scholarly journals Learning to manage public service organisations better: A scenario for teaching public administration

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45
Author(s):  
Russ Glennon ◽  
Ian Hodgkinson ◽  
Joanne Knowles
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Learning Organisation ◽  
Public Value ◽  
Public Managers ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Key Skills ◽  
New Knowledge

In the context of public value, it is argued that there is a need to adopt the learning organisation philosophy to manage public service organisations better. For collaborative work with public sector managers or in management education, a fictitious scenario is presented to develop the concept of the learning organisation as paradox. Faced with multiple and conflicting demands, public managers find it difficult to change organisational behaviour in response to new knowledge. The scenario demonstrates how learning organisation philosophy can be used to translate new knowledge into new behaviours. Key skills required for public managers to exploit the knowledge of all organisational members and confront the challenges of a contested concept, such as public value, are developed and comprise summarising evidence, making judgements, sharing thought processes on a contentious issue, and arriving at a consensus together. Contributions to public administration theory and practice are discussed.

Assessing the capacity for public value creation within leadership theories: Raising the argument

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandru V. Roman ◽  
Thomas McWeeney
Keyword(s):  
Public Choice ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Trust In Government ◽  
Leadership Theories ◽  
Public Value ◽  
Leadership Perspectives ◽  
The Creation

AbstractIn recent years, public administration has been targeted by multiple reform efforts. In multiple instances, such initiatives have been ideologically couched in public-choice perspectives and entrenched beliefs that government is the problem. One unavoidable consequence of this continued bout of criticism is the fact that government currently has a noticeably decreased capacity of boosting creation of public value. Within this context, there certainly is an important need for approaches that would counterbalance the loss of public value induced by market fundamentalism. This article suggests that leadership, as a concept of theory and practice, due to its partial immunity to the private-public dichotomy, can provide a pragmatic avenue for nurturing public interest and public value within the devolution of governance, a declining trust in government and a diminished governmental capacity to propagate the creation of public value. While this article critically examines and assesses the capacity of different leadership perspectives in terms of creating and maximizing public value, its primary scope is not the provision of definite answers but rather the instigation of a much necessary discussion.

scholarly journals Systematic Review of Public Value

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Sami ◽  
Ahmad Jusoh ◽  
Khalil Md Nor ◽  
Asmara Irfan ◽  
Muhammad Imran Qureshi
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Systematic Literature Review ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Public Management ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Public Value ◽  
Public Managers ◽  
Public Sector Organizations

Public value is a new and important concept in the field of public administration. A large number of researchers has focused on the concept of public value during the last 10 years or so. This concept gives a new idea of public management with the theme of people’s first approach to facilitate them. Public value creation is the main concern of public managers in today’s public sector organizations. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 413 articles published on the topic of public value in Scopus index journals from 1995 to 2018. A large number of articles on public value shows the importance of the concept of public value. This systematic literature review reveals that most of the work on public value has been done in developed countries like USA, UK, Australia, and Netherland and developing countries are far behind on the research of public value.

scholarly journals Interactive Political Leadership in Theory and Practice: How Elected Politicians May Benefit from Co-Creating Public Value Outcomes

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torfing ◽  
Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Political Leadership ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Public Value ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Public Managers ◽  
Benign Neglect ◽  
Private Actors

This paper argues that elected politicians may strengthen their political leadership role by initiating, orchestrating and engaging in the co-creation of public value outcomes. The collaborative turn in public value theory shows how public managers may mobilize the knowledge, ideas and resources of users, citizens and organized stakeholders, but it has so far neglected the role of elected politicians who tend to be reduced to a legitimizing sounding board for public managers aiming to advance public value creation in collaboration with a plethora of public and private actors. This paper seeks to compensate this benign neglect by advancing a new notion of ‘interactive political leadership’. This new construct aims to conceptualize the way that elected politicians may develop new and better policy solutions through a problem-focused interaction with relevant and affected actors from the economy and civil society, including users, volunteers, citizens and other lay actors. The theoretical argument about the development of interactive political leadership, which takes us beyond the traditional forms of sovereign political leadership that perceives politicians as ‘elected kings’, is illustrated by empirical examples drawn from local, national and supranation levels of government.

scholarly journals Paradigm shift from New Public Administration to New Public Management: theory and practice in Africa

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shikha Vyas-Doorgapersad
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
African Countries ◽  
New Public

The African continent is facing a number of administrative crises. The recent decline of public administration on the continent has forced some African countries to re-assess their governance systems. Their public service reforms are evidence of the emergence of New Public Management (NPM) for improved public sector administrative structures and operations. This article discusses the paradigm shifts from New Public Administration to New Public Management, as a means of meeting public administration challenges in Africa. At a contextual level, the paper examines the practical implementation by some African countries of NPM and the outcomes of NPM-led reform in these countries.Keywords: Public Administration (PA); New Public Administration (NPA); New Public Management (NPM); Public Value Management (PVM); paradigm; paradigm shift; public service reforms; governanceDisciplines: Public Management; Political Science; Sociology; Economics

Changes in public service motivation: Can public administration education help cultivate it?

