The Changing Public Sector

Successful change in the public sector can be supported or hindered by political and administrative leadership, individual and group motivation, and the public’s perception of the effectiveness of public officials and government structures. But do the very characteristics of public sector organizations present obstacles to successful transformative change? This book assesses the current state of the literature on leadership and change in government and public policy, and introduces the reader to innovative new ways to demonstrate leadership in times of change. Contributions from accomplished scholars in the field cover the traditional public administration areas of performance and management, as well as the diversity of issues that surround public leadership and change, both domestic and global. Chapters on public sector innovation, performance leadership, governance networks, complexity in disaster management, change initiatives in educational systems and local government, citizen advisory bodies, and gender and race equality, to name but a few, provide important case studies throughout the volume. Leadership and Change in Public Sector Organizations will be required reading for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in public administration/management, leadership, and public policy analysis.

First Published in 1998. The single most important purpose of this book is to create a field of public administration values, a field that currently does not exist in a recognizable form. Surely values are discussed significantly and usefully by the fields of ethics, management, decision making, and organization behavior and theory, to mention only a few. But these discussions are inevitably narrower in scope than is necessary for a true field of values. Such a field is needed to help bridge the seeming chasm about discussions of values among the established fields. A second purpose of this text is to provide a comprehensive treatment of values. A third purpose of the text is to provide a balanced treatment, giving all the major schools of thought roughly the same coverage so that their values can be compared as dispassionately as possible. A fourth purpose of the book is to make the subject accessible to and interesting for practitioners and students.

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.

Batley and Larbi examine how governments of developing countries are organized to deliver public services. The book is based on comparative international studies of four service sectors: Health care, urban water, business promotion and agricultural marketing. Governments everywhere are being driven to adopt an 'indirect' approach - managing, contracting and regulating public agencies or private partners, rather than providing services directly. It questions how governments are responding and whether this approach is appropriate to the capacities of developing countries.

This book, the first in the Routledge Masters in Public Management series, examines and explains change and innovation in the public sector to provide readers with the skills needed to manage the changes taking place.

State administration in modern industrialized countries is facing major challenges to its basic institutional premises. The changing conditions of the global economy mean that the public sector needs to develop far-reaching strategies for innovation. A fundamental reform of the public sector is thus one of the most urgent issues on the international agenda. The volume examines and compares trends, issues and experiences of this reform process in Sweden and Germany.

The Third Edition of this successful textbook introduces students to the major concepts, models, and approaches surrounding the public sector. Now fully updated to include coverage of the New Public Management (NPM), The Public Sector is the most comprehensive textbook on theories of public policy and public administration. The Public Sector is introduced within a three-part framework: public resource allocation, redistribution and regulation. Jan-Erik Lane explains the basic concepts of each of these broad areas, and goes on to examine their consequences for various approaches to the making and implementation of public policy. The book explores models of management, effectiveness and