New development: ‘Healing at a distance’—telemedicine and COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In extreme circumstances such as pandemics, the presence of patients in hospital emergency departments becomes untenable. Healthcare professionals and organizations worldwide are leaning on technology as a crucial ally to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. This article focuses on the positive impact of telemedicine for helping service provision, from enabling virtual triage to mitigating the negative psychological effects of social isolation. The authors discuss the challenges and opportunities to telemedicine practices.     

New development: Mutual solutions to shaping public service delivery

There have been a number of developments in approaches to public service delivery in the UK, partly as a response to austerity measures, as well as a shift to new models of public sector, private and third sector provision. This article considers the development of public service mutuals—those organizations that have spun out of the public sector, and where employees of the new providers play a key role in shaping and delivering public services at local and national levels. The authors identify areas where further work is needed to better understand these new models and to consider whether the perceived benefits associated with traditional mutual models are applicable when applied to public service provision.     

Organizational culture and career development in the British civil service

ABSTRACT

Quantitative analysis has rarely been used to assess the organizational culture of the British civil service. This paper matches a framework based on features of prominent theories against British Civil Service People Survey data for 2010–2018 for 71 organizations. The analysis shows a shift over that timescale to a culture giving significantly greater emphasis to personal development, with staff given more responsibility to achieve their organization’s mission come what may.     

New development: Competency assessment system and practice in government—the South Korean experience

ABSTRACT

Many advanced countries have introduced competency assessment to define the necessary abilities for effective job performance—linking key human resource management and leadership development activities to ensure organizations have competent employees. Competency management is the subject of considerable attention worldwide, but the concept is not well researched. This article reviews the South Korean government’s competency assessment system and explains how it can be adapted to develop civil servants.     

The impact of central bank digital currency news on the stock and cryptocurrency markets: Evidence from the TVP-VAR model

This study employs a non-linear framework to investigate the impacts of central bank digital currency (CBDC) news on the financial and cryptocurrency markets. The time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model developed by Primiceri (2005) is estimated based on weekly data from the first week of January 2015 to the last week of December 2021. The vector of endogenous variables in the VAR estimation contains the Central Bank Digital Currency uncertainty index (CBDCU), cryptocurrency policy uncertainty index, S&P 500 index, VIX, and Bitcoin price. The TVP-VAR model’s time-varying responses demonstrated that the reactions of the cryptocurrency market to central bank digital currency announcements vary remarkably over time. The impacts of the CBDC shocks on the financial market have been increasingly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the time-varying forecast error decompositions, CBDCU and VIX shocks have accounted for most of the variance in cryptocurrency uncertainty and Bitcoin return shocks, notably during the COVID-19 period.     

Debate: Cutback management through public procurement

The policy of contestability has become an important policy in relation to the delivery of public services. This article describes the theoretical underpinnings of contestability and its application to public services in the UK. It discusses the necessary conditions for achieving effective contestability and extending the application of contestability in public service provision.     

数字时代高校图书馆流通服务工作的发展探析

本文主要阐述了作为高校图书馆命脉,图书流通服务工作在数字时代中亟待发展的重要性,提出了高校图书馆流通部门面临的科技应用贫乏、发展滞后,借阅读者流失严重,馆员服务意识淡薄的问题,并从三方面出发针对以上问题提出了相应的解决方案与建议。     

The contracting out of legal services within the public sector

From 1979, successive Conservative governments were determined to introduce private sector management approaches into the delivery of public services. This article reviews the managerial and structural changes since 1979 and proposes an initial typology through which to interpret them. The article concludes by raising issues concerning how far these changes have reflected or diluted the Government's policy objectives and how far the changes have been to the benefit of the various stakeholders involved in the provision of public services.     

New development: Running elections during a pandemic

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic posed a profound challenge for the delivery of elections worldwide. Elections are indispensable for democracy, but the high volume of human interactions within the electoral process risked spreading the virus. Electoral officials therefore found themselves planning or managing an election during an emergency situation, often for the first time. This article argues that there are several major organizational ‘elephant traps’ that polities will need to side-step during pandemics in order to safely protect the healthy running of elections.     

New development: Alternative reporting formats: a panacea for accountability dilemmas?

ABSTRACT

The need for accountability has given rise to new formats of reporting for public sector organizations. This article discusses the relative strengths and weaknesses of the main formats and concludes with a proposal for the adoption of an ‘Integrated Popular Report’ (IPR) to connect public sector organizations with ordinary people and encourage democratic participation in decision-making.     

Continuance intention of baby boomer and X generation as new users of digital payment during COVID-19 pandemic using UTAUT2

The emergence of social distancing and stay at home regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic directly affects people’s lifestyle, including baby boomers and X generation. Many of them have started using digital payments for online or offline transactions to minimize contact with others. This study aims to analyze the continuance intention of the baby boomers and X generation toward the use of digital payments using UTAUT2 (Unified Theory of Acceptance Technology). Data were collected from 320 users with an age range of 40–74 who had just started using digital payments during this pandemic. Structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the data. The result indicates that UTAUT indicators positively affect user satisfaction. User satisfaction positively affects inertia. Overall satisfaction and inertia positively affect continuance intention. Therefore, digital payment companies and banks with digital services can expand their target market beyond Millennials and pay more attention to the older generation like baby boomers and X generation. Managers can find the results of this study useful and beneficial to develop their marketing strategy and take advantage of this situation to increase digital payment users to a broader age range.

