The spirit of management reforms

Abstract

The article reports on a comparative case study of the administrative cultures of the Australian (Queensland) and the Hungarian governmental administration. The basic finding of the study is that the culture profiles of the two administrative (sub-)systems are surprisingly similar. This finding is used to conclude that the organizational level of administrative culture is unlikely to play a significant role in shaping New Public Management (NPM) reforms. Moreover, this conclusion sheds a cloud of doubt onto the claim frequently found in NPM literature that NPM reforms involve a replacement of ‘outmoded, bureaucratic thinking’ with a ‘culture of efficiency and entrepreneurship’.     

Public cluster policy and firm performance: evaluating spillover effects across industries

ABSTRACT

While the direct positive effects of public cluster policy on subsidized industries are beyond controversy, the impact of such policy interventions on non-subsidized industries within the same region, that is, the indirect effect of public cluster policy, remains vague and unexplored. This study examines the impact of a prominent public cluster policy in Germany, the so-called Leading-Edge Cluster Competition. Based on a unique dataset, we analyse the spillover effects of this cluster policy initiative on those firms and industries, which have not been the primary target of the cluster policy. Our results suggest that public cluster policy seems to have an indirect negative effect on firms that have not primarily been related to the targeted industries; therefore, the concept of ‘agglomeration shadows’ might also apply to industries and related firms. Despite the existence of knowledge flows induced by additional governmental funding within a region, non-subsidized industries, that is, non-targeted firms, seem to be unable to compete against targeted industries and, therefore, suffer from a lack of human, financial and social capital. Based on our findings, we propose policy recommendations on how to best identify policy instruments aimed at augmenting innovation-driven growth across a broad spectrum of industries and regions.     

Accounting for Administrative Change in Three Asia-Pacific States

The New Public Management (NPM) appears to be of universal applicability. However, if examined on a country-by-country basis we can observe considerable variations. This article surveys public management change in three Asia-Pacific countries and contends that even in countries that share similar characteristics, in this case, British post-colonial bureaucracies, there is little uniformity. We might assume that administrative change is the result of the attraction of NPM to élites who shop around the international market for ideas, but this is a gross oversimplification. However, the apparent internation alization of NPM appears to be driven by policy transfer activity. The survey of public management in these countries reveals that although the policy transfer approach is difficult to apply empirically, it is worth pursuing as it strips away the appeal of NPM. Although in each of these countries, it is difficult to argue with any conviction that policy has been transferred from another country, a number of adaptations and ideas have been utilized by bureaucratic élites. Policy transfer is a more subtle process, and more ‘context sensitive’ than we might first assume. Even where a policy developed elsewhere can be demonstrated to be successful, its transfer to another country is less than, straightforward and often it is the rhetoric, rather than the substance, that is adopted.     

A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action: Policy Mobility,Urban Entrepreneurialism,and Politics of Scale in Jiyuan,China

This research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city's changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan's evolving development strategies and trajectory through two interrelated conceptual lenses—policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism—bridged by an analysis of the politics of scale. Over the past three decades, governance strategies in Jiyuan have evolved from policy imitation, during the germination of urban entrepreneurialism, to policy mutation and diffusion, under the amplification of entrepreneurialism, as the city has moved up the administrative levels and urban hierarchy. Policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism in Jiyuan, involving a multi‐scalar process, are being shaped by the interactions between the city, the region, the central state and global capital under the confluence of globalization and marketization. The ‘successful’ story of a small entrepreneurial city tells a new tale that can inform wider contexts by painting a fuller portrait of the evolution of an entrepreneurial city across different scales and time and bringing cities hitherto ‘off the map’ back into the picture of urban entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of globalization.     

Notes on contributors

Abstract

Today, many public professionals feel estranged from the policy programmes they implement; that is, they experience ‘policy alienation’. This is of concern as, for satisfactory implementation, some identification with the policy is required. We conceptualize policy alienation based on the sociological concept of work alienation, and show how this can be used in policy implementation research. Studying a Dutch case of professionals implementing a new work disability decree, we observe how NPM practices increase policy alienation because of a perceived dysfunctional focus on efficiency and results. A large number of policy changes and stricter implementation rules further increased policy alienation.     

