PUBLIC SECTOR INNOVATION FOR EUROPE: A MULTINATIONAL EIGHT‐COUNTRY EXPLORATION OF CITIZENS’ PERSPECTIVES

This study presents a three‐year effort to study public sector innovation in Europe from the viewpoint of the citizen. It examines a model of public sector innovation across a multinational sample of eight countries and 626 participants. The paper develops a theory of antecedents to and consequences of innovation in public administration as perceived by knowledgeable citizens and end‐users. Participants were senior and mid‐level managers of third sector organizations that work closely with citizens both as individuals and groups, and with public sector agencies in various domains. Structural Equation Modeling technique was used to examine two theoretical and five alternative models. Major findings that transcend national borders were found to be: (1) responsiveness, together with leadership and vision are important antecedents of innovation in the public sector; (2) public sector innovation affects trust in and satisfaction with public administration; and (3) the effect of public sector innovation on trust and satisfaction is both direct and mediated by the image of public organizations. The paper ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications for public administration theory, especially for public sector innovation in Europe, and with directions for future studies.     

Measuring Innovation – Applying the Literature-Based Innovation Output Indicator to Public Services

Governments have been encouraging public service organizations to innovate. However, little is known about the extent of innovation in public service organizations. A private sector approach to the measurement of innovation - the literature-based innovation output indicator (LBIOI) - is applied to public service organizations to address this significant information gap. The method is described and then explored in one public service sector, English housing associations. A sample of 257 innovations is constructed and then subject to analysis. This initial testing of the LBIOI indicates that the approach can be applied across public services to create longitudinal data sets, which will enhance the communication of good practice and the use of evidence in public policy, management and research. This methodology is demonstrated to offer initial insights to public service innovation and would allow relationships to be explored notably innovation and performance, a relationship central to government's promotion of innovation.     

HYBRIDS AND PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES: COMPARING UK REFORMS IN HEALTHCARE,BROADCASTING AND POSTAL SERVICES

Many countries use state‐owned, for‐profit, and third sector organizations to provide public services, generating ‘hybrid’ organizational forms. This article examines how the hybridization of organizations in the public sector is influenced by interaction between regulatory change and professional communities. It presents qualitative data on three areas of the UK public sector that have undergone marketization: healthcare, broadcasting, and postal services. Implementation of market‐based reform in public sector organizations is shaped by sector‐specific differences in professional communities, as these groups interact with reform processes. Sectoral differences in communities include their power to influence reform, their persistence despite reform, and their alignment with the direction of change or innovation. Equally, the dynamics of professional communities can be affected by reform. Policymakers need to take account of the ways that implementation of hybrid forms interacts with professional communities, including risk of disrupting existing relationships based on communities that contribute to learning.     

ORGANIZATIONAL STATUS AND PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF THE SWEDISH PHARMACIES

In recent years, studies of the relationship between organizational status and success have focused largely on organizations transferring from the public to the private sectors: pharmacies in Sweden provide a case study of organizational status change in the reverse direction. Popular belief suggests progressive deterioration in the performance of an organization where ownership changes from owner-manager to public corporation, market conditions change from competition to monopoly, and internal management becomes increasingly command orientated. This article explores change in various performance and organizational variables in the National Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies, from its creation in 1971 until 1990. The corporation displays a high degree of stability amongst its senior management team, task specialization amongst employees is low, whilst standardization of working methods is high. Decentralization of authority has occurred over several years. A review of several measures of success, including productivity, financial ratios and innovation, demonstrates substantial progress over the period, comparing favourably with other Swedish public sector organizations. It is concluded that public sector ownership and monopoly supply need not result in deteriorating performance and lack of innovation, provided that criteria for success are clearly stated and properly monitored.     

LIMITS ON INNOVATIVENESS IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT: EXAMINING CAPACITY,COMPLEXITY, AND DYNAMISM IN ORGANIZATIONAL TASK ENVIRONMENTS

Theory and evidence on the diffusion and antecedents of innovation in public organizations demonstrate that organizations respond to their environment and react by being more or less innovative. However, questions about the limits of responses to organizational task environments remain unexplored: in short, what is the appropriate level of environmental capacity and when does the environment become too complex or dynamic for innovation to occur? This study examines non‐linear capacity, complexity, and dynamic environments in an archival panel of 405 English local governments using primary and secondary data from a number of sources. Findings indicate that non‐linearities effect perceived innovativeness in relation to political and social capacity, and political dynamism in an inverted U shape, and in a U shape for community capacity. The implications of these findings for the study of public service innovation are considered.     

