Is the public getting a good deal when the government contracts out the delivery of goods and services? Phillip Cooper attempts to get at the heart of this question by exploring what happens when public sector organizations-at the federal, state and local levels-form working relationships with other agencies, communities, non-profit organizations and private firms through contracts. Rather than focus on the ongoing debate over privatization, the book emphasizes the tools managers need to form, operate, terminate or transform these contracts amidst a complex web of intergovernmental relations. Cooper frames the issues of public contract management by showing how managers are caught in between governance by authority and government by contract. By looking at cases ranging from the management of Baltimore schools to the contracting of senior citizen programs in Kansas, he offers practical information to students and practitioners and a theoretical context for their work. At every turn, the author avoids bogging readers down in technical jargon. Instead the book sheds light on a crucial part of any public manager's job with lively case material and no-nonsense guidance for making the most of taxpayer dollars.

An innovative contribution to political theory, "State Work" examines the labor of government workers in North America. Arguing that this work needs to be theorized precisely because it is vital to the creation and persistence of the state, Stefano Harney draws on thinking from public administration and organizational sociology, as well as poststructuralist theory and performance studies, to launch a cultural studies of the state. Countering conceptions of the government and its employees as remote and inflexible, Harney uses the theory of mass intellectuality developed by Italian worker-theorists to illuminate the potential for genuine political progress inherent within state work.
"State Work" begins with an ethnographic account of Harney's work as a midlevel manager within an Ontario government initiative charged with leading the province's efforts to combat racism. Through readings of material such as "The X-Files" and "Law & Order," Harney then reviews how popular images of the state and government labor are formed within American culture and how these ideas shape everyday life. He highlights the mutually dependent roles played in state work by the citizenry and civil servants. Using as case studies Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government and a community-policing project in New York City, Harney also critiques public management literature and performance measurement theories. He concludes his study with a look at the motivations of state workers.

The Third Edition of this successful textbook introduces students to the major concepts, models, and approaches surrounding the public sector. Now fully updated to include coverage of the New Public Management (NPM), The Pubic Sector is the most comprehensive textbook on theories of public policy and public administration. The public sector is introduced within a three-part framework: public resource allocation, redistribution and regulation. Jan-Erik Lane explains the basic concepts of each of these broad areas, and goes on to examine their consequences for various approaches to the making and implementation of public policy. The book explores models of management, effectiveness and efficiency, and evaluates the contribution, among many, of public choice and neo-institutionalist approaches, organizational theory, models of normative policy-making and, expanded in this edition, the theory of fiscal federalism. The new edition retains chapters on public sector reform and continues to contrast the logic of the new management state with that of the old administrative state before introducing the basic ideas of New Public Management. The Public Sector will be essential reading to all students seeking a deeper understanding of the modern state and government across political science and public policy, administration and management. Academics, and students studying government across political science and public policy, administration and management.

In Timing Successful Policy Change, Anna Marie Schuh examines four periods of civil service reform, especially their relation to legislative and administrative responses. An elucidation of the key role of the bureaucracy, the book focuses on the tensions between branches of government that drive policy-making. Schuh chooses to appropriate and expand upon John Kingdon's highly regarded political analysis, providing readers with a model that promises to guide public policy analysis far into the future.

The influence of male gender cultures on men, women, and institutions is tacitly accepted, but its effect on women in senior management positions and their creativity is little acknowledged. In a climate of corporate change in which traditional institutions, hierarchies, and working practices face pressure to adapt, the role of the innovator and the new manger from outside established hierarchies can become an important catalyst. Based on research into the public sector, Challenging Women offers a radical reassessment of organizational forces for change, the barriers encountered, and the role of "challenging women": senior women managers who are faced with the task of transforming their organizations. The implications of the study go far beyond the public sector to embrace the experience of women managers in organizations everywhere. Much has been written about women at work, the "glass ceiling", and discriminatory employment practices. This study is seminal in the linkage it makes between gender, innovation, and organizational transformation. Challenging Women provides new evidence for understanding and analyzing organizational change in the context of the gender culture at work. Policymakers, as well as students of organizational behavior and management, public sector reform, and gender studies, will find this essential reading.

Widespread sexual harassment in the public sector makes implementing sexual harassment policy a decidedly necessary task. In this book, the authors focus on the implementation of policy in public sector organizations using an analysis of case studies and survey data. The authors identify four major challenges to implementing sexual harassment policies and examine each starting with a description and concluding with specific recommendations for overcoming the challenges in policy making.

