REFORMING PUBLIC SERVICES IN THE UK: BRINGING IN THE THIRD SECTOR

In the UK, the government continues its project to reform public services. Earlier projects have focused on the modernization of public sector organizations; in the latest round of reform, New Labour has focused on widening choice and the personalization of services. To this end, the government has been working with Third Sector (TS) organizations to expand their role in shaping, commissioning and delivering public services. The government’s vision is predicated on a normative assertion, that, unlike traditional public sector organizations, TS bodies create public value by being more innovative, are inspired by altruistic aims and values, and have greater commitment to their clients. This paper reviews recent policy and questions whether the government’s policy is flawed, contradictory and risks damaging the attributes of the TS admired by New Labour.     

Developing New Forms of Partnership With the ‘Market’ in the Procurement of Public Services

This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding the key differences between newly emerging ‘market’ relationships and more traditional forms of procurement by public sector organizations. It highlights how multiple relationships between service clients in the public sector and other stakeholders mean that service clients may often co‐produce welfare changes in their communities in ways which professional and commercial providers cannot easily control and may not fully understand. It highlights the very different nature of collaborations which affect single commissioners and contractors (relational contracting), multiple commissioning bodies with a unified procurement policy (partnership procurement) and multiple commissioning bodies with diverse procurement policies empowered by a single purchasing body (distributed commissioning). The article suggests that traditional conceptions of the ‘market’ and of ‘market management’ are now outdated and need to be revised to take into account the potential of collaborative relationships between multiple stakeholders in the public domain.     

POLITICAL PRESSURES,ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY,AND ATTENTION TO TASKS: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PRE‐CRISIS FINANCIAL REGULATION

Regulatory agencies, like most public organizations, typically operate with multiple tasks and goals, which requires them to prioritize some tasks over others. Such prioritization, while essential, engenders a risk of bureaucratic oversight of significant material problems. Despite the ubiquity and importance of these concerns, our understanding of agencies' allocation of attention across tasks is limited. This article develops a model of agencies' allocation of attention across tasks, which involves an interaction between external public and political pressures and agencies' distinct organizational identities. A brief comparison between two cases of pre‐crisis financial regulation illustrates the proposed model. The two cases suggest that the British Financial Services Authority's and the Israeli Supervisor of Banks' distinct identities conditioned their responses to similarly vigorous pressures to devote more attention to firms' alleged mistreatment of their customers, with important implications for these regulators' attention to firms' capitalization and liquidity.     

The Institutional Settings for the Development of Public Services through State-Owned Enterprises in Brazil

The findings of this study make a timely contribution to the development of public services. Based on the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, this study analyzes under which institutional settings state-owned enterprises (SOEs) can be social and financial options for public service provision in Brazil. Applying a multi-case research design, this study’s findings show that SOEs can be a suitable option for Brazilian social and financial development when: markets are weak or noncompetitive; if few decisional players act; if political interference is minimized regarding operational decisions; and if corporate control is effective to avoid mismanagement and corruption. Brazilian SOEs are effective economic and social tools, but they need to peroxide value improve their corporate control (in the case of Petrobras) and strategic centralization decisions (in the case of Eletrobrás) .     

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS: THE DARK SIDES OF MANAGERIALISTIC ‘ENLIGHTENMENT’

For many years the proponents of New Public Management (NPM) have promised to improve public services by making public sector organizations much more ‘business‐like’. There have been many investigations and empirical studies about the nature of NPM as well as its impact on organizations. However, most of these studies concentrate only on some elements of NPM and provide interesting, but often anecdotal, evidence and insights. Perhaps exactly because of the large amount of extremely revealing and telling empirical studies, there is, therefore, a lack of a systematic identification and understanding of the nature of NPM and its overall relevance. This paper contributes to a systematic identification and understanding of the concept of NPM as well as its multi‐dimensional impact on public sector organizations. First, the paper aims at (re‐) constructing a comprehensive taxonomy of NPM's main assumptions and core elements. Secondly, the paper tries to provide a more comprehensive and meta‐analytical analysis of primarily the negative consequences of NPM‐strategies for public sector organizations as well as the people working in them.     

Power/Faith: Governmentality, Religion, and Post-Secular Societies

Foucault’s concept of governmentality, and its attending modalities of biopower and disciplinary technologies, provides a useful conceptual schema for the analysis of the role of religious and quasi-religious institutions in contemporary society. This is particularly important in the study of those neoliberal democratic states where religious organizations constitute an important presence in the civil society. As religion is thoroughly involved in the reproduction of social structure in most societies, an appraisal of the social and political importance of religious institutions is needed to understand the articulation and exercise of governmentality. This is not just limited to partnerships between state agencies and faith-based organizations in providing for social services, but also in rituals and other religious group activities of these organizations that play a vital role in shaping and molding the social and political subjectivities of the adherents. We argue that synergy between the scholarship on governmentality, and sociology of religion would allow for a more nuanced understanding of the politics and culture of post-secular societies.     

