Public service provision is one of the most important issues debated in the UK today and is likely to continue. This essential text identifies major financial and organisation management issues confronting the public services and explains how they can be addressed in practical terms. Written in an accessible manner by a team of experts, this is a book for new and existing managers, students and lecturers in the public service. The aim of this book is to identify major finance and organisational management issues confronting the public services and to explain how they can be addressed in practical terms by managers of those services. Details of the impact of recent political developments are looked at as well as cultural change, crisis, and quality management. Developments in the NHS, central and local government are also covered.

Throughout the 1990s public demand for a fundamental shift in the relationship between government and its citizens has intensified. In response, a "new governance" model has emerged, emphasizing decreased federal control in favor of intergovernmental collaboration and increased involvement of state, local, and private agencies.

As the authors of this volume show, one of the best examples of "new governance" can be found in the National and State Rural Development Councils (NRDC and SRDC), created in 1990 as the result of President Bush's Rural Development Initiative and now called the Rural Development Partnership. This effort was part of a move within policymaking circles to redefine a rural America that was no longer synonymous with family farming and that required innovative new solutions for economic revival. By 1994 twenty-nine states had created and ten other states were in the process of forming such councils.

In this first detailed analysis of the NRDC and SRDCs, the authors examine the successes and failures of the original eight councils in Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington; as well as eight other councils subsequently created in Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, Vermont, New York, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

Combining empirical analysis with current theories about networks and inter-organizational relations, this volume should appeal to academics and practitioners interested in rural development policy, public administration, public policy and management, and intergovernmental relations.

" Case Studies in Public Services Management examines key issues such as managing networks, measuring performance, changing culture, implementing strategy and strategic change. In addressing the key contemporary issues in public services management the cases cover a range of functions including education, health, community care, welfare benefits and policing.

The book closes the gap between politicians' rhetoric, public expectations and the day-to-day dilemmas facing managers wanting to improve the quality of public services. It offers a mixture of conceptual clarification and practical awareness of the environment in which public service managers have to work. This is no 'missionary' or 'how to' book that peddles instant solutions. Instead, a variety of approaches to quality definition, implementation and measurement are critically examined. Lessons and experience from practice and research in the public and private sectors give a solid background for readers to develop their own views. Lucy Gaster disentangles the important aspects of quality, challenges assumptions, and shows that there are no simple solutions. At the same time she provides a framework to enable public service managers to develop and integrate ideas about quality in ways which are relevant to their own day-to-day practice. This framework shows that real choices are available to managers. Values and participation, combined with a real commitment to the ideal of 'public service', are at the heart of the approach adopted in this book. It will appeal to all those wanting a more objective and informed approach to providing quality services.

Puts forward a theoretical framework for understanding consumerism in health care and its relation to professionalism. This book explains why consumers and professionals may intuitively perceive some standards as lower or higher than others and goes on to discuss many examples of professional good and bad practice.

Policing, environmental protection, and tax administration have much more in common than practitioners in these areas often recognize. Their cultures and traditions have, for the past few decades, incorporated a classic enforcement mentality, based on the underlying assumption that a ruthless and efficient investigative and enforcement capability would produce compliance through the mechanisms of deterrence. In these fields, and perhaps in many other enforcement or compliance oriented professions, Sparrow believes the traditional enforcement approach is under stress. There are too many violators, too many laws to be enforced, and not enough resources to get the job done.

In this book, Sparrow draws out remarkable parallels in the ways these professions are adapting to meet their current challenges, as they reject their traditional reliance on retrospective, case-by-case, after-the-fact enforcement. Rather than perpetuating their dependence on processes, procedures, and coverage, these professions are each developing new capacities for analyzing important patterns of noncompliance, prioritizing risks, and designing intelligent interventions using a much broader range of tools. Sparrow extracts the essence of the transformations underway, explores the critical implications for information management, and lays out the issues that need resolution before the emerging compliance strategies can reach maturity. This book is required reading for all those concerned with either the theory or the practice of the compliance side of government.

