Public administration - the practice of producing and executing government policy by bureaucrats, politicians, managers and other officials - affects almost everything we encounter in our day-to-day lives. Public administrators are - at least partially - responsible for the amount of hours we work, the quality of the air we breathe, the ease with which we can visit the doctor and the state of the roads we walk and drive down. Despite the widespread relevance of public administration however, the relative amount of government influence on society differs across the world. This major new introduction examines public administration structures, processes and achievements, and the behavior and motivations of the administrators themselves. Internationally relevant and analyzing states at a range of different developmental stages, it examines the key themes and issues that dominate the field. Chapters are framed around a series of questions that determine the typical and the unusual features of governments. For example, focus is given to what makes for a stable government, the different definitions of management, possible solutions to corruption, the relationship between central and local governments as well as the formal strategies for policy development. The book draws extensively on core theory in the field, and makes critical links between public administration and economics, law, sociology and the wider subject of political science. As accessible for students as it is useful for practitioners looking for a comprehensive reference guide, this is an essential text for those who wish to understand the complexities of government and public administration from the inside out.

The Central Intelligence Agency's relative transparency makes it unique among the world's espionage operations. Over the past few decades it has released over 31 million pages of previously classified documents, including, most recently, the so-called Family Jewels, a special collection of records on a series of operations from the 1950s to the 1970s that violated the agency's own legislative charter. Taken together, these papers permit a partial glimpse inside the CIA's clandestine world: how it operates; how it views the outside world; how it gets things right; and, all too often, how it gets them wrong. The documentary selections assembled here, carefully analyzed for content, consistency, and context, guide readers through the CIA's shrouded history and allow readers to sift the evidence for themselves. The principal theme of this new documentary history of the Central Intelligence Agency is the dilemma of maintaining a secret organization in an open society. A democracy rests on accountability, and accountability requires transparency: the people cannot hold their government to account if they do not know what it is doing in their name. At the same time, an intelligence agency lives in a world of shadows. It cannot function if it is not able to keep its sources, its methods, and many of its operations secret. The resulting tension-and the constant temptation to take advantage of the impunity that secrecy allows-has shaped the CIA's history from its beginnings. Narrative chapters introducing the successive periods of CIA history Analytical discussion setting the individual documents in context and drawing connections among them Timeline tracing major developments in CIA historyGeneral bibliography of recommended print and electronic resources for further study

This comprehensive study, part of the International Library of Policy Analysis, edited by Iris Geva-May and Michael Howlett, brings together for the first time a systemic overview of policy analysis activities in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is internationally regarded as one of the front-runners of policy analysis and evaluation in Europe. This book provides a much-needed overview of developments in policy analysis in both academia and practice at various levels of governance. It brings together contributions from key scholars as well as from professionals in the field. The book captures the diversity of modes of policy analysis which have evolved since the 1970s. Above all, it provides an overview of the current state of affairs and is, as such, suitable for anyone who is interested in governance and performance. Features of the ILPA series include: * a systematic study of policy analysis systems by government and non-governmental actors * a history of the country's policy analysis, empirical case studies and a comparative overview * a key reference collection for research and teaching in comparative policy analysis and policy studies

The authors show how and why standards are used as governance tools. They follow the historical development of standards and their new forms and roles, across the substantive areas of industrial and organizational "quality," the financial sector, environment, and labor.

While reforms of welfare policies have been widely analysed, the reform of welfare administration has received far less attention. Using empirical case studies, this book provides significant new insights into the way welfare administration is being internationally transformed. Particular attention is given to the effect on welfare clients, staff and agencies. "Administering welfare reform" presents a critical analysis of governance practices in welfare administration and examines shifts in the participants, practices and processes of welfare administration. It presents original empirical case studies that highlight the effects of reforming welfare governance on welfare subjects, staff and agencies and provides a much-needed international and comparative perspective of changing welfare governance. This book is aimed at scholars and advanced students of sociology, social policy, economics, public administration and management, as well as social policy practitioners and service delivery workers.

Written by two authors with a wide range of experience in international affairs, this introductory text addresses both the commonalities and diversity of administrative practice around the world, including a succinct but thorough overview of PA in the United States. It combines solid conceptual foundations with strong coverage of nuts-and-bolts "how to" topics, such as personnel management, procurement, and budgeting, and covers both developed countries and developing and transitional economies.The book's chapters are organized into four major sections: government functions and organization; management of government activity; interaction between government and citizens; and prospects of administrative reform. Plentiful illustrations and examples throughout the book, and "What to Expect" sections and discussion questions in each chapter, make this an ideal text for any PA course that takes a global perspective.

