Public Service Improvement Theories And Evidence

The performance of public services is a matter of concern in many countries. Issues of public service efficiency, cost, and effectiveness have moved to the forefront of political debate. This book applies the latest thinking from Management and Organization Studies to public organizations to examine how the public sector can perform better.

The performance of the public services, from education and policing to health and recycling, is a matter of concern in many countries. Issues of public service efficiency, cost, and effectiveness have moved to the forefront of political debate. This book applies the latest thinking from Management and Organization Studies to the performance of public organizations in order to evaluate the merits of different mechanisms for driving improvement in the public sector. Research in Management and Organization Studies on the private sector has identified a number of 'drivers' of improved performance, including innovation, organizational culture, leadership, and strategic planning. Many of these 'private sector' characteristics have emerged within public sector organisations in recent years. However, public managers face additional pressures, whether from regulators, constrained resources, or political interference. This book takes each of these drivers in turn and assesses whether they lead to improvement in public services. Written for students and researchers of Public Management, this book will also be of interest to public managers and consultants.

How well do governments do in converting the resources they take from us - like taxes - into services that improve the well-being of individuals, groups, and society as a whole? In other words: how well do they perform? This question has become increasingly prominent in public debates over the past couple of decades, especially in the developed world but also in developing countries. As the state has grown during the second half of the 20th century, so pressures to justify its role in producing public services have also increased. Governments across the world have implemented all sorts of policies aimed at improving performance. But how much do we know about what actually improves performance of public organisations and services? On what theories, explicit or more often implicit, are these policies based? The answer is: too much and too little. There are dozens of theories, models, assumptions, and prescriptions about 'what works' in improving performance. But there's been very little attempt to 'join up' theories about performance and make some sense of the evidence we have within a coherent theoretical framework. This ground-breaking book sets out to begin to fill this gap by creatively synthesising the various fragments and insights about performance into a framework for systematically exploring and understanding how public sector performance is shaped. It focuses on three key aspects: the external 'performance regime' that drives performance of public agencies; the multiple dimensions that drive performance from within; and the competing public values that frame both of these and shape what public expects from public services.

The performance of governments around the globe is constantly in the spotlight, whether as a celebration or indictment of their activities. Providing evidence on strategies to improve the performance of public agencies is therefore essential to the practice of public management. Originally published in 2006, this important contribution to the debate explores issues of measurement, research methodology, and management influences on performance. It focuses on three key questions: what approaches should be adopted to measure the performance of public agencies? What aspects of management influence the performance of public agencies? As the world globalizes, what are the key international issues in performance measurement and management? In examining these questions, the contributors debate both methodological and technical issues regarding the measurement of performance in public organizations, and provide empirical analyses of the determinants of performance. The book concludes with groundbreaking work on the international dimensions of these issues.

The current economic and political climate places ever greater pressure on public organizations to deliver services in a cost-efficient way. Focused on the costs of service delivery, governments across the world have introduced a series of business like practices – from performance management to public-private partnership – in the belief that these will increase the efficiency of their public services. However, both the debate about public service efficiency and the policies and practices introduced to advance it, have developed without a coherent account of what efficiency means in this context and how it should be realized. The predominance of a rather narrow definition of the term – very often focused on the ratio of inputs to outputs – has tended to polarise opinion either for or against efficiency agenda. Yet public service efficiency, more broadly conceived, is an inescapable fact of the public manager’s task environment; indeed in the past, the notion of efficiency was central to the emergence of the field of public administration. This book will recover public service efficiency from the relatively narrow terms of recent debates by examining theories and evidence relating to technical, allocative, distributive and dynamic efficiencies. In exploring the relationship between efficiency and democracy, this book will move current debates in public administration forward by reflecting on the trade-offs between the different dimensions of efficiency that public organizations confront.

This report, produced by the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, explores how systems approaches can be used in the public sector to solve complex or “wicked” problems.

How we manage public services and hold them to account is critically important. Yet austerity, recent changes to accountability frameworks, and the loss of the Audit Commission have created a huge deficit in our understanding of how well services are delivered. The time is thus right to re-examine the state of our vital public services, as well as how we can make them more accountable. This book reopens the debate on what accountability means and provides unique insights into an increasingly complex organizational landscape. It presents a new and innovative way of evaluating public services that should be of use to academics and public servants alike. Synthesising empirical work across local government, health and social care, the police, and fire services, this book also explores the relationship between financial and performance accountability and makes the case for the need for a distinctive sense of public service accountability.

How do policy makers and managers square the circle of increasing demand and expectations for the delivery and quality of services against a backdrop of reduced public funding from government and philanthropists? Leaders, executives and managers are increasingly focusing on service operations improvement. In terms of research, public services are immature within the discipline of operations management, and existing knowledge is limited to government departments and large bureaucratic institutions. Drawing on a range of theory and frameworks, this book develops the research agenda, and knowledge and understanding in public service operations management, addressing the most pressing dilemmas faced by leaders, executives and operations managers in the public services environment. It offers a new empirical analysis of the impact of contextual factors, including the migration of planning systems founded on MRP/ERP and the adoption of industrial based improvement practices such as TQM, lean thinking and Six Sigma. This will be of interest to researchers, educators and advanced students in public management, service operations management, health service management and public policy studies.