This work suggests that the 1980s were an especially tumultuous decade for the bureaucracies of Great Britain, the United States and Canada. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney came to office convinced that the bureaucracies of their countries were massively flawed: in addition to exerting too much influence over policy, they were inefficient, resistant to change and responsible for many economic woes. Savoie, a writer, scholar and a senior administrator in the Canadian government, considers the war of reform waged by the leaders of these major industrialised countries. Reagan declared that he had come to Washington "to drain the swamp" of bureaucracy; he set up the Grace Commission to investigate the operation of the US government. Thatcher and Mulroney were equally committed to reform and initiated wide-ranging changes. By the end of the decade, the changes were dramatic. Many government operations had been privatised in all three countries, and new management techniques had been introduced. In Great Britain, one observer judged that the changes were historically as important as the collapse of Keynesian economics. This book asks: is government now better in these three countries, and was the political leadership right in focusing on management of the bureaucracy as the villain? Professor Savoie suggests that the reforms overlooked problems now urgently requiring attention and, at the same time, attempted to address non-existent problems. His viewpoint combines theory and practice, and should appeal to scholars, students and practitioners. His research is based, in part, on interviews with 62 officials, almost all in the executive branch, of the governments of Great Britain, the United States and Canada.

For 20 years, British governments of both the left and right have tried to improve the management of the NHS. But the distinctive contribution of the Thatcher governments of the 1980s has defined this very much in terms of controlling health professionals: doctors, nurses and others. This volume offers an explanation of why this approach was adopted. It examines in detail the various methods of control employed and assesses the consequences for the future of professional work and organization in the NHS. The book should be interest to a wide range of health professionals including doctors, nurses, health authority members and managers and should also be useful for students of social policy and health studies.

The " Handbook of Public Services Management brings together twenty leading contributors to cover all the key issues affecting public services management. It is organized in a practical way to help students and professionals approach strategic issues.

Sir Henry Taylor's classic treatise "The Statesman," originally published in 1836, is the first modern book to be devoted to the subject of public administration. It has been read and studied by generations for its keen insights into the relationship between public administrators and elected officials in a democracy. It has also been appreciated for its wit. The present volume is the first twentieth-century edition to be based on the revised and expanded text that Taylor published in 1878 as part of his Collected Works. It is also the first edition to be fully annotated.

The lengthy editors' introduction to this volume emphasizes the relevance of Taylor's thought to the fundamental issues of public administration in the contemporary United States. The editors demonstrate the superiority of Taylor's understanding of the relationship between politics and administration to the widely accepted model of that relation that derives from the thought of Woodrow Wilson. Above all, they argue, Taylor's insights merit our attention because they indicate how a properly organized civil service can be a locus of statesmanship in a democracy, fulfilling the intentions of the authors of the American Constitution in a contemporary context that differs significantly from what the Founders themselves anticipated.

This text is a must for all aspiring or serving policy supervisors. It sincerely deals with a problem that has perplexed police union representatives and could go a long way toward easing labor/management confrontations regarding marginal police performance. "Robert B. Kliesmet, General President, International Union of Police Associations, AFL-CIO"

"Burnout in Blue: Managing The Marginal Police Performer" is an important contribution to professional law enforcement. Today, as never before, the volume of crime and the limited resources allocated to provide police services places tremendous demands on our law enforcemtn agecies. This already difficult situation is compounded further by police employees who perform at a marginal level, thus diminishing the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. The information provided in this book is well researched, insightful, and practical in terms of its application to productive and successful police operations. It is must reading' for every police supervisor and manager. "Jerald R. Vaugh, Executive Director, International Association of Chiefs of Police"

"Burnout in Blue" confronts the problem of poor police performance and shows police supervisors how to identify and deal effectively with marginal, unresponsive subordinates. Few if any books in the field offer such concrete, practical guidelines for improved police performance.