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: The effects of contractualism and devolution on political control

This article analyzes effects and implications of New Public Management (NPM) when implemented in the civil service systems in New Zealand and Norway, focusing especially on the effects of devolution and contractualism on political control. Using a transformative perspective, we interpret these effects as a result of a melding of environmental factors, polity features and national historical-institutional constraints. Norway scores low on both environmental and internal factors enhancing administrative reform, furthering a soft version of NPM and small changes in political control. In contrast a combination of external pressure, weak countervailing cultural forces and ‘elective dictatorship’ in New Zealand produces a radical version of NPM, resulting in a weakening of central political control.     

Public Management in Developing Countries

Abstract

Ten years ago public management in developing countries was reaching the end of a period in which the ‘Washington consensus’ model of a small state was dominant, with downsizing and privatization as its key mechanisms. With reform programmes in disarray and NPM an inadequate replacement, the subsequent decade has been one of ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’, with management dislodged from centre stage by a concern with the domestic and political determinants of reform. We have also seen the return of a poverty agenda, featuring education and health in central roles, to which management specialists have yet to respond fully. This review suggests the need for public management specialists to absorb a political analysis before returning to perennial management concerns.     

CITIES AND THEIR GURUS: The Role of Superstar Consultants in Post-political Urban Governance

While consultants have crept into various aspects of municipal governance, a selected few have transcended the others reaching the status of urban gurus. Although consultants are often perceived as depoliticizing urban affairs, research shows that the urban guru often instigates politicization. Research on urban gurus does thus highlight distinctions between gurus and ‘lay’ consultants, but it has paid insufficient attention to describing how, through their interaction with cities, politicization occurs. Moreover, the literature often portrays this interaction as an authority relationship in which the guru is superior, while in fact cities play an important role in bestowing ‘guru’ status. Using fieldwork, I examine the long-term interaction between Richard Florida and the City of Toronto, explaining how Florida's elevation to guru status by being brought to Toronto ended with him self-describing as ‘persona non-grata’. To explain the anomaly of this interaction and the way in which gurus instigate politicization, I differentiate between consultants’ ‘substance’ and ‘process’ roles in policy formulation processes. I show that, regarding substance, the guru offers a policy paradigm rather than policy instruments and, regarding process, their strength is in performing ideas rather than pulling strings behind the scenes—in both respects making the policy process more public and contested.     

NPM merger mania Lessons from an early case

A central doctrine of NPM requires the adoption of commercial management techniques to address the espoused goals of saving money and improving collaboration and service co-ordination. This article examines the evidence base for NPM mergers and uses study data to explain how two ingrained features of professional work helped to produce unintended outcomes at an early UK case involving a specialist mental health provider and an acute trust. The emergence of a de facto mental health trust within the merged entity arose from senior professionals' capacity to ‘buffer’ the work of colleagues from the rationalizing spectre of the merger. The persistence of ‘loosely coupled’ practices and structures restricted improvements in collaboration and service co-ordination. It is argued that these two enduring characteristics of professional organization will shape the outcomes of future NPM mergers in mental health care e.g. the creation of social care trusts and mental health ‘super-trusts’) and in other fields such as higher education.     

The new public management and the UK Police Service

This article explores the impact of the introduction of the New Public Management (NPM) within the UK Police Service since the mid-1990s. A specific focus upon individual performance management (one of the central features of NPM) is examined from the perspective of the police sergeant who has primary responsibility for managing performance and ultimately the delivery of policing services within one of the UK's ‘essential’ public services. After a discussion of the literature on individual performance management within the context of the NPM, the article identifies four major research questions relating to: the job role demands of performance management; access to valid and reliable performance management information; the capacity to provide follow-up development and support; and the wider integration of performance management with organization strategy and service objectives. After reporting on interview data collected from role sets in which the sergeant is a focal member, the article concludes with a discussion of the constraints upon effective performance management within the NPM.     

Institutional analysis for new public governance scholars

ABSTRACT

Over the past several decades, prominent public management and policy scholars have repeatedly identified institutional analysis as a promising tool for empirical research, particularly for the study of ‘new governance’ phenomena where policy is enacted and implemented by actors that span organizations, sectors, jurisdictions, and governance levels. Yet, relatively few empirical studies directly measure and model institutions in management and policy settings. In a systematic review of the literature, we identify challenges and barriers that may prevent management and policy scholars from engaging with institutional analysis, along with examples of studies that illustrate how to overcome these challenges in practice.     

