Complex Contracting: Management Challenges and Solutions

Governments at all levels buy mission‐critical goods and services whose attributes and performance requirements are hard to define and produce. Many governments—and the public managers who lead them—lack experience and knowledge about how to contract for complex products. The contract management counsel provided to public managers is thin. Missing is a conceptual managerial framework to guide purchasing the complex products that are often so critical to public organizations' core missions. Drawing on perspectives from across the social sciences, the framework presented in this article provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls. The framework helps identify conditions that increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for the purchasing government and the vendor—the win‐win. To illustrate the framework, the article provides examples of successful and failed acquisitions for complex products such as transportation projects, social service systems, and information technology systems.     

From practitioner wisdom to scholarly knowledge and back again

The relationship between scholarly knowledge in public management and the conventional wisdom of capable practitioners needs to be clarified. If we accept that improving practical wisdom is the ultimate objective of scholarly studies in public management, practitioner experience can usefully serve as the starting point of such studies as well. This article uses the maxims about coping with “overhead agencies” supplied by one respected practitioner, Gordon Chase, as a source of ideas concerning the direction of scholarly work. It also conceptualizes three types of practitioner wisdom—rules, principles, and checklists—and advises academic researchers to concentrate on clarifying the conceptualization of the principles and checklists and empirically refining the rules. A focus on those rules that protect the practitioner against large downside risks is especially important.     

Providing Public Servants What They Need: Revealing the “Unseen” through Data Visualization

Electronic media has enabled new forms of communication with the potential to provide more effective means of conveying evidence to public servants. This article explores what is known about the use of these new capacities in public affairs to visualize the results of research. The authors first explore the value of visual engagement for increasing comprehension. Then, they examine what is known of studies of the effectiveness of visualization and offer basic design principles that underpin effective visualization. Finally, two original public affairs examples are presented to illustrate what is possible.     

The class as case: “Reinventing” the classroom

New approaches to public management provide principles by which to organize the classroom as a case. In teaching public management one can enhance learning for practice by modeling, experimenting with, and reflecting upon the principles that one is teaching the students. The principles from the new ideas about public management that can be used to organize the classroom as well are strength through diversity, continuous improvement, teamwork, and empowerment. They represent changes in governing relations across the country and globe within which the new approaches to public management rest; each of these principles has a role in the “reinvented” classroom. Such practices require institutional support of various kinds as well. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Why Measure Performance? Different Purposes Require Different Measures

Performance measurement is not an end in itself. So why should public managers measure performance? Because they may find such measures helpful in achieving eight specific managerial purposes. As part of their overall management strategy, public managers can use performance measures to evaluate, control, budget, motivate, promote, celebrate, learn, and improve. Unfortunately, no single performance measure is appropriate for all eight purposes. Consequently, public managers should not seek the one magic performance measure. Instead, they need to think seriously about the managerial purposes to which performance measurement might contribute and how they might deploy these measures. Only then can they select measures with the characteristics necessary to help achieve each purpose. Without at least a tentative theory about how performance measures can be employed to foster improvement (which is the core purpose behind the other seven), public managers will be unable to decide what should be measured.     

Management by groping along

Public managers do and should grope along. They need to have a clear sense of mission for their agency. But they will never know precisely how to realize these purposes. Every new management task confronts even the most experienced manager with a new organizational, political, and cultural situation. Consequently, the public manager cannot develop the perfect plan from the beginning. Rather, he or she must experiment with various initiatives, trying to determine what works and what does not. Meanwhile, the successes that result from some of these initiatives move the manager closer to his goal, create new capabilities for his organization, and help motivate his staff by demonstrating that they can be successful. There are thousands of management principles, and it is never obvious which ones apply in a particular managerial situation. Thus, every public manager must grope along.     

增强法律观念 实施依法管理

依法执政是新的历史条件下我党执政的基本方式,公安院校的学生工作必须针对公安院校培养的对象,紧密结合新的历史条件下学生工作新的特点、新的情况,进一步增强依法管理的观念,实施依法管理。不断创新和完善学生工作的法规制度体系,使学生工作干部掌握依法管理的基本方法,不断提高依法管理的能力,使公安院校的学生工作与党依法执政的大环境同步前进,不断开创学生工作的新局面,为公安机关培养可靠的合格人才作出新的贡献。     

Deinstitutionalisation and Managerialism in Queensland's Public Psychiatric Institutions: Challenging ‘Rhetoric’ with Empirical Results

This article places the experience of public psychiatric institutions for the long term mentally ill in the context of New Public Management (NPM). This managerialist school of thought has been in widespread ascendancy since the 1970s. Some key characteristics of deinstitutionalisation and NPM are outlined. We then present some historical data about the temporal process of deinstitutionalisation in Queensland's public psychiatric institutions. The time series analysis provided is of a single state since Australia's public health care system is state‐based. Although NPM is not a coherent set of principles or doctrines, it is argued that ideology and the reality may be contradicting. Some of NPM's particular emphases are empirically analysed, in particular the view that administration/management expenditures are to be reduced, while emphasising workers ‘at the coal face’. The empirical results provide no evidence of a ‘parsimonious’ approach to management: parsimony occurs only for nursing staff. Relative expenditures on managerial functions have increased.     