     

Editorial

This article analyses the ways that Spanish public water companies communicate sustainability information to their stakeholders and explores whether distinctive and more progressive accountability is possible in the public sector in comparison with private sector organizations. Two distinct activities are identified in sustainable accountability: public organizations are engaged in informal as well as formal reporting activity, and their reporting seems to be coupled with real organizational strategies and operational activities.     

New development: Commercialization of the English National Health Service: a necessity in times of financial austerity?

ABSTRACT

This article examines income received by National Health Service (NHS) providers from non-NHS sources. In 2015–2016, it amounted to 9.1% of their revenue. In the English NHS, there is an increasing reliance on non-NHS income to provide revenue for NHS organizations, due in part to government’s austere financial plans. This article is the first comprehensive analysis of these financial data for all English organizations. It provides new evidence in the ongoing debate about the nature and values of public service organisations and the role of commercial imperatives.     

Unpacking the black box of successful ICT-enabled service transformation: how to join up the vertical,the horizontal and the technical

This paper aims to understand what goes on in the black box of successful, joined-up ICT-enabled service transformation, where complex interactions and integration must occur among the horizontal processes internal to a joined-up service delivery network, the vertical top-down processes of the organizations involved, and the change processes caused by using ICTs. A new conceptual framework is developed and applied to an illustrative case study of successful, joined-up service transformation in New Zealand.     

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.     

Developing public servants for the future

ABSTRACT

The majority of UK civil servants are ‘developed’ within a particular service or profession and there is frequently very little movement into other service areas. Many current leaders therefore have limited experiences in services and organizations other than their own. This paper presents a new graduate programme for the training and development of future public leaders in Wales. The programme is a leadership and development programme for civil and public servants, exposing them to a range of services. The intention is that, through these experiences, future leaders will approach problems from a multi-service perspective, will be better networked and ready to deal with complexity. Areas of good practice are highlighted, together with some of the challenges of developing leaders in this way.     

Constructing a positive sentiment index for COVID-19: Evidence from G20 stock markets

The present study investigates the degree of market responses through the scope of investors' sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic across G20 markets by constructing a novel positive search volume index for COVID-19 (COVID19⁺). Our key findings, obtained using a Panel-GARCH model, indicate that an increased COVID19⁺ index suggests that investors decrease their COVID-19 related crisis sentiment by escalating their Google searches for positively associated COVID-19 related keywords. Specifically, we explore the predictive power of the newly constructed index on stock returns and volatility. According to our findings, investor sentiment positively (negatively) predicts the stock return (volatility) during the COVID-19. This is the first study assessing global sentiment by proposing a novel proxy and its impacts on the G20 equity market.     

Let's lessen conditionality in times of force majeure events. The archaic righteousness of the policy of conditionality of international Institutions amid COVID-19

This article investigates how international decision-making's conditionality aids countries during strenuous economic conditions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines and contrasts the European Union's conditionality policies, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank as the more influential and leading groups of institutions. The article reveals notable policy differences. As opposed to that of the IMF and WB, the EU's approach is more comprehensive and not confined to economic considerations. Those variations aside, the article draws on the same premise: expectations of compliance with the set conditions. While in-depth, structural requirements could guide ordinary decision-making and build up resilient national institutions and policies, this article questions the merits of large-scale comprehensive terms in the face of a situation created by a force majeure or a humanly uncontrollable event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. With no more initial research addressing the specific question of the application and adequacy of conditionality to force majeure emergencies or pandemic situations of the scale of COVID-19, this article argues in favor of a measured and targeted response limited to the development, design, or determination of policy choices that tackle the intended purpose. Also, for validly practical considerations that search for to ensure the better use of aid and avoid distracting or overburdening the recipient countries to the point of risking losses of devastating proportions, the article proposes to revise and limit conditionality during force majeure events to the essential aspects of transparent management of funds for the sole intended purpose. This in itself is a distinct democratic exercise of efficient and accountable public management decision-making.     

Developing capacity within the British civil service: the case of the Stabilisation Unit

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the training and development dimensions of a relatively recent entity within the British civil service—the Stabilisation Unit (SU). Now accountable to UK National Security Council, the unit came into being in 2007 in order to co-ordinate work between the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development, and the Ministry of Defence in the wake of military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The unit now has a broad crisis prevention and response function. This paper shows how the unit has become an important training and capacity building feature of the modern British civil service. The concluding argument is that there is considerable potential for the unit to be an organizational agent for joining-up government as part of a renewed modernization agenda for civil service learning, training and development.     

GRI Sustainability Reporting by Australian Public Sector Organizations

This article analyses voluntary sustainability reporting practices in seven Australian public sector organizations which use the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. Reporting practices are diverse and the use of the GRI public agency supplement fragmented, with the annual report being only one of several media used by organizations for sustainability disclosures.