According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Public Management Reform. A Comparative Analysis

Critics of New Public Management argue that differences between public and private organizations are so great that business practices should not be transferred to the public sector. In this paper the theoretical arguments on the differences between private firms and public agencies are reviewed, and 13 hypotheses are identified on the impact of publicness on organizational environments, goals, structures and managerial values. Evidence from 34 empirical studies of differences between public agencies and private firms is critically evaluated. Only three of the publicness hypotheses are supported by a majority of the empirical studies: public organizations are more bureaucratic, and public managers are less materialistic and have weaker organizational commitment than their private sector counterparts. However, most of the statistical evidence is derived from studies that use narrow measures of publicness and fail to control for other relevant explanatory variables. Whether the existing evidence understates or overstates the distinctiveness of public agencies is therefore unclear. A research agenda and methods are identified for better comparisons of management in public and private organizations.

Public and Private Management: What’s the Difference?

Evidence from sixty-five empirical studies of the determinants of public service performance is critically reviewed. The statistical results are grouped on the basis of five theoretical perspectives: resources, regulation, markets, organization, and management. The analysis suggests that the most likely sources of service improvement are extra resources and better management. A research agenda for further work is identified, and recommendations are made to enhance the theoretical and methodological quality of studies of public service improvement. Governments across the globe are searching for ways to improve public services. During the last twenty years there has been a pandemic of public-sector reforms, many of which are associated with the new public management (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000). Which, if any, of the existing approaches to public service improvement actually work? How much empirical evidence is there on the impact of the various reform strategies, and how valid is the evidence? What are the main issues that need to be resolved in future work on the sources of public service improvement? The intent of this article is to answer these questions. In the first section of the article, the meaning of public service improvement is analyzed and criteria for evaluating the effects of different routes toward this “Holy Grail” of public administration theory and practice are identified. In the second section, five major theoretical perspectives on the sources of improvement are outlined. These cover resources, regulation, markets, organization, and management. Taken together, these five perspectives offer the basis for a more comprehensive theoretical model of how to provide better public services. In the third section of the article, the methods and results of empirical studies that have tested the five theories are critically reviewed. This leads to conclusions about the extent of our knowledge of how to achieve service improvement and about an agenda for the substance and methods of the vast research program that is required on this topic.

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Sources of Public Service Improvement: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

Institutional theory suggests that organizations pursue legitimacy by conforming to isomorphic pressures in their environment. We extend previous research on institutional theory by distinguishing between two definitions of conformity (compliance and convergence) and by taking a comprehensive view of the organizational characteristics that might be subject to isomorphic pressures. This framework is applied to change between 2001 and 2004 in the internal characteristics of 101 public organizations in England. We find substantial evidence of compliance but more limited support for convergence. Furthermore, the impact of isomorphic pressures was stronger on organizational strategies and culture than on structures and processes. Thus, the relevance of institutional theory to change in the public sector depends on the definition of conformity that is used and the organizational characteristics that are examined.

Escape from the Iron Cage? Organizational Change and Isomorphic Pressures in the Public Sector

Public choice theory suggests that if public officials monopolize service delivery, then the result is oversupply and inefficiency (Blais and Dion, 1992; Jackson, 1982; McMaster and Sawkins, 1996; Mueller, 1989). By contrast, if services are contracted out, then the pressures of a competitive market lead to improved performance. The advocates of service contracting in local government have been influenced strongly by public choice arguments on bureaucracy that were developed in the 1960s (Downs, 1967; Niskanen, 1968, 1971; Tullock, 1965). For example, Savas (1974, 474) argues that "since most city agencies are monopolies, their staffs are automatically in a position to exercise that monopoly power for their own parochial advantage -- and efficiency is rarely seen as an advantage. In short, we have unwittingly built a system in which the public is at the mercy of its servants" (see also Bennett and Johnson, 1979). The production of public services by external agencies has grown substantially since the early 1970s. As Miranda and Andersen (1994, 28) note, "although the use of contracting varies across service areas, contracts have been used for every service local governments provide." The expansion of contracting out can be viewed as a huge natural experiment that effectively tests the validity of public choice propositions concerning the behavior of public managers who possess monopoly powers. Indeed, seldom has the major practical recommendation of an abstract model of bureaucracy been so widely implemented. Public choice theory is perhaps uniquely blessed (or cursed) by policy developments that its creators may have desired, but could not have foreseen. Reviews of the evidence on local service contracting have generally concluded that it does produce the results that public choice theory predicts. For example, Stein (1990, 498) claims that "research on contracting for individual goods and services has consistently found this mode of service arrangement to be more efficient than direct service provision and production" (emphasis added). Similarly, Kiewiet (1991, 66) concludes that "virtually every study that has ever compared the operations of public bureaus with those of private firms providing identical services has found data to support the inefficiency hypothesis" (emphasis added). Finally, Bennett and Johnson (1980, 392-93) assert that "without exception, the empirical findings indicate that the same level of output could be provided at substantially lower costs if output were produced by the private sector rather than the public sector.... The private sector production of public services offers an excellent opportunity for tax reductions without sacrifice of services; the best of all possible worlds, at least in this case, can be achieved" (emphasis added; for similar arguments see Ferris, 1986; McGuire, Ohsfeldt, and Van Cott, 1987; Miranda, 1994a; Savas, 1979). Such claims on the beneficial effects of local service contracts have also been made in other countries, for example the U.K. (Boyne, 1998a). This article aims to reappraise the empirical evidence on the effects of service contracting in U.S. local government and to evaluate the implications of this evidence for public choice models of public administration. The first part of the article identifies three specific public choice hypotheses on the impact of service contracting on spending and efficiency. The second part of the article evaluates whether these hypotheses are supported by the empirical evidence on contracting with private organizations and other units of government. It is important to note at the outset that this article evaluates evidence that compares local government agencies and external contractors as producers of public services. The aim is not to compare the relative merits of wholly public and completely private provision of local services (studies that contain evidence on this issue include Hirsch, 1965 and Pier, Vernon, and Wicks, 1974, on refuse collection; Becker and Sloan, 1985, on hospitals; Nelson, 1990, Primeaux, 1977, and Yonker, 1975, on electricity; and Bruggink, 1982 and Teeples and Glyer, 1987, on water supply). …

Bureaucratic Theory Meets Reality: Public Choice and Service Contracting in U.S. Local Government

A conceptual framework for evaluating statutory performance indicators for local authorities is developed. The framework, which contains 14 dimensions of organizational performance, is then applied to the indicators set for local government from 1993/94 to 2001/02. The results show that the validity and comparability of the indicators has improved substantially over time. However, a critical weakness that remains is the absence of indicators that link spending with service outcomes. Such indicators are essential if judgements about value for money and Best Value are to be made.

George Alexander Boyne

Papers

Public and Private Management: What’s the Difference?

Sources of Public Service Improvement: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

Escape from the Iron Cage? Organizational Change and Isomorphic Pressures in the Public Sector

Bureaucratic Theory Meets Reality: Public Choice and Service Contracting in U.S. Local Government

Concepts and Indicators of Local Authority Performance: An Evaluation of the Statutory Frameworks in England and Wales