Latin America’s think tanks: The roots of nonprofit privatization

Conventional development models refer to two sectors, public and for-profit private. Massive growth of nonprofit private activity undermines that picture. Latin American tyink tanks exemplify a nonprofit privatization that has an enormous impact on development and remolds inter-sectoral relationships overall. Four major dynamics account for the spectacular growth of the region’s nonprofit think tanks. Three push factors are state repression, state weakness, and public university problems, and, as epitomized by financial supply, a pull factor is also crucial to attract nonprofit growth. To conceptualize its findings, this article considers public failure theory. Unhelpful regarding the pull factor, the theory otherwise works reasonably well, especially where there is visible movement from the public to the nonprofit sector. Beyond that, the evidence suggests ways to broaden the theory. Even a broadened formulation cannot fully capture the remarkable diversity and vitality of the growth in Latin America’s think tanks. But we are able to identify and analyze the key growth factors that blend together to produce particular institutional and national configurations. Daniel C. Levy is a professor at SUNY-Albany. After earning his Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he was research associate for five years at Yale University. He has published five books and roughly seventy articles on politics and higher education, especially on Latin America, and on Mexican politics. Levy has done field research in most Latin American countries and has presented lectures and been published on five continents.     

Governance in the UK Public Sector: the Involvement of the Governing Board

Governing boards are a prominent feature of many public sector organizations today. These boards have been modelled on the private sector board of directors. Like company boards, one of their main functions is to provide strategic leadership and policy direction for the organization. The role of managers and chief executives is to implement this. This paper examines the extent of involvement of one public sector board, the school governing body, in strategic activity. Using empirical evidence from a number of semi-structured interviews conducted in schools, its findings indicate that governing bodies are not involved at a high level in strategy within schools. Rather, headteachers are more likely to be undertaking this activity. Reflections are made about the relevance of the 'board of directors' model for both governing bodies and the public sector more generally.     

Opportunities in Role Specialization Through Location in Public Sector Services

The purpose of this paper is to study whether organizations in the public sector have special roles that are similar to those in the private sector. The model used for the analyses is the Ferdows ‘strategic role of the plant’ model. The operations of Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Finland were analyzed for the study. The data used was gathered in interviews and from general sources. The results indicate that special roles can be found and, furthermore, that there are huge possibilities in this area. The idea of roles is important to improve their productivity.     

Tortoises and Hares: The Race to Shared Services Across Australian State and Territory Jurisdictions

All tiers of government in Australia have recently aimed at enhancing service provision, with shared service platforms a recent innovation. To date there has been no scholarly inquiry into comparative shared service performance at the Australian state level. This article evaluates the experience of different state jurisdictions in adopting shared service platforms within “Whole of Government” approaches to public sector reform. It demonstrates that those jurisdictions most eager to embrace shared services have created organizations susceptible to particular adverse outcomes and that, far from implementing shared services programs, they may have installed monopoly-provider conditions for a range of back-office functions.     

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP IN THE ENGLISH PUBLIC SECTOR: PARADOX OR POSSIBILITY?

Our study explores the possibility for the enactment of entrepreneurial leadership in the English public sector under the Labour government’s modernization agenda. To substantiate our analysis, we draw upon data gathered from leaders in three public sector arenas – the National Health Service, secondary schools, and further education (FE) colleges. Our study proposes a definition of public sector entrepreneurship that extends beyond existing literature. In essence, we contend that public sector entrepreneurship is characterized by the combination of three distinct agencies: ‘stakeholder’, ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘political’. The public sector entrepreneur identifies market opportunities within the political landscape, optimizes the performance‐enhancing potential of innovation for the public sector organization, and carries stakeholders in a way that both permits risk and recognizes the stewardship of public sector resources.     

