The Transition From The Bureaucratic Paradigm To A Public Management Culture

The real problem of transition; A strategy for change; The evaluation of results; Training civil servants for the new culture.

How policymakers should guide, manage, and oversee public bureaucracies is a question that lies at the heart of contemporary debates about government and public administration. This text calls for public management to become a vibrant field of public policy.

This enlightening book scrutinizes the shifting governance paradigms that inform public administration reforms. From the rise to supremacy of New Public Management to new the growing preference for alternatives, four world-renowned authors launch a powerful and systematic comparison of the competing and co-existing paradigms, explaining the core features of public bureaucracy and professional rule in the modern day.

This book attacks the conventional wisdom that bureaucrats are bunglers and the system can't be changed. Michael Barzelay and Babak Armajani trace the source of much poor performance in government to the persistent influence of what they call the bureaucratic paradigm—a theory built on such notions as central control, economy and efficiency, and rigid adherence to rules. Rarely questioned, the bureaucratic paradigm leads competent and faithful public servants—as well as politicians—unwittingly to impair government's ability to serve citizens by weakening, misplacing, and misdirecting accountability. How can this system be changed? Drawing on research sponsored by the Ford Foundation/Harvard University program on Innovations in State and Local Government, this book tells the story of how public officials in one state, Minnesota, cast off the conceptual blinders of the bureaucratic paradigm and experimented with ideas such as customer service, empowering front-line employees to resolve problems, and selectively introducing market forces within government. The author highlights the arguments government executives made for the changes they proposed, traces the way these changes were implemented, and summarizes the impressive results. This approach provides would-be bureaucracy busters with a powerful method for dramatically improving the way government manages the public's business. Generalizing from the Minnesota experience and from similar efforts nationwide, the book proposes a new paradigm that will reframe the perennial debate on public management. With its carefully analyzed ideas, real-life examples, and closely reasoned practical advice, Breaking Through Bureaucracy is indispensable to public managers and students of public policy and administration.

Why does public management - the art of the state - so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service? What are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services?Are the forces of modernity set to produce world-wide convergence in ways of organizing government? This important new study aims to explore such questions, central to current debates over public management. Combining contemporary and historical experience, it employs grid/group cultural theory asan organizing frame and method of exploration. Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services. And contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues thatvariety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management.

A comparative, interdisciplinary examination of the mechanisms behind public administration Global Dimensions of Public Administration and Governance is a comprehensive, comparative text on the structure and function of governments around the world. Written by two of the field's leading public administration scholars, this book provides an interdisciplinary perspective and a global, historical, and theoretical examination of the management and governance of the modern state. Readers learn how territory, bureaucracy, and political systems influence policy and reform in over thirty countries, and how these mechanisms affect the everyday lives of citizens. This comparative approach features rich examples of how policy is shaped by culture, and how modern policy principles are filtered to fit a country's needs and expectations. Chapters conclude with comparative analyses that help readers better-understand the role and position of government in the contemporary world, both in democratic societies and less-than-democratic environments. Governance doesn't happen in a vacuum. Those responsible for policy, regulation, and reform take cues from history, current events, and visions for the future to inform thinking on matters that can potentially affect a large number of everyday lives. This book illustrates the thought process, providing the necessary insight these important decisions require. Understand the relationship between structure and function of government Learn how policy is culture-dependent Examine the political and societal contexts of reform Discover the myriad forms of modern bureaucracy The various social sciences provide valuable information and perspectives for those involved in public administration. Those perspectives converge here to form a thorough, well-rounded, examination of the success and failure possible, and the mechanisms through which they take place. Global Dimensions of Public Administration and Governance provides a detailed, wide-ranging look at how modern governments operate, how they got this far, and where they're headed for the future.

This book describes the administrative system of Bhutan. Divided into two main parts, the first part of the book describes the Bhutanese public administration by examining the various paradigms and ideal types of public administration. Chapters examine the paradigms and ideal types in the field of public administration, and the paradigm concept helps in explaining the dynamics and the interaction of the application of public sector reforms within the context of the ideal types. Based on the historical and recent reforms, the Bhutanese administrative system has been mapped onto the ideal type typology to show hybridity with a mix and layering of characteristics of paradigms. The second part of the book examines the dynamics of implementing and evaluating the Position Classification System (PCS). This part includes chapters which evaluate the PCS and discusses the dynamics of the reform. It synthesizes the findings of the implementation of the PCS and connects it to the broader discussions on public sector reforms. It discusses the trajectory of public sector reform and the points of convergences and divergences within this trajectory.

Since the height of the privatization debate in the 1990s, changes in government policy have resulted in significant transformation in the public sector. Some organizations have made the transition from government bureaucracy to business venture successfully; others have struggled to relinquish their traditional bureaucratic culture. In this book, Pillay and Bilney explore the cultural changes occurring within the public sector and the effects that government mandated change initiatives have actually had. The culmination of this book was due to the subject expertise and guidance of Professor Robert Jones at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. It provides perspectives on the efficacy of cultural change in the Australian public sector, and explores the practical implications for society and government as it seeks to entrench the culture of the citizen as customer. It is particularly useful for researchers and organizations searching for ways to improve service delivery within the confines of particular market positions.

This text confronts questions public managers face in their efforts to meet demands of reform and innovation. It considers bureaucratic resistance, the dilemma faced when a reform agenda runs counter to the law, and the belief that improved management can remedy flawed policy.

Building the Republican State is an insightful analysis of the new state and the new public management that is emerging in the twenty-first century. It presents the historical stages that led to the modern state, identifies a crisis of the nation-state and its origins in a fiscal crisis and in globalization, and situates public management in the last phase - the social-liberal and republican state. To understand such stages the author develops the theory of republicanrights, as a fourth type of citizenship right, after the civil, the political, and the social rights.The book contains an original model of reform, in which the roles of the state, the forms of ownership, the types of public administration, and the organizational-institutions indicated in each situation are put together. Additionally, the book discusses the political theories behind the reform, and its political implications. Throughout the book, the author underlines the complementary roles of markets and the state, and the importance of building state capacity to assure administrativeefficiency, always having in count the 'democratic constraint', i.e., the prevalence of the political over the economic realm.This is essential reading both for those studying political theory and government reform, as well as for anyone interested in state politics and globalization.