The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

It has been argued that the EU suffers from serious accountability deficits. But how can we establish the existence of accountability deficits? This article tries to get to grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of questions. First a conceptual one: what exactly is meant by accountability? In this article the concept of accountability is used in a rather narrow sense: a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may face consequences. The second question is analytical: what types of accountability are involved? A series of dimensions of accountability are discerned that can be used to describe the various accountability relations and arrangements that can be found in the different domains of European governance. The third question is evaluative: how should we assess these accountability arrangements? The article provides three evaluative perspectives: a democratic, a constitutional and a learning perspective. Each of these perspectives may produce different types of accountability deficits.

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Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework†

More than a decade has passed since the publication of Christopher Hood's influential piece that codified the nature of the New Public Management (NPM) (Hood 1991). At that time it seemed likely, c...

The New Public Governance? 1

No wonder you activities are, reading will be always needed. It is not only to fulfil the duties that you need to finish in deadline time. Reading will encourage your mind and thoughts. Of course, reading will greatly develop your experiences about everything. Reading invisible colleges diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities is also a way as one of the collective books that gives many advantages. The advantages are not only for you, but for the other peoples with those meaningful benefits.

Invisible colleges : diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities

This article questions the fashionable ideas that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable, and non-viable form of administration and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards marketor network-organization. In contrast, the paper argues that contemporary democracies are involved in another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what are desirable forms of administration and government: that is, a struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances. The argument is not that bureaucratic organization is a panacea and the answer to all challenges of public administration. Rather, bureaucratic organization is part of a repertoire of overlapping, supplementary, and competing forms coexisting in contemporary democracies, and so are market-organization and network-organization. Rediscovering Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic organization, then, enriches our understanding of public administration. This is in particular true when we (a) include bureaucracy as an institution, not only an instrument; (b) look at the empirical studies in their time and context, not only at Weber’s ideal-types and predictions; and (c) take into account the political and normative order bureaucracy is part of, not only the internal characteristics of ‘‘the bureau.’’ MAKING SENSE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Is ‘‘bureaucracy’’ an organizational dinosaur helplessly involved in its death struggle? Is it an undesirable and nonviable form of administration developed in a legalistic and authoritarian society and now inevitably withering away because it is incompatible with complex, individualistic, and dynamic societies? Are, therefore, the term bureaucracy and the theoretical ideas and empirical observations associated with it, irrelevant or deceptive when it comes to making sense of public administration and government in contemporary democracies? Or are the mobilization of antibureaucratic sentiments and the claim that it is time to say good-bye to bureaucracies and bureaucrats just another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what desirable forms of administration and government are—that An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote speech at the Ninth International Congress of Centro Lationoamericano de Administracion Para el Desarrollo (CLAD) on State and Public Administration Reform, Madrid, 4 November 2004. The original version will be printed in Spanish in Revista del CLAD Reforma y Democracia (Caracas). I thank H. George Frederickson, Robert E. Goodin, Morten Egeberg, James G. March, Jon Pierre, Christopher Pollitt, R. A. W. Rhodes, Ulf I. Sverdrup, and Hellmut Wollmann for constructive comments. Address correspondence to the author at j.p.olsen@arena.uio.no. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui027 Advance Access publication on March 1, 2005 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory a 2005 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc.; all rights reserved. JPART 16:1–24

Maybe it is time to rediscover bureaucracy

Introduction Accountability is a cornerstone of public governance and management because it constitutes the principle that informs the processes whereby those who hold and exercise public authority are held to account. Although accountability regimes vary in important respects among political systems, taken collectively they encompass processes whereby citizens hold their governors to account for their behaviour and performance directly through elections; the representatives of citizens in legislative assemblies hold political executives and public servants accountable through mechanisms of public scrutiny and audit; political executives hold their subordinate officials accountable through hierarchical structures of authority and responsibility; and, among other things, courts and various administrative tribunals and commissions hold legislatures, executives or administrative officers accountable to the law (Cooper, 1995; Stone, 1995; Mulgan, 1997). The purposes that accountability are meant to serve are essentially threefold, although they overlap in several ways. The first is to control for the abuse and misuse of public authority. The second is to provide assurancein respect to the use of public resources and adherence to the law and public service values. The third is to encourage and promote learning in pursuit of continuous improvement in governance and public management. Because accountability is an integral dimension of governance and public management it cannot be affected by the extent to which governance and public management are subject to ever increasing complexity (Thomas, 1998). Governments everywhere are under increasing pressures to be both more productive and more effective — to achieve not only the greatest degree of economy and efficiency possible but also to secure desired outcomes in respect to economic

