Large‐Scale Social Protest: A Business Risk and a Bureaucratic Opportunity

The public versus private nature of organizations influences their goals, processes, and employee values. However, existing studies have not analyzed whether and how the public nature of organizations shapes their responses to concrete social pressures. This article takes a first step toward addressing this gap by comparing the communication strategies of public organizations and businesses in response to large‐scale social protests. Specifically, we conceptualize, theorize, and empirically analyze the communication strategies of 100 organizations in response to large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during 2011. We find that in response to these protests, public organizations tended to employ a “positive‐visibility” strategy, whereas businesses were inclined to keep a “low public profile.” We associate these different communication strategies with the relatively benign consequences of large‐scale social protests for public organizations compared with their high costs for businesses.     

Inside Collaborative Networks: Ten Lessons for Public Managers

This paper offers practical insights for public managers as they work within interorganizational networks. It is based on the author's empirical study of 14 networks involving federal, state, and local government managers working with nongovernmental organizations. The findings suggest that networks are hardly crowding out the role of public agencies; though they are limited in their decision scope, they can add collaborative public value when approaching nettlesome policy and program problems.     

Benefiting from Public Sector Innovation: The Moderating Role of Customer and Learning Orientation

This article examines whether the payoff from engaging in innovation‐generating activities is contingent on an organization's level of customer and learning orientation. The authors suggest that innovative activity is associated with higher public service quality when the level of customer and learning orientation within the focal organization is high. They test this hypothesis by drawing on a novel panel data set covering all public nonspecialist hospital organizations in England. Using dynamic panel data estimation techniques, the authors find strong support for a direct relationship between innovative activity and public service quality and for a moderating role of both customer and learning orientation. These findings call for a contingency perspective on public sector innovation and highlight some of the boundary conditions that need to be in place if public service organizations are to benefit fully from their innovative activities.     

Disparate Measures: Public Managers and Performance-Measurement Strategies

Over the past two decades, many studies have investigated the scope and significance of performance measurement in public organizations. Nonetheless, there is more to learn about the challenges facing public managers who want to measure organizational outputs and use the feedback to improve performance. Specifically, managers are often faced with redundant measures of the same output, each of which may be preferred by a different political principal or stakeholder. Furthermore, a manager's choice of measures can have serious consequences for both the estimation of agency problems and the success of programmatic solutions. We test these assertions in an analysis of educational organizations in Texas. We find that managers' assessments of organizational performance and decisions regarding solutions depend on the choice of performance measures.     

Toward Interest Inarticulation: A Major Consequence of Corporatism for Interest Organizations

The main issue discussed is the difficulties in collective action. Three logics of collective action are identified and discussed in terms of their implications for solidarity within interest organizations and for organizational action. Both solidarity and organizational action are important for successful policymaking. Policies can be decided without the support of the members, but their implementation may thus prove difficult. The theoretical issue of interest articulation by interest organizations is the important one here. The article concludes that encompassing organizations will most likely have difficulty in articulating a definite organizational policy. It is maintained that corporatism and public responsibility-taking can severely hamper the articulation of organized special interests. They lead to interest inarticulation. This may lead to legitimacy problems for the organization and be one explanation for the recent decline in certain established interest organizations in Sweden and recent discussions on the future of corporatism.     

Responsibility to Be Enthusiastic? Public Servants and the Public Face of “Promiscuous Partisanship”

Contemporary public service leaders are no longer the anonymous mandarins of Westminster folklore. Whether giving public speeches to outside organizations or communicating directly with the media, senior public servants are emerging from anonymity to become public actors in their own right. This article undertakes a comparative study across four Westminster jurisdictions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—to examine the formal rules and guidelines that apply to public servants when making public statements in their official capacity. Drawing on the late Peter Aucoin's notion of “promiscuous partisanship,” the article argues that public servants are expected to demonstrate a new level of enthusiasm when explaining or justifying government policy to the public. This has implications for the extent to which nonpartisanship can continue to effectively function within Westminster systems.     