Power and transformational and transactional leadership in public and private organizations

Ten public and 35 private organizations located in Central New York State participated in a university- sponsored research project to study the effects of organizational characteristics upon types of leadership (transformational/transactional) and power demonstrated by supervisors. Public sector organizations in which managers had low control over rewards were compared to private sector organizations in which managers had high control over rewards.

Followers perceived public sector supervisors as more inspirational by their followers and they used more active management-by-exception behavior than those in private organizations. Private sector supervisors had more reward, legitimate and coercive power than supervisors in public sector organizations.     

PATTERNS OF GOVERNMENT FUNDING TO THIRD SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS AS REFLECTING A DE FACTO POLICY AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE SECTOR IN ISRAEL

The treatment of the Third Sector and its organizations by governments in Israel has been characterized by a lack of a declared, knowledge based and centrally planned policy. It takes a haphazard form of politically driven bargains, personally attained benefits, and reactive crisis intervention solutions. Paradoxically, the lack of planning and coordination in policymaking in issues involving the Third Sector is accompanied with an elaborate system of public funding to Third Sector organizations, a system that has developed incrementally over the years. These funding patterns have accumulated to a persistent de-facto policy towards that set of organizations.

Findings on public funding to Third Sector organizations from two major research projects—the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project and the Israeli Third Sector Database—served to analyze that de-facto policy towards the Third Sector in Israel.

The large-scale funding of Third Sector organizations and specifically service providing organizations in the fields of “Education” and “Health”, alongside with the meager support of other types of organizations imply a conception of the Third Sector as a complementary organ of government. The statist ideology this funding pattern reveals results in a non-deliberate yet unmistakable policy. It is geared towards utilizing the Third Sector to replace and complement the public sector in providing different essential services, and at the same time minimizing or ignoring other roles of the sector altogether (advocacy, innovation, development of civil society).

This policy has concrete consequences. Since government funding is the major funding source of the Third Sector in Israel, these preferences influence the nature and the composition of the sector. It strengthened the service provision tendency and increased the major role religion plays in the sector on the one hand. On the other hand it undermines the development of foundations as a significant alternative to public funding and the development of civil society.

The findings point out to some of the social origins of the Israeli Third Sector. Among these we discuss the major role these organizations played in the pre-state era, the centrality of religion in the Jewish State, the centralist and statist ideologies of the first Israeli governments and some political arrangements which still are in effect after decades. Our data show that despite the structural changes that the Israeli society and polity underwent since the 1970s, the economic structure of the sector and its public funding patterns have basically stayed the same. That is in spite of the drastic growth and diversification the sector enderwent since the 1980s. Third Sector policy too still carries a strong statist flavor, as it completely ignores the rising element of civil society.

The clear consequences of that unplanned de-facto policy raise various questions regarding the roles of the Third Sector in Israel, the necessity of a systematic public debate on these roles and the desired government policy towards the sector in light of these roles.     

Public Sector Commissioning: Experiences of Voluntary Organizations Delivering Health and Social Services

The perceived benefits to users and beneficiaries of voluntary organizations delivering public sector services have been well documented and include the engagement with parts of society that the state cannot reach, personalized service delivery, and improved services. There is a lack of clarity, however, as to whether these perceived benefits are being realized. This article presents the experiences of voluntary sector organizations involved in public sector commissioning. The research suggests that the public sector is limiting the voluntary sector's engagement in service design and performance monitoring. These findings raise questions about the role of the voluntary sector in public service provision.     

Innovation in Public Management: Is Public E-Procurement a Wave of the Future? A Theoretical and Exploratory Analysis

Project management has become an answer to many traditional organizational structuration and performance shortcomings, while gaining currency in business and public sector organizations. Public procurement systems have evolved into public electronic procurement systems with variations and distinctions in the age of globalization and digitalized complexities. This article examines the development of public e-procurement as an innovation in public management in the contexts of project management, public procurement management, and e-governance. It also links practice to theory—through a fourfold theoretical perspective—with contributions to the knowledge in public procurement, governance, and public administration.     