Disputes over government policies rage in a number of areas. From taxation to climate change, from public finance to risk regulation, and from health care to infrastructure planning, advocates debate how policies affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being, how these effects balance against each other, and how trade-offs between overall well-being and inequality should be resolved. How to measure and balance well-being gains and losses, is a vexed issue. Matthew D. Adler advances the debate by introducing the social welfare function (SWF) framework and demonstrating how it can be used as a powerful tool for evaluating governmental policies. The framework originates in welfare economics and in philosophical scholarship regarding individual well-being, ethics, and distributive justice. It has three core components: a well-being measure, which translates each of the possible policy outcomes into an array of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, quantifying how well off each person in the population would be in that outcome; a rule for ranking outcomes thus described ; and an uncertainty module, which orders policies understood as probability distributions over outcomes. The SWF framework is a significant improvement compared to cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which quantifies policy impacts in dollars, is thereby biased towards the rich, and is insensitive to the distribution of these monetized impacts. The SWF framework, by contrast, uses an unbiased measure of well-being and allows the policymaker to consider both efficiency (total well-being) and equity (the distribution of well-being). Because the SWF framework is a fully generic methodology for policy assessment, Adler also discusses how it can be implemented to inform government policies. He illustrates it through a detailed case study of risk regulation, contrasting the implication of results of SWF and CBA. This book provides an accessible, yet rigorous overview of the SWF approach that can inform policy-makers and students.

Taking the dichotomy of nonprofit "high culture" and for-profit "popular culture" into consideration, this volume assesses the relationship between social purpose in the arts and industrial organization. DiMaggio brings together some of the best works in several disciplines that focus on the significance of the nonprofit form for our cultural industries, the ways in which nonprofit arts organizations are financed, and the constraints that patterns of funding place on the missions that artists and trustees may wish to pursue. Showing how the production and distribution of art are organized in the United States, the book delineates the differing roles of nonprofit organizations, proprietary firms, and government agencies. In doing so, it brings to the surface some of the special tensions that beset arts management and policy, the way the arts are changing or are likely to change, and the policy alternatives "high culture" faces.

Grounded in solid research, " Social Media in the Public Sector" explores the myriad uses of social media in the public sector and combines existing practices with theories of public administration, networked governance, and information management. Comprehensive in scope, the book includes best practices, the strategic, managerial, administrative, and procedural aspects of using social media, and explains the theoretical dimensions of how social behavior affects the adoption of social media technologies.

Praise for "Social Media in the Public Sector"

"Mergel has produced a foundational work that combines the best kind of scholarship with shoe-leather reporting and anthropology that highlights the debates that government agencies are struggling to resolve and the fruits of their efforts as they embrace the social media revolution. "Social Media in the Public Sector" is a first and sets a high standard against which subsequent analysis will be measured."

--Lee Rainie, director, Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

"Mergel is an award-winning author who again wields her story skills in this book. She excels in explaining in concrete, practical terms how government managers can use social media to serve the public. Her book puts years of research into one handy guide. It's practical. It's readable. And it's an essential read."

--John M. Kamensky, senior fellow, IBM Center for The Business of Government

"Mergel moves beyond the hype with detailed, comprehensive research on social media technologies, use, management, and policies in government. This book should be required reading for researchers and public managers alike."

--Jane Fountain, professor and director, National Center for Digital Government, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"Comprehensive and compelling, "Social Media in the Public Sector" makes the case that to achieve Government 2.0, agencies must first adopt Web 2.0 social technologies. Mergel explains both how and why in this contemporary study of traditional institutions adopting and adapting to new technologies."

--Beth Simone Noveck, United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer (2009-2011)

Examining the political and economic forces that have shaped the civil service system from the Pendleton Act of 1883 through today, the authors explain why, despite efforts to overhaul the federal bureaucracy (most recently by Vice President Al Gore), significant change remains a formidable challenge. Although politicians criticize the unwieldiness of the bureaucracy, this volume shows how they have been largely responsible for its design. The authors examine the development of federal employee interest groups and their negotiations with the president and Congress over hiring policies, salaries and conditions for terminating employment. Using transaction cost analysis and public choice theory, this book aims to provide a new understanding of the growth of the federal bureaucracy and the political and economic obstacles to reforming it.