Policy modes,firms and the natural environment

This paper examines how different environmental policy types differentially impact firms and why firms vary in their responses to such policies. Based on the mechanisms embedded in policy instruments to create incentives for firms to comply, the characteristics of benefits/costs that policies impose on firms and the institutional context in which policy instruments were created and are sustained, the paper identifies five policy categories. These are category I (command and control), category II (market based), category III (mandatory information disclosures), category IV (business–government partnerships) and category V (private voluntary codes). Different policy types often bestow asymmetrical benefits/costs on firms. Some benefits/costs may constitute ‘private/club goods’ while others may constitute ‘public goods’. Drawing insights from public policy literature, the paper argues that firms can be expected to favor policies whose benefits have the characteristics of private/club goods but the costs of public goods. Thus, understanding the nature of benefits/costs (private/club versus public) and the magnitude of their excludability is critical in explaining the variations in firms' responses. To understand how managers perceive the nature of benefits/costs (monetary as well as non‐monetary), the paper draws on theories and perspectives in the business and public policy field. In doing so, the paper examines the ‘demand’ and the ‘supply’ sides as well as the market and non‐market environments of a given policy. Thus, the paper makes a case for a multi‐theoretic approach to understand variations in managerial assessments of benefits/costs, and consequently variations in their responses to various policy types. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Implementing the third way

This article examines the transfer of NPM strategies by comparing Service Charter initiatives in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. These three countries, together with Canada and New Zealand,are partofwhathas beendescribedas the ‘core’ new public management (NPM) policy community (Common 1998). Service Charters are an NPM strategy intended to change the culture of public service delivery to focus on the needs of the users, identified as ‘clients’ or ‘customers’. The objectives are to make service providers more responsive to users by guaranteeing specific standards for service delivery, providing a substitute for competition and a benchmark for measuring service quality. The first section examines the historical and political context of the development of the Citizen's Charter and Service First programmes in the UK, customer service plans in the USA and Government Service Charters in Australia. The second section explores the similarities and differences between these charter initiatives based on analysis of public documents. There is evidence of convergence at the ideological level as managerial values underpin the service charter frameworks in all three jurisdictions (Walsh 1994; Pollitt 1995; Kettl 1997). Despite drawing from a similar toolkit influenced by private sector techniques, significant differences between the country contextshaveresultedindivergent strategies. Timing in the three countries examined suggests that national politics rather than global policy convergence is more significant in explaining the development of service charters. This case study provides evidence of policy transfer rather than policy convergence (Common 1998). The final section considers the limitations of the customer service model. Monitoring quality iscentral to theprogrammes in all three countries. Performance monitoring is essentially a quantitative methodology that requires criteria and indicators for measuring the quality of service delivery and programme outcomes. Two problems are considered. The first is the difficulty of specifying and measuring service quality. The second is that quality indicators derived from services marketing and management research do not take into account the characteristics of public services.     

Resource Allocation in Higher Education in The Context of New Public Management

Abstract

The public administration framework New Public Management (NPM) has been applied to higher education systems in many western countries. The literature on these reforms reports on some positive effects but many critical voices can also be found. Even though NPM as a narrative unifies principles and measures under one roof, a detailed analysis shows that NPM principles fit differently for different tasks. Using a contingency approach, we show that, within the NPM narrative, two different higher education funding approaches exist, namely high-tech versus high-touch. Our study confirms the theoretical proposition that high-touch approaches match better with higher education domains. The use of contingency theory to classify NPM measures thus might be a promising way to further advance NPM theory and its practical application to topics as controversial as academic funding.     

Monetary policy and bank performance: The role of business models

This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and bank performance in a multiple-instrument environment, particularly highlighting the conditioning role of bank business models. Employing a unique dataset of Vietnamese commercial banks from 2007 to 2019, we display that banks react to monetary policy changes, either when the central bank increases policy rates or injects money into the economy through open market operations, by decreasing overall returns and increasing financial instability. Additionally, we document that the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves benefits bank outcomes, contrasting to open market operations, albeit the central bank uses both of these policy instruments to alter money supply in the economy. Our key analysis of interest reveals that business models considerably matter in the effects of monetary policy on bank performance. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that banks’ business models that yield more non-interest income or diversify more into different income sources may mitigate the pass-through of monetary policy to bank performance. This finding holds across all interest- and quantitative-based monetary policy indicators and across all the functions of risk-taking behavior, earning-profit capacity, and financial stability. Furthermore, while plotting the marginal effects of monetary policy, we realize that they are insignificant for banks whose business models heavily rely on non-traditional segments.     

