Lean in a cold fiscal climate: the public sector in an age of reduced resources

Reflecting on recent public sector reform, this paper examines the use of Lean during a period of financial austerity. The paper outlines several challenges for public sector organizations as they manage performance targets, and engage in service re-design. The author challenges the current use of Lean working arguing for a re-evaluation of the traditional public sector model of work and for a collective approach to co-production of service redesign.     

A '3Rs' Strategy for Public Service Turnaround: Retrenchment, Repositioning and Reorganization

Problems of public service 'failure' are high on the political agenda in the UK, and many national and local organizations are searching for effective turnaround strategies. Although little research on turnaround in the public sector has been undertaken, there is a substantial number of studies of decline and recovery in private firms. Evidence from these studies suggests that turnaround is more likely in companies that pursue retrenchment, repositioning and reorganization. The relevance of this '3Rs' strategy to the public sector is analysed, and the potential consequences for public service improvement are evaluated. This article will help managers to think more clearly about turnaround strategies that could work in their organizations.     

Faith advocacy and the EU anti-poverty process: a case of Caritas

Caritas in Europe is both the EU's largest voluntary sector network of any kind, and also comprises Europe's biggest religious NGO. This article tracks the Europeanization of its advocacy as part of an European Commission-funded initiative to engage civil society networks in the improvement of national social inclusion strategy designs. Noting the impact of state structure and civil service actions on the form and impact of such faith-based advocacy, the article draws out fresh insights for the UK debate on the role of religious organizations in welfare reform and advocacy, not least the appropriate assessment of ‘the local’, ‘motivating ideas’ and the need for the development of a new and ‘adaptive leadership’ style by public managers.     

A Regional Future for the UK Civil Service? The Government Offices for the English Regions and the Civil Service in Scotland

The civil service role in the Westminster model is to inform and implement central government policy. The authors argue that extensive public sector reforms and changes in UK governance mean that the Westminster model no longer provides an adequate explanation of how government works. Thus the United Kingdom is now a 'Disunited Kingdom'.     

BBC: Facing the future and financing it

Recent publicity on the single European market has concentrated our attention on the impact of Europe on the private sector. Potentially, however, the impact on the public sector will be equally significant. Public sector organisations will be drawn into the process of opening up markets, with consequences for their policy and management that few people yet appreciate.     

Assessing performance and value-creation capabilities in Lean healthcare: insights from a case study

ABSTRACT

Lean thinking is increasingly being applied worldwide. Yet its actual impact is still a puzzle, particularly when a ‘full-implementation approach’—which entails the adoption of a strategic approach to Lean dissemination on policy deployment procedures—is used. Focusing on the healthcare sector, this paper presents and tests a comprehensive measurement framework for Lean interventions. The paper explains how Lean testing can help decision-makers to solve managerial issues related to Lean initiatives.     

Making sense of New Zealand’s ‘spirit of service’: social identity and the civil service

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the creation a more unified civil service in New Zealand with the Public Service Act 2020, which promotes the most profound changes to the public service since New Zealand’s New Public Management heyday in the late 1980s. Among its many reforms is an explicit attempt to foster a unified culture around a ‘spirit of service to the community’—a construct without fixed definition that appears to incorporate ideas of motivations and ethics. This paper shows that this unified culture can be traced through a series of key collaborative discussions that have taken place among New Zealand’s public sector chief executives. The authors present a case study to show how these collaborations contributed to a new social identity, and provided a foundation for a civil service unified by its spirit of service to the community. The paper contributes to this PMM theme by providing empirical evidence from the latest New Zealand experience; and also contributes to theory of social identity and sensemaking in creating civil service values.     

The emergence of the tax official into a T-shaped knowledge expert

Public sector officials have had to engage in new ways of working to reflect the changing practices of the public sector. This paper uses the specific case of professional tax officials in the UK tax administration to examine this broader context, by a longitudinal study. Tax officials are being disciplined by the changing working practices of the tax administration. The tax official becomes a T-shaped tax official who has emerged from a bureaucratic inward facing technical civil servant to become an outward facing new style tax official who still has to engage with the detailed technical tax knowledge as a knowledge expert (the vertical part of the T) but also has to relate to the new way of operating in a strategic and marketing organisation (the horizontal part of the T). This changing role of the tax official has tax policy implications and impacts on the social and organizational aspects of the tax compliance process.     

Megaw and the public sector: A union response

One Civil Service union ‐ the Institute of Professional Civil Servants ‐ welcomed the Megaw Report on the grounds that it would help restore internal relativities. Unions representing the great majority of civil servants, however, came out strongly against it. The general secretaries of the Civil and Public Servants Association and the Society of Civil and Public Servants prepared a note for the TUC's public service committee on the implications of Megaw for the public sector as a whole. The following is based on that note.     

A study of the coordination of mission,objectives and targets in U.K. executive agencies

The growth of executive agencies (agencies) in the U.K. public sector has been rapid. While the first agency was established as recently as 1988, by September 1998 over 75 per cent of civil servants were working in such organizations. They were created to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery of central government services. The efficacy of a rational management model was promulgated and the need to plan and control the performance of agencies, as a basis for performance improvement, was articulated. This led to a greater focus on targeting and measuring performance. This paper provides an outline of the case for, and potential problems of, the use of a highly rational model of management in the public sector, with its focus on quantification. Through an empirical analysis of 48 planning documents, it identifies the degree to which the mission statements, objectives and targets in the Corporate and Business Plans of agencies are coordinated, or linked, in a rational manner. The main finding of the research is that although significant gaps exist, the planning documents of executive agencies appear to be more coordinated in terms of their use of objectives and targets than was evident in earlier research in other parts of the public sector.     

