Executive and legislature in Ontario: a case study on governmental reform

Abstract. In pursuit of the search common to many governments for a more rationalistic approach to policy-making, Ontario in the 1970s engaged in massive restructuring of its executive and administration. As that was nearing completion, a more modest essay at reform of the legislature was undertaken and is still in progress. The central argument of this paper is that the dominant drive on the executive-administrative side was to reduce rationality to technocratic efficiency (though more recent developments have offset that trend to an extent), while legislative reform to date has at best been a small beginning at reducing executive dominance over the legislature (though a potential is noted at the end of the paper for enhancing the legislature's role). Moreover, the two reform movements have so far followed parallel rather than intersecting courses, thus leaving the basic democratic issues of responsiveness and accountability largely untouched. Sommaire. Dans sa recherche d'une approche plus rationnelle pour l'établissement des politiques, recherche qui est commune à bien des gouvernements, l'Ontario s'est lancé en 1970 dans une restructuration massive du gouvernement et de son administration. Celle-ci éant presque terminée, il tenta plus modestement de reformer le Parlement et cette réforme se poursuit à l'heure actuelle. La thèse de l'auteur de cette communication est que le principal effort du côte du gouvernement et de l'administration a consistéà ramener la rationalisation à l'efficacité technocratique (bien que les développements les plus récents aient renversé la vapeur dans une certaine mesure), alors que jusqu'ici la réforme du Parlement a tenté timidement de réduire la domination du gouvernement sur le Parlement (bien que l'auteur mentionne à la fin de l'exposé la possibilité d'accroître davantage le rôle de la législature). De plus, les deux mouvements de réforme ont suivi jusqu'à présent des routes parallèles, ce qui laisse pratiquement intactes les questions fondamentales de la responsabilité et du contrôle.     

TAIWAN AND HONG KONG: CHINA'S POLICIES AND PROSPECTS (Review Article)

The author defines state-building as a process of increasing the capabilities within a society for the benefit of its population, noting that, traditionally, in Afghanistan villages were run through consent, though the state has usually preferred force. He then examines the various factors said to inhibit state-building – geography, class, the warlords, ethnicity and political Islam – drawing relevant comparisons with other South Asian states. His conclusion is that it has indeed been most difficult to try to build a functioning state in Afghanistan, partly because of the war, but partly because force is no substitute for consent.     

For the Want of a Nail: The Interaction of Managerial Capacity and Human Resource Management on Organizational Performance

Human resource management and managerial capacity are well documented in the public management literature as integral management functions. The field has devoted attention to the importance of human resources, but it has yet to consider whether human resource management interacts with capacity in attaining organizational outcomes. Using a large‐N, multiyear data set of public organizations, this article seeks to rectify this gap in the literature. The findings validate scholarly arguments on the importance of public organizations’ need to manage human resources and capacity effectively, identifying just the right combination for performance gains. Empirical results encourage practitioners to consider the ways in which human resource management and capacity work together to influence performance but sometimes undermine each other in counterintuitive ways.     

Public Management and Educational Performance: The Impact of Managerial Networking

Policies are implemented in complex networks of organizations and target populations. Effective action often requires managers to deal with an array of actors to procure resources, build support, coproduce results, and overcome obstacles to implementation. Few large-n studies have examined the crucial role that networks and network management can play in the execution of public policy. This study begins to fill this gap by analyzing performance over a five-year period in more than 500 U.S. school districts using a nonlinear, interactive, contingent model of management previously developed by the authors. The core idea is that management matters in policy implementation, but its impact is often nonlinear. One way that public managers can make a difference is by leveraging resources and buffering constraints in the program context. This investigation finds empirical support for key elements of the network-management portion of the model. Implications for public management are sketched.