based approach (RBA) to development as an alternative to traditional service delivery. Despite the growing popularity of RBA among NGOs and other development actors, surprisingly little attention has been paid to understanding the significance of RBA for public administration and for public managers—the “other side of the coin.” Drawing on current research in NGO studies and international development, this article describes several varieties of contemporary rights‐based approaches, analyzes their impact on development practices, and examines the intersection of RBA and public administration.     

Public sector reform in a poor,aid‐dependent country,Tanzania

African public sectors went through many changes during the 1960s and 1970s in response to political, economic and social pressures. They expanded in size but remained, at least in design, hierarchical and centralized. Their formal relations to society did not undergo any significant changes either. Generally, the reforms now under way are significantly different from earlier ones. Most are inspired by the new public management (NPM) paradigm. They are also much more radical in their aims, among which are: to reduce the core functions of the state; redraw the boundaries between political and administrative responsibilities; emphasize efficiency; redefine relations between public and private sectors; strengthen accountability; reduce corruption; reorganize organizations and staff; change values and attitudes; and exploit new technologies. This article focuses on a paradox of reform in Tanzania: multiple changes are pursued in the public sector despite fragile domestic political support to the reform package as a whole and despite few service delivery improvements on the ground. It is argued that this is the result of substantial external influences, fragmented domestic policy making, weak links between policy making and implementation, and questionable assumptions about some of the key NPM‐inspired reform measures. Moreover, the analyses highlight a number of differences with some of the recent reform literature. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamics of Public Service Motivation: Attraction‒Selection and Socialization in the Production and Regulation of Social Services

The literature on public service motivation (PSM) has typically focused on the relationship between motivation and public/private sector of employment, while the character of the work being performed has been neglected. Using panel surveys with pre‐ and postentry measures of PSM among certified Danish social workers, this article provides a unique design for investigating PSM‐based attraction?selection and socialization effects with respect to the choice between work related to service production or service regulation (controlled for public/private sector of employment). The article shows that the PSM profiles of social work students predict their preference for one of the two types of work tasks but do not predict first employment in the preferred job. Conversely, postentry shifts in social workers’ PSM profiles result from a complex interplay between influences from both work task and sector.     

How Pro‐social Motivation Affects Job Satisfaction: An International Analysis of Countries with Different Welfare State Regimes

Employees' pro‐social motivation has been shown to be positively related to job satisfaction, especially when the perceived usefulness of the job to society and other people is high. There is, however, a lack of analyses which include both public and private employees, and it has not yet been studied whether the relationships are robust across welfare state regimes. This study therefore examines the moderated relationship between pro‐social motivation and job satisfaction. Using data from the cross‐national 2005 ISSP survey (14 countries, N = 10,630), it confirms that the relationship between pro‐social motivation and job satisfaction is moderated by perceived usefulness of the job for society and other people. Usefulness again depends on the individual's employment sector (public versus private), and this public–private difference in perceived usefulness also varies between different welfare state regimes. This indicates that sector differences in how pro‐social motivation affects job satisfaction depends on the broader institutional context, and the article therefore contributes with important knowledge for the recruitment and retention of motivated and satisfied employees in a period of changing public–private responsibilities in the provision of welfare services.     

The state and civil society in transition: the role of non-governmental organizations in South Korea

This paper presents a framework of the interdependence of various sectors of society and then investigates the development and current status of the civil society sector, specifically the growth of NGOs in South Korea. Recent years have witnessed an increase in public awareness where civil societies have begun challenging states in addressing public issues. The directive state intervention following the Korean War disallowed for a strong civil society, thus restraining the development of significant non-state actors. The 1987 Democratization Movement marked an increase in the activity of NGOs and also the provision of a pathway for citizens to begin engaging in social activity. The repressive apparatus of the state has weakened allowing Korean NGOs to mature in dealing with diverse social issues in the public domain. They have extended the scope of policy-related activities to ensure an environment conducive to the enlargement of public space and the expansion of citizens’ rights. The results of this study indicate that the growth of NGOs is both the result of the demise of authoritarian regimes and further stimulus to the transition solidifying democracy. The challenges for Korean NGOs will be to ply strategic roles as partners of the state in the transitional period.     