Governments around the world are criticized as inefficient, ineffective, too large, too costly, overly bureaucratic, overburdened by unnecessary rules, unresponsive to public needs, secretive, undemocratic, invasive into rights of citizens, self-serving, and failing in provision of the quantity and quality of services desired by the taxpaying public. Fiscal stress has plagued many governments, increasing the cry for less costly or just less government. Critics have exerted sustained pressure on politicians and public managers for transformational reform. Recommendations for change have included application of market and economic logic and private sector management methods to government. Managerial reform has been promoted on grounds that the public sector is organized and functions on many of the wrong principles and needs reinvention and renewal. Government reforms in response to reformist pressures have included restraint of spending and tax cuts, sales of public assets, privatization and contracting-out of services, increased performance measurement and auditing, output and outcomes based budgeting, and new accounting and reporting methods. Reform has been accompanied by promises of smaller, less interventionist and more decentralized government, improved efficiency and effectiveness, greater responsiveness and accountability to citizens, increased choice between public and private providers of services, a more 'entrepreneurial' public sector capable of cooperating with business. While it is apparent why politicians and elected officials often support new managerial methods, observers wonder whether the promises of reform can be delivered upon to provide benefits depicted so attractively. Dialogue on this question is active among public management scholars, practitioners, politicians, citizen groups and the media. Substantial elements of this dialogue are represented in this book.

This book looks at the role of multiculturalism in the complex construction of the European Union, acknowledging the tension of creating a new political space for identities that are simultaneously national, regional, linguistic, and religious, and yet strive to encompass a political and geographic whole. The author investigates the difficulty of conjugating the complex, pluralistic sense of belonging that individuals and groups in the EU experience in efforts to form a cohesive political identity, and one that is expressly European.

Now in its third edition, Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy remains the definitive source for article-length presentations spanning the fields of public administration and public policy. It includes entries for: Budgeting Bureaucracy Conflict resolution Countries and regions Court administration Gender issues Health care Human resource management Law Local government Methods Organization Performance Policy areas Policy-making process Procurement State government Theories This revamped five-volume edition is a reconceptualization of the first edition by Jack Rabin. It incorporates over 225 new entries and over 100 revisions, including a range of contributions and updates from the renowned academic and practitioner leaders of today as well as the next generation of top scholars. The entries address topics in clear and coherent language and include references to additional sources for further study.

This book provides the most complete formal specification of the semantics of the Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 standard (BPMN) available to date, in a style that is easily understandable for a wide range of readers - not only for experts in formal methods, but e.g. also for developers of modeling tools, software architects, or graduate students specializing in business process management. BPMN - issued by the Object Management Group - is a widely used standard for business process modeling. However, major drawbacks of BPMN include its limited support for organizational modeling, its only implicit expression of modalities, and its lack of integrated user interaction and data modeling. Further, in many cases the syntactical and, in particular, semantic definitions of BPMN are inaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent. The book addresses concrete issues concerning the execution semantics of business processes and provides a formal definition of BPMN process diagrams, which can serve as a sound basis for further extensions, i.e., in the form of horizontal refinements of the core language. To this end, the Abstract State Machine (ASMs) method is used to formalize the semantics of BPMN. ASMs have demonstrated their value in various domains, e.g. specifying the semantics of programming or modeling languages, verifying the specification of the Java Virtual Machine, or formalizing the ITIL change management process. This kind of improvement promotes more consistency in the interpretation of comprehensive models, as well as real exchangeability of models between different tools. In the outlook at the end of the book, the authors conclude with proposing extensions that address actor modeling (including an intuitive way to denote permissions and obligations), integration of user-centric views, a refined communication concept, and data integration.

This handbook discusses different countries' bureaucratic, institutional, constitutional, reforms and governance system. It analyses the legislative and policy making processes and applications, local structures and functions of public administration in a given country. It presents the comparative aspects of public administration across the globe with recent developments in the field.

This proceedings volume examines the state-of-the art of productivity and efficiency analysis and adds to the existing research by bringing together a selection of the best papers from the 8th North American Productivity Workshop (NAPW). It also aims to analyze world-wide perspectives on challenges that local economies and institutions may face when changes in productivity are observed. The volume comprises of seventeen papers that deal with productivity measurement, productivity growth, dynamics of productivity change, measures of labor productivity, measures of technical efficiency in different sectors, frontier analysis, measures of performance, industry instability and spillover effects. These papers are relevant to academia, but also to public and private sectors in terms of the challenges firms, financial institutions, governments and individuals may face when dealing with economic and education related activities that lead to increase or decrease of productivity. The North American Productivity Workshop brings together academic scholars and practitioners in the field of productivity and efficiency analysis from all over the world. It is a four day conference exploring topics related to productivity, production theory and efficiency measurement in economics, management science, operations research, public administration, and related fields. The papers in this volume also address general topics as health, energy, finance, agriculture, utilities, and economic dev elopment, among others. The editors are comprised of the 2014 local organizers, program committee members, and celebrated guest conference speakers.

