Managing to Improve Public Services

A group of leading social science and management specialists show how management can be harnessed to improve public services.

Jean Hartley (Edited by), Cam Donaldson (Edited by), Chris Skelcher (Edited by), Mike Wallace (Edited by)

9780521708272, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 November 2008

314 pages, 1 b/w illus. 18 tables
24.7 x 17.5 x 1.7 cm, 0.63 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Civil service & public sector [KNV], Business & management [KJ], Regional government [JPR]