Public Adminstration & Management books

This volume accesses governance in public and non-profit organizations. Building on and challenging recent research in this area, this volume critically examines the contextual, behavioural and historical factors of governance.

Volume 5 of Critical Perspectives in International Public Sector Management is comprised of three parts. The need for experimental learning in public management development, experimental learning formats and innovative teaching and transfer and value creation. This international, interdisciplinary volume is valuable for leadership, management, public management and education scholars.

Leading Local Government: The Role of Directly Elected Mayors is a timely and critical book that examines the erratic rise and uncertain future of the directly elected mayor in the context of English local governance.  Written principally for local government practitioners as well as for those with an academic interest in public leadership, the book asks whether elected mayors offer a new and reinvigorated form of local leadership, whether for individual towns and cities or for wider groups of combined authorities at the regional level. Built on original primary research conducted with mayors, elected representatives and a range of public sector managers, the book offers a fresh perspective that recognises mayoral achievements in some areas – including economic development – but finds that mayors do not enjoy widespread public endorsement and do not represent devolution of power in any meaningful sense. Above all, the book argues that elected mayors do not represent democratic renewal in a country which remains highly centralized. Using an historical account of early local government leaders together with international comparisons from the United States and Europe, the authors present the argument that, twenty years into the mayoral experiment, the mayoral initiative has so far failed to match the aspirations of central government for a new and effective form of local leadership.

Shared Service Centers (SSCs) support the management of administratively complex enterprises. Originating in the private sector, SSCs have increasingly been adopted in the public sector in an effort to reduce administrative costs, improve the quality of public services, reduce the risk of management error and make better use of human resources. The first book to thoroughly examine the organization, development and effectiveness of the shared service market in local governments across Poland, this study explores the process of creating SSCs, the key elements of unit management, the barriers and threats to both the creation and operation of SSCs, and the strategic technological solutions that local governments have utilized in shared service provision.  The author argues that the implementation of SSCs represents the initial stage on the way to improving the effectiveness of public and local government administration, while stressing that further organizational changes and standardization processes are needed to achieve greater effectiveness, in a conclusion which makes essential reading for both practitioners in local government and scholars across the fields of public management, administration and economics.

Multi-Level Governance (MLG) is a highly influential, supple and ductile framework for interpreting governance in complex polities. Yet, criticisms have been aimed at its allegedly overly 'descriptive', rather than explanatory, power. This volume argues that progress in both the study and the practice of MLG may derive from developing linkages with disciplines, perspectives and issues that have so far not been explored in connection to MLG. By discussing cases ranging from nuclear power policy to environmental policy in both the Western world and in Eastern Asia, and by engaging different theoretical perspectives and issues of practical significance, such as legitimacy in public decisions or the management of risk in multi-level settings, the book proposes ways forward for advancing the understanding of MLG - a framework of reference in the analysis of contemporary governance.The book will provide scholars and students in the fields of public administration, public policy and political science with key concepts for the analysis of contemporary governance issues, and will be a source of ideas for practitioners and policy-makers engaged in making public decisions in complex polities.

This volume aims to shed light on how public service value is identified, managed, measured and reported. The concept of public value has been increasingly associated with the process of modernisation and in recent years the debate has shifted away from 'what' to 'how' public value is conceptualised and practiced. How the public sector can meet the communities' expectations is particularly relevant in light of the Global Financial Crisis. At present, many governments are involved in reform aimed at improving the effectiveness, efficiency and economy of operations, and improving the quality of public services. Examining the effectiveness of these reforms and understanding the gap between the expectations of society and the resources available for public services is an important but under-explored topic. The chapters are the result of a series of conferences and workshops on public value held in 2012 and 2013. There are 20 papers, covering a range of topics, including theoretical reflections, practical case studies and empirical observations aimed at understanding the concept of public value.

The growing centrality of risk management in pro-market governance raises important questions regarding how risks are produced, and why? Who and what is included in, and excluded from, risk management, and why? And, what is the relationship between the rise of risk management and neoliberalism? Drawing on various political economy approaches, this volume addresses these questions by examining - both analytically and empirically - diverse meanings and practices of risk management across a range of scales and themes ranging from austerity to climate change to housing and debt. The authors investigate the relationship between shifts in contemporary capitalism and the ways in which neoliberal forms of risk management have emerged, been reproduced and normalized, and, transformed historically.

This volume focuses on the rise of educational regulation and educational governance in a post-2015 era. Across the globe, unfettered globalization is being curtailed and cooperation and collaboration at the regional level appears to be at an unprecedented high, yet there are still substantial disparities across national levels in education, social, political, and economic sectors. This volume investigates the nexus between national policy mandates, regional aspirations and international benchmarks and commitments. In doing so, it uses a critical educational policy studies approach to examine the various scales of the politics of education to explain how changes in the global and political economy influences national educational policies and practices. Thus, the politics of education within small (and micro) states is linked to various educational agenda settings and attitudes within the national and regional policy environment and the actors and institutions that shape these agendas. Chapters within this volume explain at what scale policy decisions are taken within the policy environment and who has the authoritative allocation of values.

This volume represents an attempt to update the study of public administration in Latin America. Much of the research that has been done on public administration in this region has been extremely formal and legalistic, but this volume will use contemporary theories and methods to analyse public administration in Latin America.The Handbook is separated into two major parts. The first will contain chapters about administration in individual countries. In so far as possible these chapters will cover a common set of topics for each country so that there will be direct comparability. The coverage is not universal but does attempt to cover the principal systems in the region, as well as to provide representative examples of other types of administrative and political systems.The second part of the Handbook will contain chapters addressing important issues in public administration in a comparative manner. These chapters will address significant issues in the region such as the management of personnel, the control of corruption and the improvement of accountability.