Relational Leadership,Storytelling, and Narratives: Practices of Local Government Chief Executives

This article examines the storytelling and narrative practices of an elite group of public administrators in the United Kingdom: local government chief executives. The authors do so through the lens of relationality, exploring the collective dimensions of leadership. The focus on leadership and stories embraces the narrative turn in public administration scholarship. It responds to calls for research examining the distinctive settings of everyday leadership action. The contribution to theory is a qualitative understanding of the relational ways in which stories and narratives are used in the practices of public administration leaders. The article analyzes four ways in which such leadership is accomplished: inviting an emotional connection and commitment to public service, making sense of organizational realities, provoking reflections on practices and assumptions, and managing relations with politicians. The authors offer an appreciation of how relational leadership influence can be generated by expressive narratives and storytelling rather than stemming from bureaucratic authority.     

Positive and Negative Emotions: Differential Associations with Sleep Duration and Quality in Adolescents

Despite positive and negative emotions being equally important predictors of adolescent wellbeing, research examining positive emotions is limited. In 4582 adolescents (69.4% females; age M?±?SD?=?14.55?±?1.74 years), we used structural equation modelling to examine associations between self-reported sleep duration and quality with positive affect, negative affect, and happiness, controlling for age and sex. Overall, sleep quality displayed stronger associations with all measures of emotions compared to sleep duration. Shorter sleep was more specifically associated with lower positive emotions (happiness, followed by positive affect), whereas poorer sleep showed stronger associations with negative affect. Protecting sleep duration may promote positive emotions and enhancing sleep quality may reduce mood disturbances. Future research could incorporate both positive and negative emotions to better understand adolescents’ wellbeing.     

China’s foreign aid system: structure,agencies, and identities

China’s rise as a (re)emerging donor has attracted attention over the last decade, with a focus on Chinese development assistance as a challenge to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) aid norms. Knowledge of China’s domestic aid structure is needed to understand Chinese aid abroad. This paper addresses gaps in the literature and challenges the accepted nostrum that China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) dominates China’s aid programme. Building on the authors’ experience as Chinese aid practitioners and scholars over more than a decade and drawing on over 300 interviews, the paper explores China’s aid decision-making processes by examining the main agencies, identities and informal interactions. We argue that the Chinese aid system is characterised by fierce and ongoing competition for influence among actors, especially MOFCOM, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the Ministry of Finance (MoF), as well as the companies responsible for implementing Chinese aid projects.     

Political Symbolism and the Fall of the USSR

When Gorbachev came to power he inherited not simply a system in crisis, but a structure of symbols that was embedded within the broader political system and which was also in crisis. Given the ideocratic nature of the Soviet system, any change to that system would require symbolic change as well. This essay charts how Gorbachev sought to come to grips with this problem, investing some symbols with new meaning while rejecting others. It shows how ultimately he was unable to produce a new, coherent narrative.     

Public–Private Partnerships: An International Performance Review

Public–private partnerships are enjoying a global resurgence in popularity, but there is still much confusion around notions of partnership, what can be learned from our history with partnerships, and what is new about the partnership forms that are in vogue today. Looking at one particular family of public–private partnerships, the long-term infrastructure contract, this article argues that evaluations thus far point to contradictory results regarding their effectiveness. Despite their continuing popularity with governments, greater care is needed to strengthen future evaluations and conduct such assessments away from the policy cheerleaders.     

The Future of the Public Service Workforce: A Dialogue

It has been widely suggested that public service delivery of the future will be different to that of today. Added to this, we are currently witnessing significant changes in terms of the nature of work. Taken together these developments signal that we will see transformation in terms of the role of public servants and the public service workforce. Against this background, this paper presents a dialogue on the future of the public service workforce between Helen Dickinson and Helen Sullivan of the Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne and Graeme Head, New South Wales Public Service Commissioner. This paper offers insights from academics actively engaged in teaching the future public service workforce and a public service commissioner actively working to make a reality of a vision of the future.