How to Improve the Outcome of State Welfare Services. Governance in A Systems-Theoretical Perspective

Much governance literature deals with the limited capacity of the state and the market to govern core state welfare services such as education, scientific research and healthcare. Rather less attention has been focused on how the outcome of these services can be improved politically. An analysis of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (Luhmann 1997a, 2000) leads to the hypothesis that self-governance, that is, a combination of professional autonomy and public peer-evaluation, is a superior strategy. Though this may seem counterintuitive at first glance, this paper shows that it corresponds to well-rooted principles of public administration and, in the sphere of education, to empirical findings on school choice and school effectiveness. This raises new perspectives for future comparative governance studies.     

Performance in Public Organizations: Clarifying the Conceptual Space

Performance in public organizations is a key concept that requires clarification. Based on a conceptual review of research published in 10 public administration journals, this article proposes six distinctions to describe the systematic differences in performance criteria: From which stakeholder's perspective is performance being assessed? Are the criteria formal or informal? Are the criteria subjective? Which process focus and product focus do they have, if any? What is the unit of analysis? Based on these distinctions, the performance criteria of existing studies used in an empirical review of management and performance are classified. The results illustrate how a systematization of the conceptual space of performance in public organizations can help researchers select what to study and what to leave out with greater accuracy while also bringing greater clarity to public debates about performance.     

IPSASB’s Conceptual Framework: Coherence with Accounting Systems in European Public Administrations

Accounting and reporting systems in public administrations of European countries have deeply changed in the last 20 years due to the new public management wave and the trend toward international harmonization. This research aims to examine the possibility of implementing International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board’s (IPSASB’s) Conceptual Framework (CF), by observing accounting and reporting systems in the different governmental levels of countries selected and taking into account the embedded traditional characteristics of European countries. Results highlight how many structural differences still occur within and among countries, showing that much work is still necessary to obtain harmonization as implied in the IPSASB’s CF.