This book explores how digital platforms in the realm of tourism and hospitality have shaped social and material worlds. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with hosts and guests, the book analyses the impacts of platforms on the scale of the city, the home, and the everyday life of individuals. The book first situates platforms within the broader history of digital developments in tourism and questions what is essentially new about these socio-technical formations? The following chapters demonstrate how platforms have affected urban housing, challenged the tourism sector, and transformed understandings of hospitality and home. This is illustrated through a case-study of Airbnb's development and impact in Sofia, Bulgaria. The final chapters of the book reflect on the political dimensions of datafication processes and digital systems of measurement that underpin the platform's workings, showing how the platform economies of tourism benefit their users in highly uneven ways.

Draws on previously inaccessible family archives to penetrate the anonymity and public reticence of one of Britains great twentieth century civil servants. Gowers was highly influential in public policy throughout his long civil service career, which began in 1903 and culminated in running Londons civil defence throughout the Second World War.

Interest in e-government, both in industry and in academia, has grown rapidly over the past decade, and continues to grow. ""Global E-Government: Theory, Applications and Benchmarking"" is written by experts from academia and industry, examining the practices of e-government in developing and developed countries, presenting recent theoretical research in e-government, and providing a platform to benchmark the best practices in implementing e-government programs. ""Global E-Government: Theory, Applications and Benchmarking"" provides helpful examples from practitioners and managers involving real-life applications, while academics and researchers in the fields of information systems and e-government contribute theoretical insights.

Analyzes how border and immigration enforcement culminated in a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United States and Mexico. In Unsettling, Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest unsettling consequence of our border crisis and currents of deeply rooted white nationalism embedded in the United States. Tracing strict immigration policies and inhumane border treatment from the Clinton era through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Rosas shows how the rhetoric around these policies helped lead to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on migration--and the massacre in El Paso. Rosas draws on poignant stories and compelling testimonies from workers in immigrant justice organizations, federal public defenders, immigration attorneys, and human rights activists to document the cruelties and indignities inflicted on border crossers. Borders, as sites of crossings and spaces long inhabited by marginalized populations, generate deep anxiety across much of the contemporary world. Rosas demonstrates how the Trump administration amplified and weaponized immigration and border policy, including family separation, torture, and murder. None of this dehumanization and violence was inevitable, however. The border zone in El Paso (which translates to "the Pass") was once a very different place, one marked by frequent and inconsequential crossings to and from both sides--and with more humane immigration policies, it could become that once again.

This volume provides bridges from the social sciences to business ethics and from the latter to the quality of life, by connecting the research themes of quality of life, social sciences, including public policy-making, and business ethics or corporate responsibility. It builds on the premise that public policy making is essentially a species of good decision making, as explained in the first volume. It shows that, because most developed countries function as market economies whose governments depend on taxation to pay for their services and because a large proportion of government revenue comes from well-regulated, responsible corporations, the quality of people's lives is highly dependent upon good public policies, taxation and business ethics. The volume presents and examines ethical/moral problems arising in market economies since the first century BCE, including the first appearance of the business case for business ethics, fourteen arguments concerning the neglect of business ethics, business ethics issues for the 1990s and beyond, the loyal agent's argument, advertising, the importance of trust, public opinion polling, public program evaluation, and a critique of the relatively new monster of super-capitalism. In addition, it deals with connections among the concepts of efficiency, morality, and rationality related to decision making in general and public policy making in particular. Finally, it explains relationships between outcomes measurement and performance indicators in general and performance-based management in public administration, the taxation of net wealth and financial transactions.

"Change (Transformation) in Government Organizations" discusses recent efforts to bring about change in government organizations. The book brings together contributions by a number of managers, practitioners, academics and consultants in the study of international, federal, state, and local government efforts to respond to increased calls for change (transformation) in public sector organizations. Each contributor describes their work in this area using as a backdrop the fact that public sector organizations continue to be under new and substantial pressures to change and transform themselves. Hence a collection of current contributions such as those in this book are intended to add to the ongoing debates and rewriting of the success and failures of change in public sector organizations. The ultimate purpose of this book is to further our knowledge about the related issues and current efforts to bring about change or transformation in public sector organizations. The contributors, all experts with extensive experience as change agents in both public and private sector organizations not only support their analyses and discussions of specific cases and change (transformation) management issues but also provide practical tools, ideas and lessons learned, intended to be generalizable to other public sector agencies and helpful to those responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating similar efforts in the years to come. The audience for the book will be government managers, scholars and others interested in undertaking or learning about such efforts.

