Banishing Bureaucracy

The sisters are back in full form--ready, willing, and able to lend their shared wisdom, encouragement, and homegirl attitude to help women get through the minute-to-minute obstacle course called daily living.

David Osborne's 1992 bestseller, Reinventing Government, was a landmark book that identified ten principles characteristic of innovative, entrepreneurial, 21st century public organizations and governance. This essential sequel goes one step further, outlining five strategies that have the power to transform public systems and organizations into such organizations, thereby achieving dramatic increases in effectiveness, efficiency, adaptability, and capacity to innovate. In an age of disillusionment with public service, Banishing Bureaucracy offers inspiring stories of organizations that really work and provides specific recipes for effective change. Here is a road map by which reinventors can actually make "reinvention" work.

Bureaucracy is a much-maligned feature of contemporary government. And yet the aftermath of September 11 has opened the door to a reassessment of the role of a skilled civil service in the survival and viability of democratic society. Here, Ezra Suleiman offers a timely and powerful corrective to the widespread view that bureaucracy is the source of democracy's ills. This is a book as much about good governance as it is about bureaucratic organizations. Suleiman asks: Is democratic governance hindered without an effective instrument in the hands of the legitimately elected political leadership? Is a professional bureaucracy required for developing but not for maintaining a democratic state? Why has a reform movement arisen in recent years championing the gradual dismantling of bureaucracy, and what are the consequences? Suleiman undertakes a comparative analysis of the drive toward a civil service grounded in the New Public Management. He argues that "government reinvention" has limited bureaucracy's capacity to adequately serve the public good. All bureaucracies have been under political pressure in recent years to reduce not only their size but also their effectiveness, and all have experienced growing deprofessionalism and politicization. He compares the impact of this evolution in both democratic societies and societies struggling to consolidate democratic institutions. Dismantling Democratic States cautions that our failure to acknowledge the role of an effective bureaucracy in building and preserving democratic political systems threatens the survival of democracy itself.

All over the world, many people who live in urban areas find themselves in an arduous social situation. In the third world, people in overcrowded metropolitan areas have a problem in maintaining even the slightest standards of living. But also richer parts of the world, the United States, Europe and the far-East, show growing social inequalities in their cities. And social problems are not confined to the large metropolitan areas: impoverishment, long-term unemployment, social isolation, and the dependency on welfare programs pops up in medium-sized cities and even in smaller communities. At the same time, these cities are confronted with a growing bureaucratic conglomerate which is increasingly inapt to fight social degeneration. The catastrophe seems to be total: how to deal at once with declining social conditions and bureaucratic inadequacy? Two American authors, Osborne and Plastrik (1997), claim to have found the answer: just banish bureaucracy. The liberating accomplishments of the free market will elevate ordinary citizens and force lazy, incompetent bureaucrats to do their work properly. If they succeed, they survive. Otherwise, these agencies will vanish. They illustrate their arguments with the American city of 'Uphill Battle' which stopped its decline by reinventing government. Strict performance measures, allotting financial controls and incentives to the citizens, and improving accountability have saved the city. We should, however, be very careful in taking such measures so far that they banish bureaucracy. It is far from obvious that simply banishing bureaucracy indeed will help people in poor social situations.

Who benefits from the interconnected processes often referred to as globalization? Is it a relatively few people, with most others either being harmed or at least not helped? Are the good things that globalization produces, whatever they are, widely shared? What processes lead us in one direction or another? This book examines a key dimension of globalization: its fairness. It investigates the meaning of and role fairness plays when public institutions are faced with the challenges and opportunities of globalization. Here a distinguished group of contributors, including both academics and practitioners, focuses on East and Southeast Asia, but the relevance of the issues discussed extends well beyond these regions. They present a broad-ranging examination of the intersections between fairness, globalization, and public institutions. Contributors: Doug Allen, Walt T. Anderson, Ron Brown, Jim Dator, Jingping Ding, Christopher Grandy, Sohail Inayatullah,Yong-duck Jung, Martin Khor, Yoshiko Kojo, Le Van Anh, Ivana Milojevic, Ryo Oshiba, Edgar A. Porter, Dick Pratt, Fred Riggs, James Rosenau,Yongseok Seo, Chanto Sisowath, Shunichi Takekawa. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

In this book, Verkuil uses his inside perspective on government to examine the increasing impact of private contractors on governance. Outsourcing of government functions is on the rise and is of concern to scholars and practitioners, and the reputation of the author will bring considerable attention to this book.

Presenting more than 70 tools, The Reinventor's Fieldbook includes hundreds of practical "lessons learned," "do's and don'ts," "steps to take," and "pitfalls to avoid" in public management and governance. Based on dozens of case studies from five countries, it covers the waterfront of high-performance public organizations, including: customer choice and customer service standards, performance measurement, and performance budgeting; employee empowerment and labor-management partnerships; managed competition and asset privatization; partnerships with communities; culture change strategies; and administrative system reform.

This book examines the role of bureaucracy in modern technologically advanced societies, the traditional models of governance, and the potential of information technology to fundamentally change and improve governance. In the area of public-domain governance, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered public agencies to improve their activities and to strengthen the efficiency of their operations. Technology has enabled optimized transfer of knowledge and information between government agencies, more efficient supervision and control of relationships with citizens, and higher efficiency in law enforcement through better access to information. Throughout the last decades, technology has been used to strengthen the role of state bureaucracies and the relationship between the civil service and the citizens. We have witnessed the transformative powers of ICTs in private-sector enterprises in well-structured technological landscapes, which has produced new ecosystems comprised of software developers, providers, and consumers who provide and consume new products and services in ecosystems that are based on clear technological standards and shared modular generic artefacts, which allow for distributed peer production. ICTs will shape cultural and civic discourse and create products, services and tools, relying on the open toolsets, technologies and exchange of knowledge between peers. This book will be of particular interest to government CIOs, IT/IS managers, researchers, students, and practitioners in technical sciences, public administration, business management, public policy and IS management.