Public Management, Context, and Performance: In Quest of a More General Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. O'Toole ◽  
K. J. Meier
2021 ◽  
pp. 001872672110077
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Leuridan ◽  
Benoît Demil

Organizations that operate in extreme contexts have to develop resilience to ensure the reliability of their operations. While the organizational literature underlines the crucial role of slack when facing unanticipated events, a structural approach to slack says little about the concrete ways in which organizational actors produce and use this slack. Adopting a practice-based perspective during a 14-month ethnographic study in a French critical care unit, we study the slack practices, which consist in gathering, arranging and rearranging resources from both inside and outside the medical unit. This permanent process is captured in a dynamic model connecting situations, their evolutions and slack practices. Our research highlights the importance of situational slack production practices to ensure resilience. We also argue that these micro-practices are constitutive of the context in which actors are evolving. Finally, we discuss why these slack practices, although essential for ensuring resilience, can be endangered by the New Public Management context.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Birch ◽  
Steve Jacob

In recent years, the new political governance, a partisan model that contributes to a permanent campaign, gained ground in public organizations. In this new context, “deliverology” is portrayed as an innovative method to help governments implement new policies and deliver on election promises. This article presents the similarities and diff erences that exist between “deliverology” and evaluation. Is deliverology really something new or is it another case of old wine in a new bottle? Is deliverology a substitute for or, instead, a complement to institutionalized evaluation? To what extent does new political governance (exemplified by deliverology and performance measurement) undermine evidence-based decision making? What is the value-added of deliverology? These questions are addressed through a critical reflection on deliverology and its value-added in Canada, where evaluation became institutionalized in many departments and agencies under the influence of results-based management, promoted by the advocates of new public management over four decades.r four decades.


Author(s):  
V. Venkatakrishnan

New public management (NPM) conceptualised public administration as a business, to be managed with business-like techniques. Since services had to be assessed by the criteria of quality, efficiency, and satisfaction of citizens, the public sector had to reorganize its processes. As strong emphasis was on the services, improving their delivery was expected to facilitate achieving the above criteria. The terms of the NPM approach such as “customer focus, managing for results, and performance management” have become part of the standard language of public administration (Ali, 2001; Bekkers & Zouridis, 1999; Crossing Boundaries, 2005; Spicer, 2004).


Author(s):  
Malcolm J. Beynon ◽  
Martin Kitchener

This chapter describes the utilization of an uncertain reasoning-based technique in public services strategic management analysis. Specifically, the nascent NCaRBS technique (developed from Dempster-Shafer theory) is used to categorize the strategic stance of each state’s public long-term care (LTC) system to prospector, defender or reactor. Missing values in the data set are termed ignorant evidence and withheld in the analysis rather than transformed through imputation. Optimization of the classification of states, using trigonometric differential evolution, attempts to minimize ambiguity in their prescribed stance but not the concomitant ignorance that may be inherent. The graphical results further the elucidation of the uncertain reasoning-based analysis. This method may prove a useful means of moving public management research towards a state where LTC system development can be benchmarked and the relations between strategy processes, content, and performance examined.


2020 ◽  
pp. 193896552096106
Author(s):  
Heyao Yu ◽  
Lindsey Lee ◽  
Juan M. Madera

While organizational and management research has implemented the use of experience sampling methods (ESM), hospitality management research has yet to reap the benefits of this method and design. ESM involves collecting data at several time points from participants as they experience organizational phenomena, measuring the variations and oscillations in attitudes, behaviors, and performance. This article seeks to define ESM for hospitality research, highlight the strengths, outline the challenges of ESM, and offer best practices by using ESM data from three hospitality industry examples. Each example compares cross-sectional data collection methods and analyses to ESM data collection methods and analyses to compare the different results of the data collection methods.


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