This book presents a detailed analysis of the new management of public services at the local level, drawing on the work of the ESRC Local Governance Programme. The radical transformation of public service delivery is assessed in terms of its overall impact as well as its operation in particular service areas. Efficiency has improved and services have gained a user focus yet the new management appears to be full of contradictions and distortions, in many respects creating as many problems as it solves.

Planners hate uncertainty. The objective of their work is to devise a course of action that will reduce uncertainty on a public scale. However, complicated intergovernmental systems often make their work complex and difficult. The planning profession is founded in quandries: How can we know the future? What is the public interest? How can we know which values are right? What is the relationship between means and ends? This book addresses the mismatch between the assumptions of planning and the actual operations of the intergovernmental system Basing her work not only on empirical research but on years of personal experience in complex governmental agencies (specifically HUD), Karen Stromme Christensen presents a new theory of the underlying structure and dynamics of the U.S. intergovernmental system. It is designed to help planners and policy makers clarify the obstacles to effective action on behalf of the public good. Moreover, it suggests ways to preserve and restore the strengths of federalism and to adjust aspects that have become counterproductive.

Examining public service from the perspective of the worker, this book provides a new framework for understanding the roles and responsibilities of front-line public servants and assessing the appropriateness of their actions. Public employees who work at street level face some of the most intractable, pervasive, and complex problems in contemporary society. Drawing on more than 1500 hours of observation of police officers and social service workers in four states, this book explores the types of situations they confront, the factors they consider, and the hard choices they make. Presenting numerous cases of how these individuals acted in various situations, the authors show how public servants translate the expectations of administrators and others into legitimate street-level action. Vinzant and Crothers propose the concept of leadership as a positive and realistic framework for understanding what these public servants do and how they can successfully meet the daily challenges of their very difficult and complex jobs. They show how changing the theory and language we use to describe street-level work can encourage decisions that are responsive both to the needs of the clients being served and to the broader community's need for accountability. They also examine how street-level leadership can change the way agencies recruit, train, and manage these employees and how society defines their role in governance. This book offers valuable insights for those working in or studying public administration, policy analysis, criminal justice, and social work.

Organizational Diagnosis and Assessment presents sharp-image diagnosis, a distinctive approach to organizational consultation and planned change, that reflects current research and theorizing about organizational change and effectiveness. The authors draw on multiple analytical frames to produce empirically grounded models of sources of ineffectiveness and forces for change, showing how consultants, managers, and applied researchers can break free of unproductive practices and ways of thinking to avoid uncritical adoption of management fads. They offer workable solutions to critical problems and demonstrate ways to meet organizational challenges like market downturns, technological change, and alliances with other organizations. Organizational Diagnosis and Assessment covers diagnosis and assessment of work groups, organizations, and whole systems. This volume develops analytical approaches for problem solving and strategy formation in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Diagnosis of public policy issues, like assessments of the effectiveness of health systems, is also addressed. Many of the models and techniques contribute to assessing the changing nature of the workplace, examining organizational decline and other life-cycle transitions; gendering; change and diversity in organizational culture and in workforce composition; the spread of new forms of work organization, including teams, flat hierarchies, and networks; new uses of information technology; and mergers and alliances among organizations.

Organizational Diagnosis and Assessment will be invaluable to advanced students, consultants, and applied behavioral scientists in social sciences, management, social work, organizational and industrial psychology, organizational sociology, nursing, and public administration.

Deregulation, privatization and marketization have become the bywords for the reforms and debates surrounding the public sector. This major book is unique in its comparative analysis of the reform experience in Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Leading experts identify a number of key factors to systematically explain the similarities and differences, map common problems and together reflect on the future shape of the public sector, exploring significant themes in a lively and accessible way.

Unmasking Administrative Evil discusses the overlooked relationship between evil and public administration, as well as other fields and professions in public life. The authors argue that the tendency toward administrative evil, as manifested in acts of dehumanization and genocide, is deeply woven into the identity of public administration, as well as other fields and professions in public life. The common characteristic of administrative evil is that ordinary people within their normal professional and administrative roles can engage in acts of evil without being aware that they are doing anything wrong. Under conditions of moral inversion, people may even view their evil activity as good. In an age when "bureaucrat bashing" is fashionable, this book seeks to move beyond such superficial critiques and lay the groundwork for a more ethical and democratic public life, one that recognizes its potential for evil and thereby creates greater possibilities for avoiding the hidden pathways that lead to state-sponsored dehumanization and destruction.