Organisations as Epistemic Capital: the Case of Independent Children’s Rights Institutions

Why do national organisations proliferate in practically all areas of policymaking and organisational life, and why are they involved in supranational networks and organisations? The article approaches this mystery by exploring how organisations are built and used as authorities in domestic policymaking. The empirical focus is on the establishment of the institution of children’s ombudsman and its uses in influencing Finnish child policy. The theory developed in the article suggests that organisations are accumulations of authority, here termed epistemic capital, which is the primary reason that they are established and sustained. Once these are institutionalised, various actors can use the authority of organisations to legitimate their policy objectives. The case of independent children’s rights institutions shows how this mechanism operates in child policy. The Finnish office of the ombudsman for children has worked actively to become an established ontological and moral authority in child policy, and it has also attempted to utilise the mandate and authority of the United Nations and the Convention on the Rights of the Child to pressure the state into more child-friendly policy decisions.     

REDISCOVERING CITIZENSHIP: HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY REFLECTIONS

Our contemporary perception of participation is rather narrow, limited as it is to types of direct and indirect political participation. It is in this narrow perspective that governments’major problems nowadays are analysed: demand overload and declining citizen participation. The major solutions are thus found in reform of politics and government. Little or no attention is given to the potential of the citizenry in providing public services, since their contribution is mainly voluntary by nature. In this article I argue that a different perception of citizenship may well lead to different solutions of governments’current problems. In its true meaning, participation encompasses more than just public endorsement of political proposals. A comparison of historical and contemporary citizen participation serves to highlight the true problem of our times: the lack of reciprocity between government and citizen.     

Public service as a calling: An exploration of a concept

Several years ago, the public administration faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University issued their famous “Blacksburg Manifesto” the public Administration and the Governance Process: Refocusing the American Dialogue. In this document they call for a substantive change in the American Dialogue regarding the role of the public administrator. Nothing that the founding fathers viewed public service as a “calling”, as did the populists, Progressives, and New Dealers, they suggest that today’s government officials should percive themselves as “trustees” with a sense of a calling in serving for a cause. This call for a renewed convenant stimulated this researcher to speculate on the nature of the calling, its origins, definitions, applications, and its applicability as a psychological motivator for effective. productive performance in the public sector.

Our exploration for understanding starts with an examination of Western society’s earliest written record of man’s behaviour, the Bible, which is replete with stories of divine calls, first from God to the individual, and then to a group or society. We also review subsequent religious and secular calls, noting their universality and the reciprocal phenomena of “good” and “evil” which such calls exemplify. Thus, God’s call to Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt is balanced by the fombat-driven calling of the city-state of Sparta.

We also not that the calling is subject to a hierarchy process. Plato writes about the natural endowments of individuals which creates three social classes that are called upon to serve the state; artisans, warriors, and philosopher-kings. Later on Eusebius defines a difference in the intensity and degree of suffering suffering between those professing a “high calling” and those following their“calling”.

This study also considers the meaning of the word “calling”. The researcher proposes a modification of its meaning which is less sacred and more secular in context. “Klesis Diakonis”, two separate Greek words, in combination, can be defined as a “call to joyous service”. This secular interpretation of the calling, frees it from its classic, religious association, and provides for its application to non-religious endeavor.

In conclusion, it is suggested that upon further research and study, the concept of a calling can be a vital and significant motivator, indded, part of the critical psychological and emotional makeup for those individuals in our society who are not fulfilled by material rewards. It is hypothesized here that the public-minded individual can find his or her calling through the medium of public service, can help restore the sacredness of public service as a public as a public trust, and can satisfy his or her search for self-fulfillment through the redefined concept of the calling.     

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.     

Discretion drift in primary care commissioning in England: Towards a conceptualization of hybrid accountability obligations

In the context of welfare delivery, hybrid organizations mix public and ‘new’ market, social, and professional types of mechanisms and rationales. This article contributes to our understanding of accountability within hybrid organizations by highlighting how accountability obligations can become hybrid, simultaneously formal and informal. Instead of seeing accountability as hybrid only in the sense of the coexistence of types of organizational mechanisms and structures (i.e., the prevalence of both state and market types), we examine accountability arrangements governing a hybrid model—primary care commissioning in England—and interrogate the relationships between accountability actors and their accountability forums. We conceptualize ‘hybrid accountability obligations’ as a state whereby the nature of obligation underpinning accountability relationships is both formal-informal and vertical-horizontal concurrently. The article concludes by highlighting the consequences of this kind of hybridity, namely how it extended discretion from welfare delivery to the domain of welfare governance.     

Enhancing Employees’ Work Performance through Organizational Justice in the Context of Financial Crisis. A Study of the Greek Public Sector

In a period of economic crisis, the increasing pressure of sparse financial resources and the structural reforms in labor law are factors pushing and forcing managers of both public and private organizations to do more with less. The current study explores how employees’ performance in the public sector is affected by perceptions of organizational justice in terms of resource allocation (e.g., benefits and compensation). The responses received from a sample of 490 employees working for public organizations in Greece indicated that work performance is significantly and positively related not only to employees’ satisfaction with pay, but also to employees’ perceptions of distributive and procedural justice.     

