A working model to help institutionalize quality improvements in local governments

This article describes a working model designed to help leadership in public management introduce quality improvements and eventually facilitate transformations to quality organizations (TQO). By quality improvements and transformations to quality organizations -- whether in government, public education, public health, or other fields of activity -- we mean those institutional changes which reliably achieve ever greater effectiveness in accomplishing mission and responsively achieve ever higher levels of measurable service to public “customers.”

This article discusses the development of an organizational assessment instrument which the authors designed for the County of Los Angeles. Building on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the President's Award in the USA, as well as on the review of other state and local criteria and comments received through a national review process, the authors formulated criteria of quality management with a view toward public service customers, particularly at local levels of government.

The model described has been initially applied to conduct self-assessments in four departments of Los Angeles County. It is also intended for broader use by administrative practitioners and scholars interested in the organizational change process. This article reports the development of the working model and identifies some lessons learned. The purpose of this article is threefold: (1) to inform about quality developments in the County of Los Angeles, (2) to present the working model as a point of departure for dialogue about the role which quality criteria might play in strengthening local governments more broadly, and (3) to consider the working model's possible use in facilitating shared mutual learning across geographic and other boundaries electronically.     

“A partnership in virtue among all citizens”:(1) the public service and the civic humanist tradition

It is argued that the Founders’ intentions are most correctly interpreted through the virtue-centered paradigm of civic humanism, with its attendant “ethics of character.” Such an interpretation has major implications for the civic obligations of public servants. Among them are obligations to encourage civic autonomy; to govern by persuasion; to transcend the corruptions of power; and to become civic exemplars. Because these vital civic responsibilities have been neglected in recent years, it is argued that public administration should take the lead in promoting them as standards of good government.

The future of fin de siecle America is not bright, as each day brings us closer to some geopolitical, economic, or environmental disaster that will pitch us into the garrison state.

Because of the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a banal self-seeking and “moral thoughtlessness, “⁽²⁾ we trail dispiritedly after leaders who have neither vision nor courage and who care only for the pomp, circumstance, and financial possibilities of their offices. Lost in the scramble for preferment and self-aggrandizement are the Founding values and the society they were to create.

A few call for a return to the ideals of the Founding, but who are to be the reformers? One area with real possibilities is public administration, for two reasons. First, it still respects the vestiges of the political philosophy of its tradition and, hence, does not automatically reject suggestions from moral philosophy as impractical. Second, many who joined the public service did so because of some sense, perhaps inchoate, of wanting to serve the “public interest.” We can build from this foundation.

In this spirit, then, what are the moral obligations of the public service? While public servants owe their organizations both efficient performance and compliance with the law, they also owe a great deal more because they are “public” employees. Publicness carries higher obligations than those entailed by private employment. To be of the public service is to accept moral obligations, bespoken in the oath of office, the basis of public accountability. At the base, the primary obligation is to know and to believe in the Founding values.

Second, public servants are obligated to embody those values intentionally in all their actions, whether with superiors, colleagues, subordinates, or the general public. Third is the obligation to secure the Founding values for the citizens of the Republic. The fourth obligation is that all are able to speak and write well in defense of the Founding values. These obligations are nonnegotiable.

The source of the problems of contemporary America is our collective loss of belief in and application of the Founding values. By loss, I do not mean to imply that we disbelieve, but rather that we are—following Hannah Arendt— “thoughtless” concerning them. They have become cliches, rather than the guiding principles for all individual and organizational actions. Even those who defend the Founding values are reluctant to deal with the difficult problems of belief, but knowledge of the Founding values must precede belief in them, and knowledge must be interpreted within a paradigm, of which there are at least two to which we may turn.     

Performance Regimes—The Institutional Context of Performance Policies

Performance measurement, targeting, reporting and managing of public services has spread across jurisdictions in recent years. The most usual stance adopted by governments in developing performance policies has been shaped by principal-agent theory and a hierarchy of principal-agent relationships from core executive to service delivery. Such notions have been challenged from several directions, both in theory and empirically. Writers on accountability and those analyzing the “audit explosion” and the growth of “regulation inside government” have pointed to the way in which multiple actors and accountabilities have grown. Drawing on these and other sources this article develops a “performance regimes” perspective that offers a heuristic analytical framework of the main groups of institutional actors who can (but do not always) attempt to shape or steer the performance of service delivery agencies. The aim is to create a framework that can be applied comparatively to study changes in total performance regimes over time and between jurisdictions and sectors.     

Economic discourse and the capitalist order

This paper uses the concepts of business model and financial ecosystem to analyse the relation between the US capital market and corporate business. Under a capital market double standard, from 1995 to 2000, new companies with digital prospects could recover their costs from the capital market; but, after the tech stock crash in 2000, all companies were required to generate profits from the product market. This encourages a blurring of old and new firm identities, because sectoral power is increasingly necessary to secure cost recovery. But this does not imply any return to business as usual when the financial ecosystem for new technology survives the crash and large-scale venture capital investment continues. From this point of view,the new economy illustrated, concretely, the determining role of finance in the broader processes of financialization.     

Question,ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment

The use of labour values as a basis for economic calculation in a socialist economy is defended. A resource allocation mechanism is outlined that uses a combination of labour value calculation with market clearing prices for consumer goods. Conditions for full employment are specified. A type theoretic analysis of economic calculation is presented. Information theory is used to estimate the information content of real price vectors. It is demonstrated that both price calculations and value calculations are type theory equivalent and that both involve information loss. It is shown that modern computer technology is capable of computing up to date labour values with comparative ease.     

Changing Municipalities in the Information age

Abstract

Political leadership at the local level has attracted growing attention in recent years in parallel with reforms of local government and of the municipal administration, as well as the debate on a shift from government to governance. Considering the power triangle of (i) the mayor, (ii) the municipal administration (executive officers) and (iii) the council, it is surprising that the latter has gained little interest so far. This article analyses how the roles of local councils as representative bodies are assessed by mayors from seventeen European countries and how differences in the perception of councils can be explained. Can differences be explained by institutional settings, the notion of the mayor towards the role of political parties or by the kind of interaction between the mayor and the council – or are specific local conditions and idiosyncratic personal factors crucial?     

Devolution and Local Government: Evidence from Scotland

Devolution in Scotland has had a major impact upon local government. Local government, at both political and managerial levels, perceives central government in the shape of the Scottish Executive to be closer (geographically and politically) and more open to local government in terms of access to ministers and civil servants. However, Scottish central–local relations continues to be characterised by a sense of mistrust of local government, especially among civil servants and a continuing desire for central control of key policy agendas. Equally, the policy process continues to display features of fragmentation across major policy areas. Moreover, Westminster has not yet departed the scene of Scottish politics in both financial and policy terms but also in the enduring presence of a Westminster ‘political culture’     

The Role of Organisational Culture in the Merger of English Local Authorities into a Single Unitary Authority

Cornwall Council is a new ‘unitary’ local authority which was created following the merger of six district councils and one county council on 1 April 2009. A questionnaire survey based on specific ‘dimensions’ of organisational culture was circulated to staff prior to the merger date. Overall, the results indicated a generally congruent culture characterised by a strong team spirit and commitment to the workplace. A number of differences were observed between the cultural orientations of the seven councils, but there was only weak evidence of differences between tiers of management or professional groupings. The study suggests that the new organisation will have to find ways of ‘unfreezing’ staff from their established ways of thinking and working before changes can be properly embedded. It is recommended that the organisational change process shifts from a top-down ‘planned’ approach to a more ‘emergent’ approach to facilitate learning and organisational development.