The Right Mix? Gender Diversity in Top Management Teams and Financial Performance

Recent research has illustrated that demographic diversity influences the outcomes of public sector organizations. Most studies have focused on workforce diversity; by comparison, little is known about how managerial diversity affects organizational outcomes. This article focuses on gender diversity in the top management teams of public organizations and its relationship to financial performance. Theory suggests that management diversity can be a positive asset for organizations, allowing for the use of more diverse knowledge and human skill sets. Results of this study, however, suggest that organizations may only be able to leverage these advantages if they have a supporting management structure. In a longitudinal study of top management teams in Danish municipalities, the authors find that gender diversity in top management teams is associated with higher financial performance, but only in municipalities with a management structure that supports cross‐functional team work. These results are interpreted in light of existing theory, and implications are suggested.     

Management Roles in Political and Senior Civil Servant Positions: A Multiple-Study Approach

ABSTRACT

A recent trend in public administration studies has been to assess how public management is performed by politicians and top civil servants. Surprisingly, little is known about how these different posts develop their management roles. Following seminal management studies, we focus on core management roles to compare the ways in which politicians and top civil servants develop their management responsibilities within public organizations. Empirical evidence is provided by triangulating three separate studies developed in Spain. Results from the triangulation show that there is unmistakable evidence of differentiations between politicians and top civil servants when performing their managerial roles.     

Usable Knowledge in Public Policy

The range of usable information for public policy is complex and distributed but policy debate is still dominated by instrumental and centralised information constructed and controlled by functional and managerial experts—the creed of expertise. In recent years other types of 'usable' knowledge has begun to flow back into policy streams and in particular local knowledge (sometimes called community knowledge) is staging a major revival. This inductive knowledge is now being merged with the deductive paradigms of new public management.
In the first section I illustrate the key features of expert-based knowledge and how it pervades our thinking about how policy happens and the valued content of policy. Then I outline the types of usable information that flows into government and therefore constitutes the basic building blocks for knowledge. Finally, I drill down to expand on the idea of community knowledge and illustrate what it actually looks like.     

The New Public Administration: management innovations in government

Over the last two decades there have been some fundamental changes in the working of government which have resulted in major and visible management innovations in the organizational structures and systems of government aimed at delivering greater efficiency, and more responsive and flexible public services. The innovations have led to the ‘New Public Administration’. This article identifies the innovations in thinking about the role and functioning of government; about service users; about administrative structures and about staff. The article also discusses the strategies and actions employed in the new synergy between the public and private sectors, as well as the reforms in financial planning and control systems. In conclusion, the broad objectives of these reforms have been to shift emphasis from developing plans to developing key strategic areas; to shift emphasis from inward-looking systems to developing partnerships; to shift emphasis from inputs and processes to outputs and outcomes; and to shift emphasis towards managing diversity within a unified public service. Finally, managerial pragmatism and political conviction are highlighted as essential to motivating management innovation in government. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

Medicaid Managed Care for Children with Special Health Care Needs: Examining Legislative and Judicial Constraints on Privatization

Over the past decade, much has been written about the results of reinventing government. Most research has examined the effects of executive or managerial perspectives. Using David Rosenbloom's competing perspectives model, we examine Medicaid managed care programs for children with special health care needs to illustrate the influence of legislative and judicial institutional perspectives on the reinvention movement. Legislative and judicial responses to the reinvention of Medicaid managed care reveal the outer limits of what managed care and related executive reforms can accomplish in a Constitutional system that is based on checks and balances among competing institutional perspectives. Furthermore, relative to Medicaid managed care, legislative and judicial responses conserve public responsibility to society's most vulnerable populations. In the long run, the balance of institutional perspectives and values—not managerial innovation per se—will influence public administration.     

