The Know How Of Public Leaders In Collective Politics

From small, local associations to national social movements, this work demonstrates how we can make more meaningful assertions about what leaders do and how they do it to better push for systemic social change.

From small, local associations to national social movements, this work demonstrates how we can make more meaningful assertions about what leaders do and how they do it to better push for systemic social change.

This is the best single-source guide to leadership development in the public sector. The all-original chapters include discussions of leadership frameworks, competencies for public leaders for the new governance, and strategies for senior leaders in government.

Using the assumptions of rationality and self-interest common to economic analysis, Professors Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Young develop a profit-making theory of political behavior as it pertains to the supply of collective goods—defense, law and order, clean air, highways. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

'Leadership' is routinely admired, vilified, ridiculed, invoked, trivialised, explained and speculated about in the media and in everyday conversation. Despite all this talk, there is surprisingly little consensus about how to answer basic questions about the nature, place, role and impact of leadership in contemporary society. This book brings together academics from a broad array of social science disciplines who are interested in contemporary understandings of leadership in the public domain. Their work on political, administrative and civil society leadership represents a stock-take of what we need to know and offers original examples of what we do know about public leadership. Although this volume connects scholars living in, and mostly working on, public leadership in Australia and New Zealand, their contributions have a much broader scope and relevance.

Local governments throughout the west are undergoing a transformation of their leadership styles and structures. Some countries have abandoned traditional systems of collective or committee based decision-making in favour of Cabinet models or, more radically, a directly-elected executive mayor, while others have strengthened existing mayoral systems. There are a few exceptions to this trend. Based on original research in eleven countries the book assesses these changes in terms of their implications for political accountability, the role of lay politicians, political recruitment, the professionalization of leadership, and relations with the bureaucracy.

This book offers a new insight into leadership in the public sector: It describes public leadership as a form of collective leadership in which leaders from a range of public, private and voluntary organizations share a common aim in improving the life of communities. It examines the current focus on public service reform and highlights the impact that performance targets have had on leadership. The importance of the role of the individual leader is acknowledged, but it argues that this role is not to provide the answers but to ask intelligent questions in tackling wicked issues that undermine well being. The book explores the experience of reform across the sector and sets some tough challenges for government, public institutions and their leaders. It will be of benefit to all who are interested in what the future holds for public services and prompts a different way of thinking about leadership.

Politicians everywhere tend to attract cynicism and inspire disillusionment. They are supposed to epitomize the promise of democratic government and yet invariably find themselves cast as the enemy of every virtue that system seeks to uphold. In the Pacific, "politician" has become a byword for corruption, graft, and misconduct. This was not always the case—the independence generation is still remembered as strong leaders—but today's leaders are commonly associated with malaise and despair. Once heroes of self-determination, politicians are now the targets of donor attempts to institute "good governance," while Fiji's 2006 coup was partly justified on the grounds that they needed "cleaning up." But who are these much-maligned figures? How did they come to arrive in politics? What is it like to be a politician? Why do they enter, stay, and leave? Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the region's political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job. We learn that politics is a messy, unpredictable, and, at times, dirty business that nonetheless inspires service and sacrifice. We come to understand how being a politician has changed since independence and consider what this means for how we think about issues of corruption and misconduct. We find that politics is deeply embedded in the lives of individuals, families, and communities; an account that belies the common characterization of democracy in the Pacific as a "façade" or "foreign flower." Ultimately, this is a sympathetic counter-narrative to the populist critique. We come to know politicians as people with hopes and fears, pains and pleasures, vices and virtues. A reminder that politicians are human—neither saints nor sinners—is timely given the wave of cynicism and disaffection. As such, this book is a must read for all those who believe in the promise of representative government.