There are growing pressures for the public sector to be more innovative but considerable disagreement about how to achieve it. This paper uses institutional and organizational analysis to compare three major but different public innovation strategies. The paper commences by confronting the myth that the market-driven private sector is more innovative than the public sector by showing that both sectors have a number of barriers as well as drivers of innovation, some of which are similar while others are sector-specific. The paper then systematically analyses the three strategies for innovation. These are: New Public Management which emphasises market competition; the neo-Weberian state which emphasises organizational entrepreneurship; and collaborative governance which emphasises multi-actor engagement across organizations in the private, public and non-profit sectors. The article concludes that the choice between different strategies for enhancing public innovation is contingent rather than absolute. Some contingencies for each strategy are outlined.

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Collaborative innovation: A Viable Alternative to Market Competition and Organizational Entrepreneurship

It has been two decades since the “public value” framework emerged, articulated initially at the Harvard Kennedy School. In this paper we set out the basics of the original approach, and then consider emerging critiques and meanings. Our aim is firstly to clarify the core concepts of Moore's approach, and secondly to track the new meanings of public value which are developing. This allows us to engage with the growing debate about public value both inside and outside academia, and also to discuss its trajectory as a new idea in public sector management.

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Making Sense of Public Value: Concepts, Critiques and Emergent Meanings

Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years, and why do some see it experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and Weber's ideas are used in this essay to explore debureaucratization efforts since the late 1970s and the rediscovery of bureaucracy since the mid 1990s. One conclusion is that there has not been a monotonic development toward bureaucratization, as argued by Weber, or debureaucratization, as argued by his critics. Several normative and organizational components have coexisted; the significance of each component and their relationships has varied over time. Although elements of a theoretical framework are suggested, no great optimism for a comprehensive theory of bureaucratization and debureaucratization is offered. Institutions, agency, and macro forces all matter, but there is no agreement regarding the cond...

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The Ups and Downs of Bureaucratic Organization

Responsibility, participation and choice are key policy framings of active citizenship, summoning the citizen to take on new roles in welfare state reform. This volume traces the emergence of new discourses and the ways in which they take up and rework struggles of social movements for greater independence, power and control. It explores the changing cultural and political inflections of active citizenship in Germany, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy and the UK, with ethnographic research complementing policy analysis. The editors then look across the volume to assess some of the tensions and contradictions arising in the turn to active citizenship. Two final chapters address the reworking of citizen/professional relationships and the remaking of public, private and personal responsibilities, with a particular focus on the contribution of feminist research and theory.

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Participation, responsibility and choice: summoning the active citizen in Western European welfare states

New public management (NPM) has been the dominant orthodoxy in analysing public service reform with major implications for employment relations. Drawing on comparative studies of major OECD countries, including Australia, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United States, this article examines recent reforms of public service human resource management. It refutes the proposition that reforms indicate convergence towards an NPM model and argues that the ‘varieties of NPM’ thesis is also unconvincing. Several reform trajectories exist which have sought to modernize public sector pay, performance and working conditions, but these highlight the existence of alternative models rather than a shift towards NPM or even the emergence of ‘varieties of NPM’.

https://www.aidp.it/aidp/ALLEGATI/OTHER/3280.pdf

Varieties of new public management or alternative models? The reform of public service employment relations in industrialized democracies

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Héctor Arámbula

Papers

Transcending New Public Management: The Transformation of Public Sector Reforms