Managing to Improve Public Services
Managing to Improve Public Services
Cam Donaldson, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Chris Skelcher, University of Birmingham
Mike Wallace, University of Bath
How are public service organizations governed? How can their performance be measured, managed and improved? Public services play a central role in the well-being, sustainability and growth of communities, cities and nations. Managing to Improve Public Services shows how management can be harnessed to improve a range of public services (e.g. policing, health, local government) by examining them through different theoretical lenses (e.g. governance, innovation and change, performance metrics and management). It advances both theory and practice, beyond traditional public administration and 'new public management', by considering the interrelationships between governance and public management. The book is written by a group of leading social science and management specialists, who were awarded the prestigious ESRC/EPSRC Public Service Fellow awards as part of the Advanced Institute of Management Research initiative. It will be of interest to graduate students, academics and policy makers involved in public service management and performance measurement.
- Multi-disciplinary approach to key organizational questions facing public service management
- Emphasizes the value of leadership in shaping improvements in public service delivery
- Contributes to the research agenda for public service improvement
Reviews & endorsements
'This is an important volume by an impressive collection of UK and international public management scholars, many of them linked to the major AIM Public Services research initiative. It combines a broad overview of current key developments and debates in public management, with valuable in depth chapters covering key topics. Its style is scholarly but clear and will appeal to reflective practitioners and academics alike.' Ewan Ferlie, King's College London
'Ideally, the field of public management would develop as the field of medicine has done - through a close collaboration among scientists and clinicians struggling together to deal with particular concrete problems the world faced. A major obstacle to this vision has been the difficulty of creating a strong academic community that could have a sustained, cumulative discussion that ran alongside, and offered a powerful analytical and empirical commentary on, the past and emergent practices of the wider professional community. The AIM Initiative represented a bold effort to break this particular bottleneck, and the important results are contained in this book. Anyone who wants to enter into a serious discussion of public management reform should read these chapters, and get in touch with these authors. There is a lot of good science and no small amount of practical wisdom contained in these pages.' Mark Moore, Director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Product details
November 2008Paperback
9780521708272
314 pages
247 × 175 × 17 mm
0.63kg
1 b/w illus. 18 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface Robin Wensley
- 1. The agenda for public service improvement Jean Hartley and Chris Skelcher
- Part I. Governance and Accountability:
- 2. Does governance perform? Concepts, evidence, causalities and research strategies Chris Skelcher
- 3. Performativity, management and governance Paul M. Collier
- 4. Critical assessment of performance measurement for policy making Michael Pidd
- 5. Priority setting in the public sector: turning economics into a management process Cam Donaldson, Angela Bate, Craig Mitton, Stuart Peacock and Danny Ruta
- Part II. Performance Metrics:
- 6. Public service productivity: new approaches to performance measurement in health sectors Mary O'Mahony, Philip Stevens and Lucy Stokes
- 7. Performance measurement systems and the criminal justice system: rationales and rationalities Barbara Townley
- 8. Valuing public sector outputs Rachel Baker, Helen Mason, Cam Donaldson and Michael Jones-Lee
- 9. The use of geodemographics to improve public service delivery Paul A. Longley and Michael Goodchild
- Part III. Managing Innovation and Change:
- 10. The innovation landscape for public service organizations Jean Hartley
- 11. Innovation type and organizational performance: an empirical exploration Richard M. Walker and Fariborz Damanpour
- 12. Public service failure and turnaround: towards a contingency model George Boyne
- 13. Orchestrating complex and programmatic change in the public services Mike Wallace and Michael Fertig
- Postscript:
- 14. Conclusions: current themes and future direction for research Cam Donaldson, Jean Hartley, Chris Skelcher and Mike Wallace
- Index.
