scholarly journals Supervision: A force for change? Three stories told

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 773-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta Bradley ◽  
Lambert Engelbrecht ◽  
Staffan Höjer

Drawing on research, we contextualize social work and describe the role of supervisors in child welfare settings in South Africa, England and Sweden. Exploratory frameworks and models of supervision illustrate how it has been influenced by principles of New Public Management and the concluding discussion proposes an agenda for change.

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.


Author(s):  
Jana Štrangfeldová ◽  
Štefan Hronec ◽  
Jana Hroncová Vicianová ◽  
Nikola Štefanišinová

Education is a key area, the results of which play an important role in the development of each society. The role of education focused on the inclusion of children into school groups, to prepare students to enter the labour market or continue their studies in the context of tertiary education is a sufficient argument to enable beginning to look for answers and possible solutions to the difficult question of the quality of schools. Constant pressure from the public forces them to monitor and improve the provision of public services, and continually enhance their own performance in order to achieve long-term existential security. These facts consequently require a comprehensive measurement of their performance. This opens up opportunities for applying the concept of Value For Money based on the principles of New Public Management. The purpose of the scientific study is to show the potential uses of Value for Money on the example of education. The suggestion of methodology of VFM to measure the performance in education presented in this study shows possibilities to measure, evaluate, monitor and achieve necessary and especially relevant information about the situation of education and subsequent decision-making not only for public forces, but also, it can be the suitable tool for public grammar schools themselves. The article is co-financed by the project VEGA 1/0651/17.


Author(s):  
Blessing M. Maumbe ◽  
Wallace J. Taylor

By the end of 2005, an emerging era of e-government had arrived in South Africa with the promise to transform public service delivery and the relationships between government, business and the citizens. E-government has been perceived as the second revolution in public management after the new public management of the 1980s (Saxena, 2005; Teicher, Hughes, & Dow, 2002). The advent of e-government information and services globally has brought increasing focus on the need to develop user-oriented quality Web portal services. Prior to this time, governments paid little attention to citizen service quality issues (Teicher et al., 2002).


Author(s):  
Stephen Bach ◽  
Ian Kessler

As human resource management (HRM) has developed as a field of study, the attention paid to public sector employment relations has been relatively limited. The preoccupation with the link between HR practice and corporate performance has been less applicable to public service organizations that are answerable to a range of stakeholders and in which HR policy has been geared to ensuring political accountability. There has been a recognition that the public sector confronts fiscal and political pressures that are altering HR practice. However, this observation has rarely been backed up by a sustained focus on people management in the public sector. This limited attention arises from characteristics of the sector. Defining the public sector is not straightforward because there are differences between countries in terms of the size, scope, and role of the sector.


Author(s):  
Dries Vansteenkiste ◽  
Estelle Swart ◽  
Piet Van Avermaet ◽  
Elke Struyf

Any answer to the question “What is professional development (PD) for inclusive education (IE)?” needs to be based on a deep understanding of the nature of IE. Taking fully into account its multileveled nature, encompassing inclusive practice, policy, advocacy, and philosophy, IE appears as a “glocal” phenomenon that is affected by institutions (e.g., accountability, new public management, and neoliberalism) with which it can resonate or collide, resulting in tensions within the educational field. These tensions complicate the endeavors of teachers to orient themselves and their actions because different institutions conceptualize teaching and the role of teachers differently, demanding different and sometimes conflicting things from them. Further, teachers also need to give meaning to perceived similarities, differences, and conflicts between these professionalisms and elements of their own professional identity. This results in specific concerns for teachers and imposes challenges for teachers’ agency. PD based on this understanding of IE refers to creating and exploiting spaces where the different actors involved address the complexities of, and coconstruct, a teaching profession that is inclusive. This conceptualization implies formal and informal, social and local, embedded, open-ended practices that can strengthen teacher agency. To do this, it needs to recognize the teacher as being at the center of PD. These spaces are experimental zones for the exertion of agency, incorporating transformative ideals which can involve developing a different behavior repertoire, changing the immediate professional context, or addressing contradictory institutions. As such, PD is not regarded as the prerequisite for IE, but as its consequence.


2019 ◽  
pp. 123-141
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Łęgocka ◽  

New public management, as well as institutional and market pressure, brought business-like requirements to HEIs. Their implementation resulted in profound changes in university governance. This paper presents a systematic literature review of the scholars’ perception of a quality system introduced by new public management and the corporatization of universities. The implications of the new practices and discourses for academic identity, university governance, power-balance, as well as the role of a scholar are investigated. The findings reveal that the underlying values and university culture stay in tension with managerialist ideology. The presence of the institutional logics approach in a university context was also examined. It enabled to analyze whether it was used in the context of providing insight into the academics’ perception of quality assurance systems.


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