The political economy of an African public enterprise: A longitudinal case study of the administrative and economic operations of the Sierra Leone Port Organization

In most of the post-colonial states of sub-Saharan Africa, both the size of the state bureaucracy has grown and its functions proliferated. Whatever the economic rationale of public sector organizations, they do not exist and operate in a social and political vacuum. This paper argues that they are typically an integral part of a patron clientelist political and economic system on which the foundations of government sometimes depend. The consequences for the economic performance of public sector organizations arising out of this socio-political context is now widely recognized in the growing literature on African public enterprise. Contributions to this discussion, however, have tended to be dominated by economists and public administration specialists who have generally adopted a technocratic problem solution approach. In isolating their analyses of the performance of African parastatals from an appraisal of the role of the state, this approach fails to situate adequately the problem of performance in its proper context. This paper provides a case study which examines the administrative and economic operations of the Sierra Leone Port Organization in the colonial and post-colonial states. In arguing that problems of performance of African public sector organizations also require political solutions this discussion extends the discussion beyond a technocratic focus.     

Less Government, More Secrecy: Reinvention and the Weakening of Freedom of Information Law

Many critics have suggested that worldwide efforts to reinvent government could also weaken democratic control over public institutions, but few have considered how attempts to implement the "new paradigm" in public management might affect a widely used instrument for promoting accountability: freedom of information law (FOI). FOI laws give citizens and nongovernmental organizations the right of access to government information. However, recent Canadian experience shows that reinvention can weaken FOI laws in three ways. First, attempts to reduce "nonessential" spending may cause delays in handling FOI requests and weaken mechanisms for ensuring compliance. Second, governmental functions may be transferred to private contractors and not-for-profit organizations that are not required to comply with FOI laws. Third, governments' attempts to sell information and increase FOI fees may create new economic barriers to openness. Thus, restructuring provides an opportunity for political executives, public servants, and some well-organized business interests to weaken oversight mechanisms and increase their own autonomy within the policy process.     

Political Pressure,Conformity Pressure,and Performance Information as Drivers of Public Sector Innovation Adoption

Why public organizations adopt and abandon organizational innovations is a key question for any endeavor to explain large-scale developments in the public sector. Supplementing research within public administration on innovation with the related literature on policy diffusion, this article examines how external factors such as conformity pressure from institutionalized models, performance information from other organizations, and political pressure affect innovation adoption. By the use of two survey experiments in very different political contexts—Texas and Denmark—and a difference-in-differences analysis exploiting a reform of the political governance of public schools in Denmark, we find that public managers respond to political pressure. We find no indications that they emulate institutionalized models or learn from performance information from other organizations when they adopt organizational innovations. The results thereby point to political pressure as an important factor behind large-scale adoptions of organizational innovations in the public sector.     

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.     

People: hearts and minds Towards rebirth of the public service ethic

No country will escape the enormous forces that are now buffeting the public sector worldwide. The massive changes underway are affecting people—public servants and citizens alike—and not just bottom lines. Standard approaches to dealing with change may unwittingly overlook the fact that Public Services are first and foremost “people systems”. The article provides a timely reminder that players in public organizations—senior officials, middle managers and front-line workers—experience change differently given their distinct perspectives and levels of authority. While responses to change may vary considerably within organizations, a common humanity is what ultimately unites people. As a result, governments that choose to ignore rather than acknowledge the human side of change may experience needless difficulty in bringing about the successful renewal of the public sector. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

Wisdom in Public Administration: Looking for a Sociology of Wise Practice

This article explores a sociological account of practical wisdom in public administrations. Very little research on contemporary applications of wisdom exists, and what research there is has a cognitive bias, largely ignoring sociology. For public organizations to create the conditions for wise practice within themselves and within individual administrators, an understanding of the social relational structures and processes that build and sustain practical wisdom is crucial. Furthermore, given that there is an aesthetic dimension to practical wisdom, an aesthetics-based approach to sociology of organizational wisdom provides a useful starting point in this sociological project. Aesthetics raises important issues of communicative action and discourse that address social relations and their structures and processes. Finally, a research agenda that explores these structural and processual issues in public administration is canvassed.     

Assessing Organizational Performance: Exploring Differences Between Internal and External Measures

ABSTRACT

Differences in judgments of public service performance across stakeholder groups have often been noted, but have rarely been tested. We measure the extent of these differences between and within internal and external stakeholders. The evidence shows that internal groups usually overestimate the performance of their organizations. We then develop and test a model of inter-organizational variations in the extent of this overestimation. The statistical results show that performance overestimation is more likely in small organizations with geographically dispersed clients, and in organizations that adopt fashionable management practices that are associated with higher institutional legitimacy.     

News Management and New Managerialism

Abstract

This article examines the public communication activities of “Quangos” (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations). These non-elected organizations fulfill diverse public functions-such as, providing services, advising policy makers, regulating other institutions, representing the interests of certain social and cultural groups, supporting private enterprise, and promoting pro-social values and practices.

