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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

The contributors discuss the links between ethnicity, inequality and governance. Their findings suggest that it is not the existence of diversity" per se," but "types of diversity" that explain potentials for conflict or cohesion in multiethnic societies. Relative equality has been achieved in the public sectors of countries that are highly fragmented or those with ethnicity-sensitive policies, but not in those with ethnicity-blind policies. The book is critical of approaches to conflict management that underplay background conditions in shaping choices.

Digital innovations are often non-linear, non-incremental, and perhaps at times, disruptive processes that have transformed private as well as public service delivery. The rise of digitization has not only overhauled the governance system and enabled greater government-citizen engagement but has also revolutionized public administration. For public organizations to thrive, it is imperative to understand the challenges and applications that digitization can create for the development, deployment, and management of public service processes. Leveraging Digital Innovation for Governance, Public Administration, and Citizen Services: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a comprehensive research book that combines theory and practice, reflecting on public administrative governance and citizen engagement implications of digital innovations and strategies, and how and when they can make a difference in the area of digital application in public administration. Highlighting topics such as e-government, electronic payments, and text mining, this publication is ideal for public administrators, policymakers, government officials, executives, administrators, researchers, academicians, and practitioners in the fields of computer science, information technology, citizen engagement, public management, and governance.

Contracting has become one of the tools that governments use to make their services more efficient and effective. This work studies the positives and negatives involved with the multiple elements of contracting. Contract culture is broken down into its many parts: rules and regulations, norms and values, local governments and the private sector. This allows the authors to examine the topic through a unique cross-cultural lens and provide a fresh take on this expanding topic. Sources such as survey data, in-depth case studies, and analysis of advocacy coalitions are used to shed new light on contract governance. Topics include: *Contracting on the Public Agenda. *Limits of the "New Contractualism." *The "hard" and "soft" elements of contracts. *Local Governments. *Contracting as part of the New Public Management.

Open government initiatives have become a defining goal for public administrators around the world. However, progress is still necessary outside of the executive and legislative sectors. Achieving Open Justice through Citizen Participation and Transparency is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the implementation of open government within the judiciary field, emphasizing the effectiveness and accountability achieved through these actions. Highlighting the application of open government concepts in a global context, this book is ideally designed for public officials, researchers, professionals, and practitioners interested in the improvement of governance and democracy.

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.

Whilst the prevailing orthodoxy of the expenditure retrenchment literature is that globalisation and neo-liberal ideas are leading to a downsizing of the state, empirical research - basing its conclusions on patterns of welfare state spending - does not support such a view. This book brings a new perspective to bear by looking at what has been happening to other areas of the state's activity. Edited by Francis G. Castles, a leading authority in the field, and bringing together an outstanding group of British, German and American scholars, it examines trends in non-social or 'core' spending on public administration, defence, public order, education, economic affairs and debt financing and in the regulatory ordering of the economic sphere. The book not only opens up new areas of comparative public policy research, but also demonstrates clearly that there have been real reductions in the reach of state in some areas, although patterns of causation are more complex and varied than generally presumed by the retrenchment literature. The research findings reported in The Disappearing State? provide pivotal, relevant and challenging core material for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses in public and social policy, political economy and the sociology of the modern state.

The twin objectives of this book are to identity the determinants and to explore the implications of Third World military expenditure. Beginning with a descriptive profile of Third World military expenditure, the study uses cross-national and longitudinal data to explore the determinants and implications across a range of issues areas. On the basis of this analysis, the book concludes with an empirical theory of military expenditure and a critical appraisal of the general implications.

During the past decade, globalization and democratization have been the major forces that helped transform the structures, functions, and processes of Asian public sectors. Nevertheless, these transformation efforts of Asian countries vary considerably depending on local context, and have met with different degrees of success. Some countries experienced smooth transformations. For others, the reform process has been more volatile. These issues were explored at a conference July 7-9, 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand, hosted by the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, and co-sponsored by the International Public Management Network, the Asia-Pacific Governance Institute, and Thailand Democracy Watch. This book presents some of the works contributed by participating scholars and practitioners at the conference. The contents fall into three categories: corruption and anti-corruption initiatives, public financial management reforms, and public management reforms with emphasis on performance and results.

This book describes and compares how semi-autonomous agencies are created and governed by 30 governments. It leads practitioners and researchers through the crowded world of agencies, describing their tasks, autonomy, control and history. Evidence-based lessons and recommendations are formulated to improve agencification policies in post-NPM times.

To be successful in the 21st century, governments must make use of digital and communication technologies in order to coordinate resources and collaborate with their citizens. IT in the Public Sphere: Applications in Administration, Government, Politics, and Planning evaluates current research and best practices in the adoption of e-government technologies in developed and developing countries, enabling governments to keep in constant communication with citizens, constituents, corporations, and other stakeholders in modern societies. Within these chapters, scholars, administrators, managers, and leaders will find the latest information on utilizing digital technologies in their e-governance projects.