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Advances in public management sciences have long indicated the empirical finding that the normal state of public management systems is complex and that its dynamics are non-linear. Complex systems are subject to system pressures, system shocks, chance events, path-dependency and self-organisation. Arguing that complexity is an ever-present characteristic of our developed societies and governance systems that should be accepted, understood and adopted into management strategies, the original essays collected in this book aim to increase our understanding of complex governance processes and to propose new strategies for how public managers can deal with complexity in order to achieve high-qual...
Critical approaches to leadership studies have sought to challenge the normative position of leadership as residing solely within the formal leader and have gone as far as to undermine the traditionally held assumption of leadership as a "real" phenomenon. The book offers a critical account of the nature of leadership and management in modern organizations. Specifically it examines the forces that affect the influence relationships between leaders and followers in public sector organizational settings and thus, how these relationships inform social influence processes. Although the book focuses on the case of a public sector organization in the UK, the findings are placed in the context of both leadership theory and research across the globe and the dissemination of 'new public management' worldwide. By acknowledging the criticisms concerning the weaknesses of conventional or mainstream leadership study and through the adoption of a critical perspective, Critical Leadership provides a deep and rich interpretation of the empirical material on leadership, thus making an outstanding contribution to the current literature.
Complexity, complex systems and complexity theories are becoming increasingly important within a variety disciplines. While these issues are less well known within the discipline of spatial planning, there has been a recent growing awareness and interest. As planners grapple with how to consider the vagaries of the real world when putting together proposals for future development, they question how complexity, complex systems and complexity theories might prove useful with regard to spatial planning and the physical environment. This book provides a readable overview, presenting and relating a range of understandings and characteristics of complexity and complex systems as they are relevant to planning. It recognizes multiple, relational approaches of dynamic complexity which enhance understandings of, and facilitate working with, contingencies of place, time and the various participants' behaviours. In doing so, it should contribute to a better understanding of processes with regard to our physical and social worlds.
Public administration as a field of study finds itself in the middle of a fluid environment. The very reach and complexity of public administration has been easy to take for granted, easy to attack, and difficult to explain, particularly in the soundbite and Twitter-snipe media environment. Not only has the context for the discipline changed, but the institutions of public administration have adapted and innovated to deliver services to the public and serve those in power while becoming increasingly complex themselves. Has public administration evolved? And what new lines of research are critical for effective policy and delivery of programs and public services while preserving foundational ...
Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment. Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this "smartness mandate"? How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding—and managing—reality? How have we come to see the planet and its denizens first and foremost as data-collecting instruments? In The Smartness Mandate, Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that "smartness" is not pri...
In order to address major social policy problems, governments need to break down sectoral barriers and create better working relationships between practitioners, policymakers and researchers. Currently, major blockages exist, and stereotypes abound. Academics are seen as out-of-touch and unresponsive, policymakers are perceived to be justifying policy decisions, and the community sector seeks more funding without demonstrating efficacy. These stereotypes are born out of a lack of understanding of the work and practices that exist across these three sectors. Drawing on ground-breaking research and partnerships, with contributions from senior public servants, this book explores the competing d...
Politicians and public managers utilize branding to communicate with the public as well as to position themselves within the ever-present media now so central to political and administrative life. They must further contend with stakeholders holding contradictory opinions about the nature of a problem, the desirable solutions , and the values at stake. Branding is used as a strategy to manage perceptions, motivate stakeholders, communicate clear messages in the media, and position policies and projects. Brands have a unique ability to simplify such messages and motivate different actors to invest their energy in governance processes. Public administration scholars so far have however paid lit...
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Global Legitimacy Crises addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative a...
Polarization is widely diagnosed as a major cause of the decline of evidence-based policy making and public engagement-based styles of policy making. It creates an environment where hardened partisan viewpoints on major policy questions are less amenable to negotiation, compromise or change. Polarization is not a temporary situation – it is the “new normal.” Public Policy, Governance and Polarization seeks to provide a theoretical foundation for scholars and policy makers who need to understand the powerful and often disruptive forces that have arisen in Europe and North America over the past decade. Academics and practitioners need to better understand this growing trend and to find ways in which it may be managed so that policy solutions to these threats may be developed and implemented. Researchers and future policymakers in fields such as public administration, public management and public policy need to recognise how institutional design, corporatist interest group systems and different pedagogical approaches may help them understand, discuss and work beyond policy polarization. Edited by two leading political science scholars, this book aims to begin that process.
This book applies interactive perspectives, which have historically mainly been discussed in the context of Western European countries, to case studies on water governance in Asia. It examines how these perspectives can be used to reveal complex and dynamic interactions in water governance in Asia, and how interactions between policies and practices, as well as those between formal institutes and emerging informal institutes, come to pass. In two introductory chapters and seven case studies in Asia (two from China, and each one from Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India), the book reveals the interactive forms currently emerging in Asia under hierarchical but often fragmente...