Although social scientists generally do not discuss "evil" in an academic setting, there is no denying that it has existed in public administration throughout history. Hundreds of millions of human beings have died as a direct or indirect consequence of state-sponsored violence. This book argues that administrative evil, or destructiveness, is part of the identity of all modern public administration (as it is part of psychoanalytic study at the individual level). Furthermore, evil has been largely suppressed or ignored despite, or perhaps because of, its profound and far-reaching implications for the field. From the Holocaust to the "white lie," evil exists on a continuum, and the way along that continuum begins on the proverbial "slippery slope." We prefer to think of horrible eruptions of evil, such as Adolf Hitler, as occurring at a particular historical moment and within specific extraordinary cultural contexts. Yet, we have a long history in the United States of public lynchings, syphilis/radiation/LSD experiments within our military, and police brutality in our cities while public administrators have looked on, even participated. The Holocaust was such a massive administrative undertaking, we must consider whether modern public administration may be at its most effective and efficient when it is engaged in programs of dehumanization and destruction.

Constructing a positive future for public administration requires a willingness to deal with the disturbing aspects of the field?s history, identity, and practices. Rather than viewing events such as genocide as isolated or aberrant historical events, the authors show how the forces that unleashed such events are part of modernity and are thus present in all contemporary public organizations. This book is not an exercise in bureaucrat-bashing. It goes beyond superficial critique of public affairs and lays the groundwork for building a more effective and humane profession.

Examining how public and nonprofit managers improve productivity in their organizations, Evan M. Berman lays out a wide range of tools and strategies to promote employee motivation, client orientation, cost-effective service delivery, effective partnering, harmonious workplace relations, and the use of information technology. Productivity in Public and Nonprofit Organizations presents a positive view of the possibility of improvement through many hands-on examples of change. It offers specific advice on overcoming vital challenges that managers often encounter when they seek to improve their organizations and units. In a clear and effective writing style, Berman argues that managers must combine technology and analysis with psychology and foresight in human relations. This book further includes survey data about the use of productivity improvement strategies in a wide range of public and nonprofit organizations.

Productivity in Public and Nonprofit Organizations will be of great interest to professionals and students in the fields of public administration, management, and organization studies.

In recent years, American attitudes about government have become increasingly disaffected and critical. After the 1995 bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City, a newspaper ad sponsored by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees brought to the nation?s attention the heroism of government workers? rescue efforts, with the reminder that "This is our government."

This volume, the result of collaboration by practicing administrators and academics, explores the current anti-government climate and its effect on the work and working lives of public employees and their relationships with citizens. If offers economic, political, historical, and philosophical perspectives on citizen discontent and tells stories of actual working relationships between public agencies and citizens. The collaborators maintain that while government workers cannot control the economy or the bureaucracy as a whole, they can take practical steps to improve their interactions with citizens.

While many books advise citizens how to get what they want from government, few have been written to help career civil servants work better with citizens. In a time of public negativism, Government Is Us is about building relationships, listening, making connections, and hope.

What are the political forces which drive the process of change in the health service? How do these forces impact on existing structures of power, policy and organisation? In addressing these questions, Brian Salter applies an original theory of political change to key areas of NHS activity. He shows how the escalating demand for health care combined with recent radical policy initiatives has posed different problems for politicians, doctors, bureaucrats and managers. Out of the accommodations reached, a new shape has emerged for the NHS.

Although the concept of policy networks is now well-established in the field, most research has to content itself with description and analysis of their contribution to policy failure. This book goes further. It accepts policy networks as a fundamental characteristic of modern societies and presents an overview of the strategies for the management of these networks, as well as illustrating the various strategies for intervention.

Interorganizational collaboration is not an easy process to implement successfully, yet it is becoming a significant means of achieving organizational objectives in turbulent environments. Creating Collaborative Advantage draws on the work of authors with a high level of relevant experience, providing a thought-provoking and highly accessible introduction to this new concept. The book begins by developing a framework of key dimensions for understanding collaboration. It highlights the differing rationales and contexts involved and the range of elements that need to be explored before embarking on collaborative endeavors. Next, the volume focuses on collaboration in practice. It examines the problems that can occur when different aims, cultures, procedures, power resources, and professional languages cross organizational boundaries, paying close attention to the importance of creating and sustaining value for the participants in these contexts. Finally, the book addresses the processes of acting as facilitator to collaborative groups, discussing how and why a third-party facilitator role can be helpful, and exploring the various processes and techniques that can be used. Creating Collaborative Advantage is invaluable reading for students and professionals in strategic management, public sector management, management science and operations research, and general management.