This book charts the significant increase in Britain over the last 25 years in the deployment of contract as a regulatory mechanism across a broad spectrum of social relationships. Since Labour came to power in 1997 the trend has accelerated, the use of contract spreading beyond the sphere of economics into public administration and social policy. The 'new public contracting' is the term given this distinctive mode of governance, characterized by the delegation of contractual powers and responsibilities to public agencies in regulatory frameworks preserving central government controls and powers of intervention. In many cases the contracts are not legally enforceable, their power as regulatory instruments deriving from the hierarchical authority relations in which they are embedded. Examples of the new public contracting include the regulation of relationships between government departments through Public Service Agreements and Framework Documents; the regulation of relationships between individual citizens and the state through Youth Offender Contracts, Parenting Contracts, and Jobseekers Agreements; the funding of public infrastructure projects through Public Private Partnerships; and the restructuring of key public service sectors such as health, social care and education through contracts in competitive quasi-markets, reflecting the Government's privatization agenda. The book critically analyzes and evaluates such contractual arrangements with reference to theories of relational contract and responsive regulation. It argues that while in business and other private relations contract routinely enables the parties to regulate and adjust their on-going relationships to mutual benefit, this is often not the case in the new public contracting. In many instances crucial elements of trust, voluntariness, and reciprocity are shown to be lacking. This and other weaknesses in regulatory design are likely to impede the attainment of the Government's policy objectives. The book demonstrates the problems of ineffectiveness and lack of legitimacy generally associated with this mode of regulation, and specifies institutional and other conditions that need to be satisfied for the more responsive governance of these public service functions.

"The Devil Inside the Beltway." This chilling and personal story that reveals, in detail, how the Federal Trade Commission repeatedly bungled a critically important cybersecurity investigation and betrayed the American public.

Michael J. Daugherty, author and CEO of LabMD in Atlanta, uncovers and details an extraordinary government surveillance program that compromised national security and invaded the privacy of tens of millions of online users worldwide.

Background: The FTC, charged with protecting consumers from unfairness and deception, was directed by Congress to investigate software companies in an effort to stop a growing epidemic of file leaks that exposed military, financial and medical data, and the leaks didn't stop there. As a result of numerous missteps, beginning by "working directly with" malware developers, such as Limewire, instead of investigating them, the agency allowed security leaks to continue for years. When summoned before Congressional Oversight three times since 2003, the agency painted a picture of improving security when in fact leaks were worsening. Then, rather than focus on the real problem of stopping the malware, the FTC diverted Congress' attention from the FTC's failure to protect consumers by playing "get the horses back in the barn." How? By attacking small business.

"The Devil Inside the Beltway" is riveting. It begins when an aggressive cybersecurity company, with retired General Wesley Clark on its advisory board, downloads the private health information of thousands of LabMD's patients. The company, Tiversa, campaigns for LabMD to hire them. After numerous failed attempts to procure LabMD's business, Tiversa's lawyer informs LabMD that Tiversa will be handing the downloaded file to the FTC. Within this page turner, Daugherty unveils that Tiversa was already working with Dartmouth, having received a significant portion of a $24,000,000 grant from Homeland Security to monitor for files. The reason for the investigation was this: Peer to peer software companies build back doors into their technology that allows for illicit and unapproved file sharing. When individual files are accessed, as in the case of LabMD, proprietary information can be taken. Tiversa, as part of its assignment, downloaded over 13 million files, many containing financial, medical and top secret military data.

Daugherty's book exposes a systematic and alarming investigation by one of the US Government's most important agencies. The consequences of their actions will plague Americans and their businesses for years.

As a way of improvising on the study of civilizations in world politics, the volume focuses on those social and political "practices "through which notions of civilizational identity are reproduced in a variety of contexts ranging from the global credit regime to theological debates about modernity to the 'war on terrorism'. The contributors to the volume explore the ways in which practices of civilizational identity give rise to the "effect "of a solid object called a 'civilization, ' even though this object is itself nothing more than an ensemble of social practices.

Everywhere we turn in Canadian local politics - from policing to transit, education to public health, planning to utilities - we encounter a peculiar institutional animal: the special purpose body. These "ABCs" of local government - library boards, school boards, transit authorities, and many others - provide vital public services, spend large sums of public money, and raise important questions about local democratic accountability. In Fields of Authority, Jack Lucas provides the first systematic exploration of local special purpose bodies in Ontario. Drawing on extensive research in local and provincial archives, Lucas uses a "policy fields" approach to explain how these local bodies in Ontario have developed from the nineteenth century to the present. A lively and accessible study, Fields of Authority will appeal to readers interested in Canadian political history, urban politics, and urban public policy.