Richard Davis is a founding member of Vanguard Consulting in the UK, and has worked with John Seddon for over 25 years. His was a significant role in developing the Vanguard method, which has allowed for dramatic improvements in public services. In this important book, Richard turns his attention to the important issue of 'responsibility' - on both the government's part and that of the users. While government wrestles with how to cut the cost of services, Davis shows that government can provide responsible, sustainable and effective services significantly more cheaply by focussing on what is of 'value' to individuals and communities. What is of 'value' can only be determined by fully understanding the context in which problems arise and then providing tailored support to get people's lives back on track and as quickly as possible. The emphasis changes from supplying services (chosen in advance by government regardless of actual need) to helping people to look after themselves and take responsibility for their own lives. It's a simple logic. The current system defines problems according to predetermined services and categories and if a person doesn't fit with their definitions (which is often the norm), they remain in trouble. These are many people who never fit into the categories the system has designed and constantly fall between the cracks - so the wider system continues to spend money because the services are ineffective; it racks up costs and failure and rarely solves the problems. But, as Responsibility and Public Services shows, the truth is that it is cheaper to help people directly than to continue providing the same old services. The thinking is that if a little time is taken to understand people in context and to find out what matters to them, the solutions are far easier and cheaper. It is not only cheaper to do this at the time but, because you build in resilience and help people take their own measures, it stays cheaper. The book is a rich compendium of examples of what changes when a responsible approach is taken - examples are drawn from the care sector, prisons, the police force, hospital services, education and many more.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.

How well is the public sector performing? Are citizens being well served? This report compares the performance of nine public services in 36 developed countries (including the 28 EU member states) over the period 1995-2013. The central research question focuses on how the performance of the public sector has developed over time and what relationships can be discerned between that performance and the resources deployed, the output, and the trust placed by citizens in the public sector. The sectors studied include education; health; social safety; housing; public administration; social security; economic affairs and infrastructure; environmental protection; and recreation, culture, and participation.

While serving as an assistant to Vice Pres. George H. W. Bush, Chase Untermeyer concluded that the only way to learn how the US government really works was to leave the silken cocoon of the White House and seek a position in one of the departments or agencies. In March 1983, when offered an appointment as a deputy assistant secretary of the navy, he jumped at the opportunity. After only a year as a "DASN," he was named by Pres. Ronald Reagan as assistant secretary for Manpower & Reserve Affairs, in charge of all personnel issues affecting nearly one million sailors and Marines and a third of a million civilian workers. Inside Reagan's Navy offers an engaging, up-close narrative of Untermeyer's experiences in the Pentagon, interwoven with descriptions of events and people, humorous anecdotes, and telling quotations. As in his earlier book, When Things Went Right: The Dawn of the Reagan-Bush Administration, Inside Reagan's Navy paints a portrait of official Washington during the Reagan years, with its politics, parties, and personalities.

Discover analytical tools and practices to help improve the quality of risk management in government organizations

Federal agencies increasingly recognize the importance of active risk management to help ensure that they can carry out their missions. High impact events, once thought to occur only rarely, now occur with surprising frequency. "Managing Risk in Government Agencies and Programs" provides insight into the increasingly critical role of effective risk management, while offering analytical tools and promising practices that can help improve the quality of risk management in government organizations.Includes chapters that contribute to the knowledge of government executives and managers who want to establish or implement risk management, and especially Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), in their agenciesFeatures chapters written by federal risk managers, public administration practitioners, and scholars

Showing government officials how to improve their organization's risk management capabilities, "Managing Risk in Government Agencies and Programs" meets a growing demand from federal departments and agencies that find themselves increasingly embarrassed by risky events that raise questions about their ability to carry out their missions.