Looking Forward to Cuts: A Simulation Decision Tool for Cutback Management

This study addresses managerial strategies to adapt public spending in anticipation of fiscal stress. It simulates a cutback to a federal agency, providing a decision tool that applies normative recommendations from the cutback management literature. Using agency data, we develop a menu of options that illustrate how different distributions of budget reductions affect organizational goals. We show five alternatives that consider the political, legal, and fiscal implications of the agency's responses to anticipated budgetary pressure. This simulation demonstrates that public agencies can apply existing data to generate rational and viable strategic plans for weathering fiscal stress.     

The influence of management on the cost of fire protection

An important and unresolved issue central to the study of government performance is how the actions of managers and the nature of organizations affect the cost of public services. This paper presents an empirical analysis of fire departments that estimates the influence of managerial choices on per capita spending within a simultaneous public production system. It does so by refining a theoretical cost model from the field of public management to include fundamental dimensions of government organizations and administration. Two‐stage least squares regression analysis is then employed to examine the fire protection case. The results of the analysis substantiate the intuition that managerial practices and decisions influence the cost of a public service. They show that the cost of fire protection depends significantly on the outcomes of a department's fire prevention and suppression activities, some key aspects of a department's management practices, the configuration of its workforce and equipment, its legal structure, and factors in its external environment. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

From Virtue to Competence: Changing the Principles of Public Service

Virtue has long been a central principle in the tradition of public service—to what extent is it still relevant today? Focusing on the role of the monitoring officer, a key official in the ethical framework of local government in the United Kingdom, this essay asks which virtues, if any, are still needed for public service and whether these virtues have been displaced by managerial notions of technical competence as the principles of public service delivery. The authors draw an initial distinction between virtue and competence that, upon further investigation, does not appear to be sustainable. Despite being drawn from two different academic perspectives—moral philosophy and management development—the concepts of virtue and competence are, in practice, very similar. This theoretical convergence is reflected in the practical concerns of monitoring officers and their perspective on public service ethics.     

Issues management,systems, and rhetoric: exploring the distinction between ethical and legal guidelines at Enron

• Many corporations use legal rather than ethical standards for decision making in issues management. The Enron collapse provides a case example of why legal standards should never be used as a substitute for ethical principles. As we illustrate in this discussion of Enron, seeking loopholes in the law can lead to ethical violations that are ultimately more severe than legal infractions. We use systems theory and rhetorical rationales to discuss the issues management function as the proper location in an organization for ethical decision making and corporate responsibility. Both systems theory and rhetoric support the argument that an organization must be good internally and make decisions from an outside‐in perspective; management at Enron heeded neither idea. This research recommends a deontological approach, based on Kantian norms of moral autonomy and good intention as a basis for ethical issues management, and uses the Enron case for illustration of these principles. We conclude this discussion by offering a matrix simplifying the principles of both ethical and legal decision making based on systems theory and rhetorical approaches to public policy.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond Engagement and Participation: User and Community Coproduction of Public Services

In recent years, there has been a radical reinterpretation of the role of policy making and service delivery in the public domain. Policy making is no longer seen as a purely top-down process but rather as a negotiation among many interacting policy systems. Similarly, services are no longer simply delivered by professional and managerial staff in public agencies but are coproduced by users and their communities. This article presents a conceptual framework for understanding the emerging role of user and community coproduction and presents several case studies that illustrate how different forms of coproduction have played out in practice. Traditional conceptions of service planning and management are now outdated and need to be revised to account for coproduction as an integrating mechanism and an incentive for resource mobilization—a potential that is still greatly underestimated. However, coproduction in the context of multipurpose, multistakeholder networks raises important public governance issues that have implications for public services reform.     

The Quality of Management and Government Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the American States

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public administration, and political science. Government's administrative arrangements and managerial behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, considering public management's effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School's Government Performance Project to examine the relationship between state governments' managerial capacity and a measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state management capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely (that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place managerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influence on government activities.     

Reinventing government through on‐line citizen involvement in the developing world: a case study of taipei city mayor's e‐mail box in Taiwan

Since the 1980s, a global administrative reform movement is reshaping the relationship between citizens and state. A major concern is how government can be more responsive to the governed through citizen participation. However, the more citizens participate, the more costly it is to govern. And the application of new information and communication technology (ICT) seems to be a cure for this limitation. In this research, authors take the Taipei City Mayor's e‐mail‐box (TCME) in Taiwan as a case to illustrate the complex relationships among citizen involvement, e‐government and public management. After a series of empirical investigations, the authors show that although ICT can reduce the cost of citizen involvement in governing affairs, it cannot increase citizens' satisfaction with government activities without reforming the bureaucratic organisation, regulatory structure, and managerial capacities of the public sector. The results could be helpful to public managers in planning and evaluating online governmental services in the developing countries. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.