The Cost of Empowerment: Multiple Sources of Women’s Debt in Rural India

Abstract

Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned loans’ and ‘instant loans’. We find that ‘instant loans’ support women’s bargaining power in various types of household financial decisions, whereas ‘planned loans’ have no impact. This surprising result is better understood when the nature of ‘instant loans’ is examined – these are frequently usurious, involve coercive enforcement methods and are considered socially debasing. Hence women who use them perform a convenient role for their households and in return gain some negotiating power.     

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 Use of Social Media Policies by US Municipalities

As the use of social media technologies becomes ever more ingrained in the day-to-day functions of public organizations, it is important to develop relevant social media policies to guide their effective use and enable increasingly transparent engagement with citizens. Analyzing the content of such policies can inform scholars about the intended purpose of government’s use of social media. Hence, to build the foundation for a research agenda focused on the role of policy in government’s ability to effectively engage citizens, this exploratory study first identified 156 US cities with a recognizable social media presence and then employed a content analysis to analyze the key elements of their social media policies. Based on our findings, most cities have integrated social media into daily operations, however, many do not provide effective social media policies to guide such use.     

ETHICAL CLIMATE AND RULE BENDING: HOW ORGANIZATIONAL NORMS CONTRIBUTE TO UNINTENDED RULE CONSEQUENCES

Rules help ensure consistent employee behaviour, yet rule bending occurs in public organizations every day. Previous research indicates that rule bending is influenced by organizational structure and personal characteristics (DeHart‐Davis 2007). This present study considers the influence of organizational norms on rule bending by exploring the impact of ethical climate, which signals to employees the best course of action when faced with situations that are ethical in nature (Victor and Cullen 1987, 1988). To investigate this relationship, survey data from employees of a large American local government are analysed. Results from a structural equation model show that three ethical climates – ‘organization interest’, ‘team interest’, and ‘rules/SOP’ – significantly influence rule bending. Findings suggest that organizational norms play a critical role for employee behaviour and public managers can consider rule bending and ethical climate as impetuses for organizational change.     

Organizational Forms and Incentives in Public Procurement: Natural Experiment at a Large Public Sector Organization in Russia

This article analyses how the intensification of centralized monitoring within public organization may impact incentives for efficiency in those divisions of the organization that have different levels of financial autonomy. The efficiency of divisions’ activities was estimated through their procurement effectiveness. All the divisions were classified as non-commercial units (NCU) funded by the government or as income earning units (IEU) operating in the market and having broader financial autonomy. The results show that under standard monitoring, the IEU had more efficient procurements compared to the NCU. After intensification of centralized monitoring, the differences in performance became insignificant. These findings show that stricter monitoring is efficient for organizations with soft budget constraints, while for organizations with hard budget constraints it is preferable to use more flexible regulations.     

The civil unrest as an obstacle toward financial development in Georgia, 1991–2007

Georgia has been experiencing robust GDP growth since the Rose Revolution despite its formal financial system remaining critically underdeveloped. This goes against a strongly supported proposition that a country’s economic development is followed by a well-developed and efficient financial system. In this paper we first explain the shallow financial deepening in Georgia and show that the economic growth in Georgia has been driven by such determinants as public spending and construction works mainly supported by foreign debt and FDI inflow. This paper further argues that prolonged civil conflict is one of the critical obstacles toward financial development in Georgia. Bank lending activity is associated with high level of uncertainty stemming from recurrent civil war. Newly privatized commercial banks are excessively cautious in expanding their loan assets to private non-financial corporations due mainly to the banks’ inability to precisely assess borrower’s risk involving not only with individual financial soundness but also with political uncertainty.     

What Makes a Key Player in Interorganizational Social Policy Networks? The Case of Uruguay

ABSTRACT

Networks of organizations involved in public policy implementation require strong interaction, concerted action and high degrees of collaboration to be effective. However, little is known about how different types of organizations involved in implementation of multi-sectoral social policies interact in these networks. In this article the relationship between organizational characteristics and network position is explored, as well as how the intensity of collaborations can also determine organizations’ involvement in networks. The nature of funding (public/private) and the remit of activity of organizations are found to determine their influence and importance in social policy networks. Furthermore, the network position of the organizations also depends on the level of intensity of their interactions. These results can guide public administrators when developing and promoting networks to involve a particular type of actor and also policymakers as to which types of ties are more aligned with the implementation of a particular policy.     

PUBLICS,PATIENTS, CITIZENS,CONSUMERS? POWER AND DECISION MAKING IN PRIMARY HEALTH CARE

This article uses theoretical approaches to the discussion of power in order to consider the role of public and patient participation in primary health care organizations in the UK. There is considerable evidence to suggest that, despite major national initiatives to extend participation in health services, the role of participation in decision making remains underdeveloped. The primary purpose of this article is to understand how and why this should be the case. Using findings from qualitative research that explored approaches taken by the dominant professional groups on primary care groups (PCGs) to involving patients and the public, we consider how these approaches reflect the exercise of different forms and levels of power. The explanation combines Lukes’ categorization of three forms of power with Bourdieu’s dynamic conceptualization of the relations of habitus and field. It is argued that the models observed represent different opportunities for the operation of power with implications for the role that participation can play.