Focusing mainly on news management strategies in the sector, the article shows that the popular image of quangos as highly introverted organizations needs revision, and that many place considerable emphasis on public communication issues. However, this recognition contextualises rather than invalidates concerns about accountability within this tier of government, as publicity activities in the sector are geared towards facilitating the external promotion of organizations' roles rather than scrutiny of their conduct.     

The Life and Death of Public Organizations: A Question of Institutional Design?

Why do some public organizations grow old and others die young? Since Herbert Kaufman first posed this question, considerable research has been devoted to answering it. The findings of that research suggest that the design of new public organizations affects, to a significant degree, their survival chances. In this article, we test whether and how “design factors” affected the durability of the so‐called New Deal organizations initiated under FDR's first term. Our findings confirm that design factors do matter, but their effects change over time. We draw out some potential implications for institutional design and sketch a renewed research agenda to determine why some public organizations survive environmental pressure whereas others succumb to it.     

The Authority to Do Good: Publicly Responsible Behavior among Private Mortgage Lenders

Private organizations are increasingly relied on, explicitly and implicitly, to carry out public objectives. But given that profit and public motives are not always aligned, why do private firms behave in publicly responsible ways? Specifically, how do diverse regulative, economic, normative, and cultural influences combine to enable or constrain publicly responsible behavior? This analysis focuses on a specific group of private actors: mortgage lenders. Through semi‐structured interviews with private lending agents participating in a public mortgage program, this analysis investigates influences that contribute to publicly responsible behavior. From the interviews, four different publicness dispositions are identified: pecuniary (sensitive to economic and regulative constraints), traditional (sensitive to regulative and isomorphic constraints), altruistic (sensitive to isomorphic and cultural‐cognitive influences), and opportunistic (sensitive to multiple influences). Even for organizations (and their actors) operating within the same policy context and the same public program, responses to political authority likely are contingent on varying publicness dispositions.     

Perceptions of Public and Private Performance: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Media, politicians, and reform proponents frequently assert that public sector organizations are inefficient and burdened by administrative procedures. But are negative stereotypes of the public sector reflected in people's perceptions of public service provision? Given the methodological challenges of isolating the perception of publicness from other factors related to public organizations, little is known about whether public organizations have a negative image. The authors use a survey experimental design to isolate the effect of publicness on perceptions of the performance of hospitals. The results suggest that public sector organizations have a negative image on productivity‐related aspects of performance but not on normative aspects of performance. As this article is a randomized experiment, it provides strong evidence regarding the causal nature of the relationship between publicness and perceptions of performance. Implications for researchers aiming to understand these mechanisms and for public managers concerned about the image of their organization are discussed.     

The Public Sector in a Democratic Order. Problems and Non-Solutions in the Danish Case

The literature of the last decade indicates two important lessons for future research. The first is that political scientists and scholars in related fields have rediscovered the nature and ubiquity of politics. In particular, they have realized that neither public administration nor organization theory can solve political issues. The second lesson is that the growth of government has enlarged the list of important political actors with the addition of numerous 'public' groups, organizations, and institutions. The combined message of the two lessons is that analyses of the public sector and policy-making should be sensitive to the importance of political actors in the public sector. This paper is a preliminary attempt (based on elite questionnaire data) to map the general structure of the Danish policy-making system by focusing on the interactions among government bureaucrats, interest organizations, and MPs. These elites are further included in an analysis of public expenditure problems, with particular emphasis on the (often neglected) role of political parties and their relationships to various groups and segments of society. The emergent overall picture of the policy-making system indicates problems that presumably cannot be 'solved' within the framework of a democratic polity.     

Managerial Networking in Nonprofit Organizations: The Impact of Networking on Organizational and Advocacy Effectiveness

Public management scholars are interested in the ways that public managers can improve the performance of their organizations and, by extension, public service outcomes. However, public sector outcomes are increasingly being produced by nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits have encountered increased pressures to improve effectiveness in recent years, both from their funding entities and from the public. A growing body of public management research has shown that managerial networking can pay dividends for organizational effectiveness, yet no studies to date have considered the effects of managerial networking on nonprofit effectiveness. This is the first study to apply the basic elements of Meier and O'Toole's model to the nonprofit sector. Using survey data from a random sample of 314 nonprofit human service organizations in 16 U.S. states, the authors explore the frequency of various networking relationships on organizational and advocacy effectiveness. The findings reveal that political networking increases advocacy effectiveness and community networking increases organizational effectiveness.