Collaborative Innovation: A Viable Alternative to Market Competition and Organizational Entrepreneurship

There are growing pressures for the public sector to be more innovative but considerable disagreement about how to achieve it. This article uses institutional and organizational analysis to compare three major public innovation strategies. The article confronts the myth that the market‐driven private sector is more innovative than the public sector by showing that both sectors have a number of drivers of as well as barriers to innovation, some of which are similar, while others are sector specific. The article then systematically analyzes three strategies for innovation: New Public Management, which emphasizes market competition; the neo‐Weberian state, which emphasizes organizational entrepreneurship; and collaborative governance, which emphasizes multiactor engagement across organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. The authors conclude that the choice of strategies for enhancing public innovation is contingent rather than absolute. Some contingencies for each strategy are outlined.     

De l'usage des sciences cognitives dans l'analyse des politiques publiques

Depuis les années 1980 les approches cognitives des politiques publiques rencontrent un grand succès. Nous nous interrogeons ici sur leur contenu en le confrontant à la cognition telle que la pensent les sciences du même nom (principalement ici la psychologie cognitive) qualifiée de cognition forte. Après avoir défini trois types d'intégration des sciences cognitives aux sciences sociales (terminologique, méthodologique et théorique), nous cherchons à classer plusieurs approches de politiques publiques en fonction de notre taxinomie. Nous observons que dans la majorité des cas, les références à la cognition ne visent pas à transférer une théorie d'une discipline à l'autre. La cognition étudiée par les analyses des politiques publiques est le plus souvent une cognition faible, sauf exceptions. Nous concluons en examinant les enjeux épistémologiques soulevés par ces dernières et tâchons d'avancer quelques pistes pour expliquer ce phénomène.     

Rating and Evaluating Health Systems: The Value of the Life Expectancy Approach

ABSTRACT

Cross-national ranking and rating of public services does not always provide the conditions for effective cross-national learning, because such learning requires causal understanding of the mechanisms underlying ranking scores. That causal understanding means grappling with the production functions involved in public services, and it is particularly difficult for organizations or policy domains where processes are more readily measurable than outcomes relative to goals. Health is to a large extent a policy domain of that type, which makes effective ranking and comparison difficult and also presents a particular challenge for cross-national learning. Numerous attempts have been made to compare the efficiency of different health care systems, and though there is a certain logic about such approaches to ranking and rating, this paper argues that much can be learnt for health policy using life expectancy as the basis for ranking and comparison.     

A short review

Abstract

As the title indicates, Zhou En-lai is the link which joins together the two distinct parts of this brief work. The first section by Davison and Selden is a short interpretive history of the Chinese revolution from the Opium War to 1975, highlighting Zhou's participation in and contributions to it. The second section contains reprints from New China Magazine of Zhou's 1971 talks with Americans on selected topics including class struggle in the socialist period, slogans, the Cultural Revolution, and U.S.-China relations.     

Politics and television

Texts reviewed:

Jay Blumler, Michael Gurevitch and Julian Ives (1978) The Challenge of Election Broadcasting, Leeds University Press.

Tom Burns (1977) The BBC: Public Institution and Private World, Macmillan Press.

Grace Wyndham Goldie (1977) Facing the Nation: Television and Politics 1936–76, Bodley Head.

Philip Schlesinger (1978) Putting ‘reality’ together: BBC News, Constable.

Michael Tracey (1977) Producing Political Television, Routledge Direct Edition.