“Grabbing Hand” or “Helping Hand”?: Corruption and the Economic Role of the State

This article seeks to disentangle which features of government intervention are linked to corruption and which are not, by distinguishing between the government roles of regulator, entrepreneur, and consumer. It finds that the degree of regulation of private business activity is the strongest predictor of corruption, and that high levels of public spending are related to low levels of corruption. There is no evidence of direct government involvement in production having any bearing on corruption. It is concluded that advanced welfare capitalist systems, which leave business relatively free from interference while intervening strongly in the distribution of wealth and the provision of key services, combine the most “virtuous” features of “big” and “small” government. This suggests that anti‐corruption campaigners should be relaxed about state intervention in the economy in general, but should specifically target corruption‐inducing regulatory systems.     

Recentralization and vertical alignment in the French health‐care system

In foreign exemplars, key new public management (NPM) features such as decentralization and devolution of health‐care responsibilities had outcomes below expectations. Other NPM traits such as the patient as overseer of reforms or the empowerment of patient remained elusive. In France, the integration of public values such as greater participation of patients and local actors (NGOs and elected officials) and NPM‐driven private values such as performance evaluation has yet to be seen. Taking advantage of NPM's failings and austerity agenda, a French welfare elite regained control over health‐care policy decisions at the expense of regions and other local actors. NPM outcomes were below expectations. Austerity cures led to weakening of the regional decision spaces, which can be explained under the principal–agent relationship. Accountability shifted to managerial (the professionalization of hospital managers) and legal (governance via regulations) forms in a bid to restore central government control. A democratic recess results from the lack of public engagement in recent health reforms.     

The challenges and opportunities of implementing the integrity pact as a strategy for combating corruption in Nigeria's oil rich Niger Delta region

In recent years, significant local and transnational concerted initiatives have been instituted to curb the incidence of corruption that has undermined socio‐economic development in Nigeria. Drawing on the critiques of such initiatives, and the experience from the process of implementing the Integrity Pact in the Niger Delta Development Commission, this article suggests that the Integrity Pact in principle offers real opportunities that can both reinforce and complement existing anti‐corruption initiatives in Nigeria's public sector. However, political instability, lack of continuity in civil service leadership and limited capacity are core challenges that confront the successful implementation and institutionalisation of the Integrity Pact as a means of fighting corruption and meeting sustainable development objectives in the Niger Delta. The article concludes by considering the implications of the findings for the fight against corruption in Nigeria. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Innovation in the Public Sector

Why does the public sector innovate, how should the public sector innovate, and, even more basically, should the public sector innovate? These are some of the questions that these contributions explore and to which they provide some salutary answers. Martin Stewart‐Weeks, an independent consultant working at the intersection of government, innovation, and technology, draws some lessons from his direct experience and advisory work about how the public sector catches the innovation ‘bug’ and turns it into in‐ spired action. From infection to inspiration to implementation, the public sector needs to lower its defences and put itself ‘in harm's way’ to engage with innovators and new ideas. Tim Kastelle, one of Australia's leading innovation scholars and practitioners, sets out some practical ways that the public sector can extend and entrench its innovation practice. These include managing innovation as a process, shifting the risk equation, and experimenting.     

Competitiveness improvement in public sector organizations: What they need?

What types of public sector organizations have more capabilities to build competitive advantages? Ability to achieve a unique advantage over the competitors is a way to explain why some of the firms are more successful than others, and it is important to the survival of both public and private businesses in the present day's highly competitive business world. Concentrating on the role of employees, the current study analyzes how internal marketing, employees' positive work attitude, and employees' intention to leave have an impact on public firms' competitiveness improvement. Our survey‐based data from 82 public sector organizations in Bangladesh showed that internal marketing affects positively on employees' positive work attitude and negatively on employees' intention to leave in public sector organizations. Most importantly, our result confirmed that firms' internal marketing and employees' positive work attitude influence positively on firms' competitiveness improvement. We did not find any significant relationship between employees' intention to leave and firms' competitiveness improvement in public sector organization.