In 2016, the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) were signed into being, marking a new phase of global development thinking focused on ecologically, socially and fiscally sustainable human settlements. Few countries offer a better testing ground for their attainment than post-apartheid South Africa. Since the coming to power of the African National Congress, the country has undergone a policy-making revolution, driven by an urgent need to improve access to services for the country's black majority. More than 20 years on from the fall of apartheid, Building a Capable State asks what lessons can be learned from the South African experience. This comprehensive examination of urban service delivery in the global South assesses whether the South African government has succeeded in improving service delivery, focusing on the vital sectors of water and sanitation, energy, roads and public transport. Emphasising the often-overlooked role of local government institutions, the book demonstrates that effective service delivery can have a profound effect on the social structure of emerging economies, and must form an integral part of any future development strategy.

This accessible study examines all the major elements of the nonprofit sector of the economy of the United States --health services, educational and research institutions, religious organizations, social services, arts and cultural organizations, and foundations--describing the institutions and their functions, and then exploring how their benefits are distributed across various economic classes. The book's findings indicate that while few institutions serve "primarily" the poor, there is no evidence of a gross distribution of benefits upward toward the more affluent. The analysis of this data makes for a book with profound implications for future social and tax policy.

Public management literature has often debated the usefulness of transactional leadership. Some scholars are concerned that transactional leadership strategies will harm public employees' perceived competence (ie: their self-efficacy), but in fact there are also arguments for the opposite result - that feelings of competence are strengthened by conditional rewards, because they provide feedback about performance. This study explores how 91 high school principals' reported use of rewards and sanctions affect perceived professional competence among their 1,921 teachers. The results show that the use of rewards strengthens self-efficacy, and that the use of sanctions does not seem to have negative effects. Furthermore, the teachers' self-efficacy can be linked positively to organisational performance. This suggests that rewards can be an important tool for managers in the public sector.

Capitalism in Europe is transformed as a result of liberalisation, privatisation and regulatory reform. Unravelling the state as service provider and employer has posed significant social policy challenges to the emerging regulatory state. The book examines how these challenges have been addressed in different varieties of capitalism and across sectors. It compares change in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, takes stock of the reform movement in Europe and internationally, and discusses policy approaches in telecoms and electricity. It pays special attention to falling mail volumes as a driver of change and a new wave of privatisation triggered by the European sovereign debt crisis. The analysis reveals whether and how social policy goals have been addressed by means of regulation and redistribution. The book explains why liberal market economies have been postal reform latecomers and why the regulatory state benefits consumers, but is likely to leave employees' interests behind. -- .

Since the third edition of this authoritative volume, most of Western Europe and North America have entered an era of austerity which has pervasive effects on programmes of public management reform. Even in Australasia extensive measures of fiscal restraint have been implemented. In this fourth edition the basic structure of the book has been retained but there has been a line-by-line rewriting, including the addition of extensive analyses and information about the impacts of austerity. Many new sources are cited and there is a new exploration of the interactions between austerity and the major paradigms of reform - NPM, the Neo-Weberian State and New Public Governance. The existing strengths of the previous editions have been retained while vital new material on developments since the Global Economic Crisis has been added. This remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, widely-cited academic text on public management reform in Europe, North America and Australasia.

The seventh edition of the bestselling Public Sector Management is a rich and insightful description, analysis and critique of the management of the public sector by the UK government. NEW to the seventh edition: Now set in an international context with comparative global examples throughout Three new chapters covering: strategy and planning in the public sector; transparency, accountability and ethics; and non-profit management, including the role of social enterprise and the voluntary sector Examines the impact of the continuing financial crisis on public spending An updated companion website with tutorial videos, free access to full-text journal articles, policy documents, links to useful websites and social media resources Public Sector Management is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying public sector management as part of a business, management or politics degree.