Local adaption and central confusion: decentralized strategies for public service Lean implementation

There are a number of arguments for implementing public service Lean in a decentralized fashion, characterized by employee participation and local adaptions of the concept. This paper reports on a longitudinal case study of decentralized Lean implementation in a large Norwegian public service provider. The analysis points to unintended consequence of communication and co-ordination difficulties. The authors suggest ways of striking a reasonable balance between centralized and decentralized strategies of Lean implementation.     

Reappraising the UK social value legislation

This paper appraises the scope and legal obligations of the UK Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012. The law, by imposing on public authorities an obligation to consider wider social, economic and environmental benefits before they enter into major public service contracts, in principle improves service outcomes for communities, and facilitates better access for third sector organizations to public contracting opportunities. Evidence of the legislation’s impact has been mixed.     

A critical review of the 2015 South Korean civil service pension reform

The Republic of Korea’s civil service pension (KCSP) was established in 1960 and has been changed several times to overcome the serious financial burdens it has placed on the country. Major problems related to the KCSP include its structure (low contribution and high benefit) and the country’s rapidly aging population. The authors examine the 2015 KCSP reform, reviewing the reasons for the reform, its process, and its fiscal and policy implications. Reforms in other countries are briefly compared. The paper provides important lessons for researchers and practitioners involved in public sector pension reforms.     

Spot the Difference Between the Public and Private Sectors: Disputes and Third-Party Intervention in Britain

This article considers whether there is a difference between the public and private sectors in respect of third-party intervention to prevent and resolve collective employment disputes. Based on statistics from Acas for the five years from 1 April 1997 and interviews with key informants, it finds only a few differences. Public sector disputes were more likely than private sector disputes to have a national dimension and they were less likely to be resolved by conciliation. Also, there was seldom third-party intervention in civil service disputes. The main difference, however, was not in third-party intervention but in fourth-party intervention, i.e. intervention by the Government, which dominates both overtly and covertly.     

The impact of a changing financial climate on a UK local charitable sector: voices from the front line

Forced to compete with private and public sector providers, charities experience tensions as the quest for a more commercially-oriented position may conflict with their social imperative. Little attention has been given to understanding the experiences of local charities as service providers. This paper captures the reactions of those working on the charity front line.     

Polish Public Sector Accounting in Transition: Evidence From the Mid 1990s

The Polish public sector is still under transition that began at the turn of 1989/1990. In the mid-1990s a new significant development in public sector accounting took place. A substantial differentiation of the accounting system was introduced. New elements and relationships appeared, along with general domination of the Accounting Act, tax regulations and the Budgetary Law. The system of basic regulation of accounting and reporting has also changed. There were also some changes in the auditing system. The enactment in 1994 of the Accounting Act has brought to light the political character and political importance of financial information in Poland. This paper presents the current mode of public sector accounting regulation and its relationship with the overall system of Polish accounting regulations. Much attention has been devoted to specific principles of public sector accounting and financial reporting in the public sector, and to government accounting. Some political contaminations and consequences of the current accounting system have been pointed out.     

Yardstick competition and public sector innovation

The paper addresses the incentives of the public sector to implement new technologies in public service provision. The focus is on the role of local governments under decentralization. Exploiting variation in the level of innovation in a large sample of US school districts, the impact of yardstick competition on the choice of public sector technologies is identified. It is shown that the impact of other districts’ innovation activity on a district’s innovation score is much stronger in communities where incumbents face a high risk of being elected out of office. This finding suggests that under decentralization, yardstick competition is an important force shaping the decisions of local governments to adopt new technologies.      

Public service motivation and public sector employment preference: Comparing Italian and British students

ABSTRACT

Previous research has suggested that an individual’s public service motivation (PSM) is positively linked to a preference for public sector employment. The authors explore this link using a sample of British and Italian undergraduate students. They found a positive relationship between PSM and public sector job preferences among Italian students but not with the British students. The UK has implemented more NPM-style reforms than Italy and this could be impacting on public sector recruitment. Implications for recruitment and retention the public sector are discussed.     

Tracking Resource Use in a Welfare Organization: Needs, Costs and Co-production

Public sector welfare organizations are situated at the sharp end of resource allocations in society and must cope in an environment where demand frequently far exceeds supply. In consequence, the resource problem of meeting the need for social welfare is never fully resolvable and evaluations of the ways in which scarce resources are used within the public sector are of critical importance for public policy. This paper draws on an empirical study of a welfare service for homeless young people in order to illustrate, first, the cost implications of two different approaches to service delivery (one more superficial – termed 'people-processing'; one more in depth – termed, 'people-changing') and, second, how the characteristics of the clients served (in particular, their ability to fully engage with the service termed –'co-production') can have a marked impact on the cost of the services delivered to them.     

New development: Reconnecting public service ethos and multi-agency collaboration. What are the possibilities and prospects for new local collaborative environments?

The public service ethos (PSE) is typically portrayed as the responsibility of public officers working for the public good, or described negatively as requiring intervention from the private sector. This article explores the relationship between the ethos and collaboration informed by findings from an empirical case study of public officers. It ends by identifying future avenues for research on the PSE by setting out possibilities and prospects for new local collaborative environments.