Behind the doom-laden headlines, a quiet revolution is taking place in the public sector. In the police... hospitals... local government... social welfare... costs have been significantly reduced, services have improved and there is a real 'danger' of improving morale. There is now no politician or executive in any branch of local government or any area of the public sector who can say: "It won't work here." The evidence is clear: it does work here, and right across the board. It's four years since John Seddon's first assault on the regime of 'choice', targets, delivery, inspection, incentives, 'free market' reforms and back-office 'economies of scale' that was paralysing UK local authorities. Systems Thinking in the Public Sector explained how it was that so-called 'performance improvement' led to ambulances driving round in circles with ill people on board and benefits claimants having to complete the same form three times. Two years later, in 2010, and in response to calls for evidence that Seddon's Vanguard Method really did offer the kind of dramatic improvements that he claimed for it, a first collection of Case Studies showed Vanguard's Systems Thinking approach at work in (mainly) housing and housing benefits departments. This latest collection of Case Studies spells out the kind of dramatic performance improvements that have been consistently achieved in the NHS, the emergency services and a wide range of local authority departments. It's a handbook for anyone faced with the apparently impossible task of improving service levels and dramatically cutting costs. The Case Studies demonstrate again and again just how much can be achieved in a relatively short time using a Systems Thinking approach - transforming the lives of service users for the better in the process. Part 1 describes the application of the Vanguard Method to eight different systems: *Police forces in the Midlands and Cheshire, *the Fire and Rescue Service in Staffordshire, *Development Control at Rugby Borough Council, *Food Safety in Great Yarmouth, *Legal and Social Welfare Problems (Advice UK), *Health and Social Care (NHS Somerset), the care of Stroke patients at Plymouth Hospital. Part 2 has three topical briefings on the vexed question of 'demand' and why it is that increasing resources to meet increasing demand is so often the wrong answer.

In many ways the public sector and the private sector share concerns about how best to manage their employment functions: recruitment, evaluation, incentives, discipline, retention, compensation. There are also substantial differences between the two sectors. Not surprisingly, a period such as the Great Recession and its aftermath highlights those differences. Some state and local governments that had engaged in precarious fiscal practices were thrust into public attention as their tax revenues receded. But that is not the whole story. The reasons public sector workers and human resource practices are under scrutiny go beyond the impact of a recession putting the spotlight on already-strained budgets.

Public Jobs and Political Agendas spotlights the important public/private differences that account for the special attention visited upon the public sector starting with the Great Recession. The first of these differences was the timing of the response to the recession and its aftermath on revenues. The second difference involves employee compensation and the contrasts between public and private practices in that area. Intertwined with these two factors is the role of politics: social welfare programs have been targeted in recent years, with repercussions for even the most efficient state and local government agencies and their employees.

Contributors: Keith A. Bender, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee; Ilana Boivie, National Institute on Retirement Security; Ellen Dannin, Pennsylvania State University; Gloria Davis-Cooper, University of West Indies; Sabina Dewan, Center for American Progress; John S. Heywood, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee; David Lewin, UCLA Anderson School of Management; Daniel J.B. Mitchell, UCLA Anderson School of Management and the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs; Charlene M. L. Roach, The University of The West Indies; William M. Rodgers III, Rutgers University; Mildred E. Warner, Cornell University; Christian Weller, University of Massachusetts Boston and Center for American Progress"

Patronage systems in the public service are universally reviled as undemocratic and corrupt. Yet patronage was the prevailing method of staffing government for centuries, and in some countries it still is. In Jobs for the Boys, Merilee Grindle considers why patronage has been so ubiquitous in history and explores the political processes through which it is replaced by merit-based civil service systems. Such reforms are consistently resisted, she finds, because patronage systems, though capricious, offer political executives flexibility to achieve a wide variety of objectives. Grindle looks at the histories of public sector reform in six developed countries and compares them with contemporary struggles for reform in four Latin American countries. A historical, case-based approach allows her to take into account contextual differences between countries as well as to identify cycles that govern reform across the board. As a rule, she finds, transition to merit-based systems involves years and sometimes decades of conflict and compromise with supporters of patronage, as new systems of public service are politically constructed. Becoming aware of the limitations of public sector reform, Grindle hopes, will temper expectations for institutional change now being undertaken.

B. Curtis Eaton is one of Canada's leading microeconomists. As an applied economic theorist, Eaton has contributed greatly to industrial organization literature and has also worked in labour economics, economic geography, and organizational theory. The essays in this volume, by former students and present and former colleagues, call attention to the path-breaking work of Professor Eaton.