The dialectics of accountability for performance in public management reform

If one were to bet on the design of public organizations in the twenty-first century, it would seem foolhardy to gamble that bureaucracy has a future. Virtually all prognoses suggest that bureaucracy is a model whose time has passed; its demise will occur in the new century, if it is not extinct by then. Reformers thus speak of ‘%banishing bureaucracy”’ and “breaking through bureaucracy” to conform to the “post-bureaucratic paradigm.”’ The call to go “beyond b~reaucracy,”~ in other words, is both prescriptive and predictive. In the Canadian context, the norm for the future of or anizational design is universally described as “altema tive service delivery”’; and while this means different things to different people, at the very least it means alternatives to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has no future, it is widely assumed, because we have supposedly concluded that its three chief characteristics hierarchy, specialization and standardization are highly dysfunctional in an age and global environment where well-performing organizations must be characterized instead by empowerment and self-managed teams, horizontal policy development, integrated service delivery, and management discretion and flexibilities tailored to the particular circumstances of each organization. In contrast to this ideal, bureaucracy is taken to mean centralized decision-making as well as command and control systems; organizational fragmentation and turf protection; and rules, regulations and procedures imposed on those who manage the operations of government by armies of program and functional specialists in both central agencies and line organization headquarters. In order to overcome these perceived organizational pathologies, ,‘bureaucratic systems” must be replaced with ”entrepreneurial system^."^ Or so the script reads. If we take “bureaucracy” to mean unnecessary, self-serving or outdated

The design of public organizations for the 21st century: why bureaucracy will survive in public management

Organizational change in the central machinery of government is essentially a function of executive leadership. The major determinants of such change are invariably political and not administrative in character and derive from the leadership paradigms of chief executive officers—their philosophy of government, management style and political objectives. This phenomenon is examined in the recent transformation of the Canadian central executive system from one based upon the Trudeau paradigm of rational management to one structured to fit the Mulroney paradigm of brokerage politics. The organizational instruments of each paradigm are considered and their respective capacities to meet the requirements of executive leadership in our modern administrative state are assessed. It is argued that the two different systems and the changes introduced by them are best explained by the paradigms of these two prime ministers.

Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government: From Rational Management to Brokerage Politics

In discussions of state policy capacity one area that is often neglected is the recruitment, retention and development of professional staff. This chapter addresses this issue by examining the effects of public service reform on government policy capacity in respect of the quality of public service staff. In doing so it argues that public service reforms over the past two decades — or at least in countries that have been highly receptive to the new public management paradigm — and a general political climate that is critical of bureaucracies have made it difficult to recruit and retain ‘the best and the brightest’. This is a critical failing for those regimes in which public servants are expected to function as ‘partners in governance’ with political executives, having leadership roles in respect of corporate, government-wide responsibilities as well as for individual departmental or agency responsibilities.

Public Service Reform and Policy Capacity: Recruiting and Retaining the Best and the Brightest

Paul Martin's plan to reform parliamentary government in order to eliminate the so-called democratic deficit calls for greater independence for individual mps and the House of Commons vis-a-his the government. In this article, we first examine what is required to make the reforms work according to his measures of success. We then consider why he has restricted his assault on the democratic deficit to the reform of Parliament. Third, we consider whether parliamentary reform is sufficient to address the discontents and criticisms of Canadian government that have given rise to the perceived democratic deficit. We conclude that the Martin plan, except for the review of government appointments, is sound from the perspective of representative democracy but that it will be successful in addressing the democratic deficit only to the extent that the prime minister and his reform-minded colleagues are able to convince Canadians that citizen participation in the institutional processes of reformed parliamentary government can be meaningful.



Sommaire: Le projet qu'a M. Paul Martin de reformer le gouvernement parlementaire afin d'eliminer le soi-disant deficit democratique exige une plus grande inde-pendance des deputes individuels et de la Chambre des communes a l'egard du gouvemement. Dans le present article, nous examinons tout d'abord les exigences necessaires pour que les reformes fonctionnent selon ses mesures de succes. Nous examinons ensuite pourquoi M. Martin a restreint son attaque du deficit democratique a la seule reforme parlementaire. Troisiemement, nous examinons si la reforme parlementaire est suffisante pour remedier aux insatisfactions et critiques envers le gouvemement canadien qui ont engendre le deficit democratique percu. Nous con-cluons que le plan de M. Martin, a I'exception de la revue des nominations gouveme-mentales, est solide du point de vue de la democratie representative. Il ne parviendra cependant a s'attaquer au deficit democratique que dans la mesure ou le Premier ministre et ses collegues soucieux de reforme seront capables de convaincre les Canadiens que la participation des citoyens aux processus institutionnels d'un gouverne-ment parlementaire reforme peut etre constructive.

Peter Aucoin

Papers

The dialectics of accountability for performance in public management reform

The design of public organizations for the 21st century: why bureaucracy will survive in public management

Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government: From Rational Management to Brokerage Politics

Public Service Reform and Policy Capacity: Recruiting and Retaining the Best and the Brightest

The democratic deficit: Paul Martin and parliamentary reform