This original analysis of the creation of new state forms critically examines the political forces that enabled `more and better management' to be presented as a solution to the problems of the welfare state in Britain. Examining the micro-politics within public service, the authors draw links between politics, policies and organizational power to present an incisive and dynamic account of the restructuring of social welfare. Clarke and Newman expose the tensions and contradictions in the managerial state and trace the emergence of new dilemmas in the provision of public services. They show that these problems are connected to the recurring difficulties in defining `the public' that receives these services. In particular they question whether the reinvention of the public as either a nation of consumers or a nation of communities can effectively address the implications of social diversity.

The American political system is undergoing a serious governmental crisis--our political leaders know only how to campaign, not how to gain consensus on goals or direct a course that is for the good of the nation. Continuing research that began over a decade ago with Gary L. Wamsley's Refounding Public Administration, this informative new volume continues the argument that public administration is at the center of the governance process and is therefore forced to compensate for the growing inadequacy of our leaders. Refounding Democratic Public Administration offers a revisualization of the relationship between public servants and the citizens they serve, as well as a continuing discourse on how public administration can constructively balance forces of change and stability in order for democracy to evolve and mature. This eye-opening volume will be required reading for students and professionals in public administration, political science, and management/organization studies.

This innovative text offers an assessment of the role of management in the restructuring of social welfare in contemporary Britain.

In the transformation of the welfare state since the 1970s, management has been accorded a central role. New forms and ideas of management have had profound consequences for: the organization and delivery of public services; the political processes of policy formation; systems of accountability; and the experiences both of the recipients of services and of those working within public sector organizations.

Examining the significance of managerialism, this book offers a unique insight into the current shaping of social welfare.

This innovative text offers an assessment of the role of management in the restructuring of social welfare in contemporary Britain.

In the transformation of the welfare state since the 1970s, management has been accorded a central role. New forms and ideas of management have had profound consequences for: the organization and delivery of public services; the political processes of policy formation; systems of accountability; and the experiences both of the recipients of services and of those working within public sector organizations.

Examining the significance of managerialism, this book offers a unique insight into the current shaping of social welfare.

Now in paperback in an Enlarged Edition, this volume explores the lessons of one of the most comprehensive attempts to improve public management.

Metcalfe and Richards describe and assess Thatcher's Efficiency Strategy as an exercise in improving public management. They explain how the strategy has gone about improving administrative performance by increasing cost-consciousness in the use of resources and creating flexibility for managing change. They analyze major themes such as: decentralization, information systems and budgets as management tools, organization design, and the management of interdepartmental relations.

Local governments in the United States are important in providing an almost endless variety of services that immediately affect our lives. And, in recent years local governments and administrators are becoming increasingly important as they try to deal effectively with drugs, AIDS, homelessness, gangs, economic decline, or even economic development. A well written examination, this important volume provides a descriptive analysis of how public administrators manage municipal government. Managing Local Government explores conceptual and empirical dimensions of public administration including the legal aspects of public management; human resource management; budgeting and public finance; the political dimension; intergovernmental relations; and ethical considerations. Within this context, the authors take up such pressing and practical issues as economic development, housing, culture and recreation, public safety, transportation, and waste disposal. Professionals and students of public administration, urban studies, policy studies, and political science will find this volume essential reading. " The American text, Managing Local Government: Public Administration in Practice is another example in the large collections of readings, modestly priced, and . . . covering key policy and administration issues. . . . The bringing together of these studies, mostly written by practitioners, is a long overdue and worthy contribution to the literature. The insights contained here could hitherto only be gleaned from professional journals. In teaching a course on municipal administration I found this book to contain important practical and theoretical insights. I can only hope that someone will be stimulated to draw together similar insights from the Canadian background." --Trevor Price, University of Windsor

Managing Public Organizations presents the case for the development of public management and indicates the directions it should take. It reviews the progress of new management initiatives in the European public sphere; examines the role of the public manager and the organization of public bodies; and considers the potential for change.

The contributors reject the notion that there are formulas for management innovation or that general rules from private sector management can be applied. They emphasize the need to develop a concept of management that is appropriate for public organizations.