The first two chapters provide a short overview of Eaton's research contributions and argue that his work laid the foundation for important research programs across the country. The remaining chapters, including an unpublished paper by Eaton himself, consist of original work that can be divided into the three broad categories of industrial organization and spatial competition, trade and productivity, and social interaction. Not only a collection of laudatory essays, Industrial Organization, Trade, and Social Interaction presents cutting edge research by leading scholars.

Collaborative public management is a concept that describes the process of government and the private sector working together in multi-organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved (or easily solved) by single government organizations. Collaborative public management may also include participatory governance: the active involvement of citizens in government decision-making. This book presents current state-of-the-art empirical research and conceptualizing about collaborative public management. The contributors are top scholars in public management and public policy. The book examines how recent case studies have produced evolutions in public management theory, particularly since the publication of Robert Agranoff and Michael McGuire's award-winning book Collaborative Public Management: New Stratagies for Local Governments (Georgetown University Press, 2003). The thirteen chapters in the book are primarily organized by major topics in collaborative public management (e.g. how governments choose collaborative partners) and describe various recent cases that have advanced our understanding of the topic. One chapter (Chapter 6) provides a new case study.

Can we rely on the altruism of professionals or the public service ethos to deliver good quality health and education services? And how should patients, parents, and pupils behave - as grateful recipients or active consumers? This book provides new answers to these questions - a milestone in the analysis and development of public policy, from one of the leading thinkers in the field. It provides a new perspective on policy design, emphasising the importance of analysing the motivation of professionals and others who work within the public sector, and both their and public service beneficiaries' capacity for agency or independent action. It argues that the conventional assumption that public sector professionals are public-spirited altruists or 'knights' is misplaced; but so is the alternative that they are all, in David Hume's terminology, 'knaves' or self-interested egoists. We also must not assume that individual citizens are passive recipients of public services (pawns); but nor can they be untrammelled sovereigns with unrestricted choices over services and resources (queens). Instead, policies must be designed so as to give the proper balance of motivation and agency. The book illustrates how this can be done by detailed empirical examination of recent policies in health services, education, social security and taxation. It puts forwards proposals for policy reform, several of which either originated with the author or with which he has been closely associated: universal capital or 'demogrants', discriminating vouchers, matching grants for pensions and for long-term care, and hypothecated taxes.

`Recent years have seen the voluntary and social enterprise sectors embark on a tentative love affair with performance measurement. We should, it seems, be measuring, monitoring and reporting our performance for a variety of reasons - accountability, continuous improvement and self-motivation, to name a few. But has anyone stopped to consider the realities if implementing the range of tools on the market? Author Rob Paton does just this' - Voluntary Sector

Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises examines the question of what happens when performance improvement techniques originating in the private sector are applied to public and nonprofit organizations.

Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises looks critically at a range of performance measurements and improvement methods, including:

· Outcome measurement

· Using financial ratios for performance comparison

· Social audit

· Process benchmarking

· Externally accredited standards (like `Investors in People' and ISO 9000)

· Diagnostic models and other tools from the quality movements

· `Balanced scorecards'

Rob Paton offers a measured critique of the naïve realism and rhetorical excesses of the performance management movement but also shows why many of its critics are unduly pessimistic.

Through a combination of theory and research, the book provides practical guidance to the problem of performance management outside of the private sector.

This is an essential text for those interested in public and social enterprises, particularly MBA and Masters students in public administration//public management and non-profit management.

As academic disciplines, public administration and public policy programs have struggled to link theoretical and conceptual grounding with practical application. Students often have discrete courses in human resources, finance, organizational behavior, policy analysis, and planning, but rarely are they offered an opportunity to pursue these through actual cases and problems facing public managers.

The Public Manager Case Book is a collection of eight public administration cases that allows students to practice the decision-making skills they will need in their jobs as public managers. Each case focuses on the local administrative issues managers most often face in their day-to-day responsibilities, and each encourages students to collaborate with others in order to gain the necessary cooperation and information. The cases are multi-dimensional and challenge students and professors to draw from a variety of knowledge areas to develop alternative recommendations, decisions, or actions.

An instructor's manual is available for useful background material, references, theoretical and conceptual framework, and teaching tips.

About the Editor

Terrel L. Rhodes is Professor of Public Administration and Vice Provost for Curriculum and Undergraduate Studies at Portland State University.

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.

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.

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.