2021 ◽  
pp. 002085232110243
Author(s):  
Wan-Ling Huang
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Service Motivation ◽  
Panel Survey ◽  
Latent Growth ◽  
Public Managers ◽  
Service Training ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Knowledge Delivery

This study aims to investigate the influence of public administration education on the development of college students' public service motivation over time. The data come from a four-wave panel survey of 868 Taiwanese undergraduate students who enrolled in college in 2015; 418 of them majored in public administration and 450 majored in business administration. Latent growth modeling was employed to capture a change of overall public service motivation and individual public service motivation dimensions. Our findings show that students' public service motivation tends to change during the college years, while public administration education may not significantly contribute to its development. Points for practitioners Research findings offer some implications for practice. Given that public service motivation seems to be changeable, it becomes relevant for public managers to invest in developing employees' motivation to serve and make a positive difference in others' lives. However, any in-service training aiming to foster employee public service motivation should not focus too much on knowledge delivery, but rather accentuate the establishment and practice of service values.

On Legitimacy: Is Public Administration Stigmatized?

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 770-794 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Moura ◽  
Hugh T. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Professional Responsibilities ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Definition Of

Public administration scholarship has a long-standing tradition of examining the legitimacy of public administration. One of the motives behind this literature is the necessity to defend against constant criticisms directed toward public administration research, theory, and practice. In this article, we shift the focus from defending public administration by conceptualizing and accepting it as an illegitimate and stigmatized institution—one that cannot and should not rid itself of this label. Accepting and presupposing this label of illegitimacy, independent from any particular definition of legitimacy, allows scholars and practitioners to focus on creating new knowledge and performing professional responsibilities.

Is “We” Singular? The Nature of Public Value

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Prebble
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Public Value ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Managers ◽  
Democratic Discourse

Since publication two decades ago, Moore’s theory of public value has become a significant concept in public administration, especially for teaching public managers. A feature of the theory is that public value is assessed by arbiters. These arbiters include a “public as a whole,” which is a disembodied singular entity that is different from the sum of its parts. The idea of arbitration by a public as a whole is critically examined by considering its possible sources, comparison with individualistic bases for arbitration (especially democratic discourse), and exploring the implications of arbitration by the public as a whole. The conclusion is that the public as a whole is an unsuccessful concept which does not assist the theory of public value and which creates significant practical problems for practitioners by understating the degree of ambiguity that is inherent in the pursuit of public value.

Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Donald C. Stone

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-18
Author(s):  
Howard Rosen ◽  
Winifred J. Weizer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Professional Associations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Global Society ◽  
The Impact

Donald C. Stone, the founder of the American Public Works Association, died in 1995 at the age of 92. Professor Stone's life was a deliberate mix of public administration theory and public service practice. He is best known for his contributions to the implementation of the Marshall Plan, the organization of the executive office of the President of the United States, and the establishment of action-oriented professional associations serving a global society. This article is a reflection on the life and times of Donald Stone. It is also a call for historians to critically assess the impact of Stone and his colleagues on public works and public administration history, theory, and practice.

How managers and students view public service: The theoretical vs. practical divide

2021 ◽  
pp. 014473942110130
Author(s):  
John R Wood ◽  
Kenneth Kickham
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Group Membership ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Descriptive Statistics ◽  
Analysis Of Covariance ◽  
Public Administrators ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Management Concepts ◽  
Analysis Of Results

This paper examines existing management concepts and practices that make up three contemporary approaches to public policy and public administration. We attempt to understand whether municipal public administrators and public administration graduate students validate these perspectives in “reality” versus “ideally.” Addressing the extent to which practicing public administrators and students identify with theoretical frameworks, which one(s) they deem most prominent, and how closely their preferred frameworks correspond to what they see in practice, we offer an exploratory analysis of results from 176 respondents through descriptive statistics, paired-sample t-tests, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). We hypothesize significant differences with respect to 1) what is preferred and what is perceived in the workplace, 2) group membership (administrator, graduate student, or undergraduate student), and 3) gender (female or male). This research will help public administration educators bridge the gap between theory and practice and narrow the distance between the “is” and the “ought.”

scholarly journals Convergence of Social Marketing and Public Administration: Democratizing Value Creation

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Leon M. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Communication Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Communication Media ◽  
Public Value ◽  
Quality Of Democracy ◽  
The Public

Abstract This article aims to explain the interface between advances in civilization and advances in communication. The article also addresses the inadequacy of public administration literature to explain why communication media is important to its theory and practice. Subsequently, the article explicates why communication media contribute to the public administrator’s ability to improve the quality of democracy. The literature on communication media and public administration provide conceptual data that indicates how communication media continuously contributed to the public administrator’s ability to manage large disparate social-economic units. Network theory and administrative communication theory indicate why communication networks improve institutional effectiveness and efficiency. The literature confirms the need for clarity on how the interface between communication media and public administration increases public value and improves the quality of democracy. Network theory is a viable strategy for increasing the public administrators’ ability to increase public value.

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