Who is considered an ‘older worker'? Extending our conceptualisation of ‘older’ from an organisational decision maker perspective

A refinement of the construct of age, specifically ‘older’, is recognised as a critical measurement concern for experts in both ageing research and policy formation. In this context, we set out to both chronologically define an ‘older worker’ and to identify on what basis the age of ‘older’ is determined. In doing so, we draw on open‐ended survey data (collected in 2011) from a sample of 407 organisational decision makers across all industries in Ireland. Our focus was specifically on the perspective of organisational decision makers because these individuals will be instrumental in facing the challenges associated with workforce ageing. The results show that workers are considered as ‘older’ at a younger age than might be expected and that decision makers conceptualise workers as ‘older’ using various approaches in the organisational context. Our findings contribute to the literature in three ways: firstly, by providing an important empirically derived understanding of the term ‘older worker’; secondly, by empirically examining previously suggested ‘possible’ indicators of age; and thirdly, by demonstrating that these indicators are conceptually and empirically distinct, advancing theory on the concept of age in the workplace.     

SCALE, PERFORMANCE AND THE NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF LOCAL AUTHORITY SERVICES

New public management (NPM) arguments on strategy and structure suggest that performance is enhanced if large organizations are disaggregated into smaller units. the NPM perspective reflects the views of public choice theorists who claim that big organizations are unresponsive to public needs, inefficient and fail to achieve their formal goals. These arguments have underpinned many recent changes in the structure of public services at both central and local levels.
This paper uses data on six local government services to test the NPM hypothesis that there is a negative relationship between scale and performance. Five dimensions of performance are analysed: service coverage, quality, speed of provision, efficiency, and administrative effectiveness. Scale is measured through indicators of service output, caseload and needs. the impact of scale is tested in multivariate statistical models which control for other potential influences on variations in performance across local authorities.
Only around half of the statistical evidence suggests that the smallest local units are the best performers. In addition, even when performance does decline with scale, this trend is reversed in the very largest units. Thus, contrary to NPM arguments, the biggest organizations are seldom the poorest performers.     

Civic Engagement in the Performance Evaluation of the Public Sector in China: Building horizontal accountability to enhance vertical accountability

Abstract

This article accounts for the logic of building of an accountability mechanism with elements of civic engagement in an authoritarian regime. It is elaborated by a performance evaluation programme ‘Democratic Review of Administrative and Business Style’ (DRABS) in Wuhan in central China. The author argues that the DRABS does help form government agencies’ responsiveness to the public with various public scrutiny instruments including mass media and the internet, and that it is more accurate to frame the mechanism as having the function of building horizontal accountability to enhance vertical accountability.     

Beyond the Berlin Wall?: Investigating joint commissioning and its various meanings using a Q methodology approach

Abstract

Joint commissioning has been extensively alluded to in English health and social care policy as a way of improving services and outcomes. Yet there is a lack of specificity pertaining to what joint commissioning actually is and what success would look like. In this paper we adopt a Q methodology approach to understand the different meanings of joint commissioning that those involved in these arrangements hold. In doing so we get beyond the more orthodox interpretations of joint commissioning found in the literature although the appeal of joint commissioning as a ‘good thing’ is still prominent across these accounts.     

Agencies and non-departmental public bodies

Abstract

The emergence of Britain's ‘Next Steps’ agencies has spawned a new movement in theorizing about administrative organizations, and the practical example and the seeming theoretical excitement have influenced reformers in many other countries. But there is an older tradition of scholarship about administrative organizations that understands that many other sorts of deviant or ‘irregular’ public bodies have been in use for centuries in Britain and elsewhere. Moreover the executive agency model gets diluted as it travels away from Britain, and it then becomes more like some of those other forms. Some contributions to agencification theory are more accommodating than others about this. It is the contention of this article that many such resemblances do exist, and that all students of administrative organization would benefit if more effort could be devoted to searching for common ground between the executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies generally.