How can management make a meaningful contribution to the performance of public services? Around the world, public organizations face increasingly complex social issues related to globalization, migration, health crises, national security, and climate change. To meet these challenges, we need a better understanding of what managing for public service performance means, and what it requires from public managers and public servants. This book takes a multidisciplinary, critical, and context-sensitive approach to address such questions. Through a comparative review of public administration research, it examines a variety of management aspects such as leadership behavior, human resource management, performance, diversity, and change management. It also critically reflects on how the context of the public sector affects the management-performance relationship in democratic societies, as well as the influence of numerous stakeholders and their beliefs about the nature and purpose of public service. By clarifying conceptual issues and taking a theoretical and evidence-based approach to the relationships between management and performance, this book offers new directions for research and a framework to help improve public services in practice.

The 'Little Heresies' seminars - this is the second published collection of the talks given at them - provide an important public platform to debate the future of public services. Now more than ever it seems vital to challenge the 'received wisdom', 'zombie thinking' and old, tired and outdated habits and practices that continue to infest important aspects of our public services. For, as the authors demonstrate, what appear to be well-intentioned policies not only create perverse incentives but frequently cause lasting damage to the social fabric. Private sector management methods, underpinned by neoliberal thinking, were introduced into UK public services by Margaret Thatcher. Many other countries have adopted the same approach. And successive governments continue to be duped into believing, against plenty of evidence to the contrary, that New Public Management, as it is now called, works. It doesn't. In this second publication from the Little Heresies series, nine heretics, all leading thinkers and practitioners in their professional fields, explain the disastrous effects of wrong thinking and ineffective practice in areas like standardisation, professionalisation and measurement in public services, socalled evidence-based policy-making, money creation and, looking more widely, in the troubled waters of philanthropy and the third/charitable sector.

Innovation is a necessity in a changing world. But what kind of innovation? 'Sustaining innovation' props up and temporarily fixes structures and processes that are failing - making them cheaper, faster, safer, more efficient. 'Disruptive innovation' shakes things up. Typically however disruptive initiatives offer only short-term impact or are eventually adapted and 'mainstreamed' to help sustain existing systems. That is particularly true in the public, social, cultural and civic sectors where the natural patterns of renewal that have been developed in market settings (creative destruction, sophisticated financial support etc.) are generally absent. Only 'transformative innovation' can deliver a fundamental shift towards new patterns of viability in tune with our aspirations for the future. This book offers a first stand-alone practical guide to how to realise transformative potential at scale. It offers six elements for policymakers, funders and innovators: Knowing: how to expand our sense of what constitutes valid knowledge to become more comfortable with complexity Imagining: how to conceive, develop and design transformative initiatives to carry a group's longer term aspirations Being: how to organise for action, manage the process, and sustain the people involved over time Doing: how to introduce the new in the presence of the old, enrol others and figure out what to do when you don't know what to do Enabling: how to construct a policy framework for long term transition and provide smart financing to match Supporting: how to develop systems and structures to support a culture of renewal in our public, social and civic systems. It concludes with an invitation to join a growing community of transformative innovators around the world - a network of hope in powerful times.