Knowledge management and communities of practice in the private sector: lessons for modernizing the National Health Service in England and Wales

The National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales has embarked upon a radical and far–reaching programme of change and reform. However, to date the results of organizational quality and service improvement initiatives in the public sector have been mixed, if not to say disappointing, with anticipated gains often failing to materialize or to be sustained in the longer term. This paper draws on the authors' recent extensive research into one of the principal methodologies for bringing about the sought after step change in the quality of health care in England and Wales. It explores how private sector knowledge management (KM) concepts and practices might contribute to the further development of public sector quality improvement initiatives in general and to the reform of the NHS in particular. Our analysis suggests there have been a number of problems and challenges in practice, not least a considerable naïvety around the issue of knowledge transfer and 'knowledge into practice' within health care organizations. We suggest four broad areas for possible development which also have important implications for other public sector organizations.     

The 'Publicness' of Public Organizations

This article analyses the diversity of public organizations focusing on variations in their degree of publicness. We define 'publicness' as organizational attachment to public sector values: for example, due process, accountability, and welfare provision. Based on a survey of Danish public organizations, we show that organizations with a high degree of publicness differ from organizations with a low degree of publicness. The former are characterized by complex tasks, professional orientation, many external stakeholders, conflicting environmental demands, and low managerial autonomy. The latter are the opposite. We explore in detail both the relationship between the organizations and their parent ministries and their responses to organizational change. Organizations with a high degree of publicness are subject to a tight ministerial control and have formal and distant relations with the ministry. They also have strong vertical links, externally and internally. High internal control is the joint product of ministerial control and the stress on the public sector value of rule compliance. All organizations ranked high on publicness are reluctant to adopt organizational changes stemming from the 'New Public Management'. Again, organizations with a low degree of publicness are the opposite, keen to adopt new ideas. We show that degree of publicness matters, across both functional types of organizations and policy sectors. Finally, we discuss alternative theoretical explanations of publicness drawn from contingency theory and the new institutionalism.     

MODERNIZATION AND SPORT: THE REFORM OF SPORT ENGLAND AND UK SPORT

This article evaluates the impact of New Labour's 'modernization project' on two key non-departmental public bodies for sport, Sport England and UK Sport. Our analysis concentrates on identifying the sources of the general momentum for modernization in the sport sector, how it has been interpreted by government in relation to the two organizations, the nature and consequences of modernization for both organizations, and the future of modernization. The analysis is informed by a range of public documents produced by government and by the two sports agencies, together with a series of seven interviews conducted with senior staff and members of Sport England and UK Sport and with senior civil servants in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Our conclusions suggest that modernization has resulted in a narrowing of the two organizations' objectives, the adoption of business-like principles and a 'command and control' regime in relationships with key frontline delivery partners.     

Who loves input controls? What happened to “outputs not inputs” in UK Public Financial Management,and why?

Why do frequently criticized input controls survive in the management of public spending while apparently more enlightened output/outcome controls come and go? The question matters, because output/outcome controls are often assumed in public financial management and related literature to lead to superior policy performance as compared with input-focused approaches. We tackle the question by applying qualitative push–pull analysis to compare one key type of input controls (administration cost [AC] controls) with one much-discussed form of output/outcome controls (performance targets linked to spending allocations) in one major country case, the United Kingdom, over two decades. Drawing on documents and in-depth interviews with 120 key political and bureaucratic players, we conclude that bureaucratic inertia at most only partially explains the survival of input AC controls in this case. The push/pull factors associated with the politics of blame and credit made the political players fair-weather output controllers but all-weather input controllers.     

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.     

WHAT’S VALUED MOST? SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR

In recent administrative and organizational literature much attention has been paid to values that guide organizational and managerial behaviour in the public and private domain. Comparative empirical research efforts, however, are sparse. This article reports the results of a comparative empirical survey of 382 managers from a variety of public and private sector organizations in The Netherlands. Contrary to much recent literature that presupposes the intermixing or convergence of value systems guiding governance in different kinds of organizations, the results of this study show two distinct and relatively classical value systems for government and business as well as a ‘common core’ of important organizational qualities. These are accountability, expertise, reliability, efficiency and effectiveness, all of which are considered crucial in both public and private sector organizations. Additional analysis shows that value preferences are primarily attached to sector rather than to age, gender, working experience, or previous employment in the other sector.