The article analyzes the design and development of health services in Germany and France—two countries with similar welfare states but with striking differences in their national regulatory styles. ...Using these comparative cases, I show how the interplay of long-term institutional factors and short-term political factors shaped the establishment and development of these regulatory welfare states’ (RWS) social services. Specifically, I argue that the discovery of service quality in the 1990s had the potential to accelerate RWS development. In Germany, characterized by a corporatist state tradition and a cooperative regulatory style, the political debate on quality (either as a parameter of competition or as a concept for the professional consolidation of service production) had a greater influence on the design of the national quality regulation system (goals, instruments, processes, institutions) than in France, which is characterized by a state-centered Napoleonic tradition and a directive regulatory style.
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Active social and employment services are a crucial infrastructure of the welfare state. As these services are designed to help people in need of support to overcome periods of insecurity in their ...life course, their effective provision has also been seen as an element of the implementation of the social investment (SI) welfare state. However, the transition to the SI state is linked to numerous preconditions. This is especially true with regard to vulnerable people like the long-term unemployed (LTU). The provision of social services that meet the specific needs of this group requires the actors responsible for implementing social and employment policies to have adequate operative capacities. This article compares Germany and France as two European welfare states that – confronted with persistently high long-term unemployment – have taken different reform paths over the last 20 years that partly run counter to their political-administrative systemic conditions and governance traditions to meet this challenge. Empirically, the article draws on a systematic content analysis of selected policy documents and secondary literature. It is shown that the recent German reform path of combining central steering responsibility with local scope for action can be a way to come closer to a social investment-oriented service policy for the LTU. However, the article also reveals that neither state (yet) has the necessary operative capacities for a shift towards an SI state. Overall, the changes in the understanding of the SI paradigm and the welfare state's constant reluctance to invest in implementation capacity make its sustainable application unlikely.
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For more than 30 years, New Public Management has been the most popular label for public sector reform. For more than 15 years, however, New Public Management has also been heavily criticized. There ...is a growing trend to consider New Public Management as ‘dead’ and claim the evolution of a new reform trend, called post-New Public Management. Like New Public Management, post-New Public Management is an umbrella term that is used to prescribe and/or describe different reform trends. The aim of this article is to give a state of the art of recent post-New Public Management literature by discerning the manifold meanings of this label. For this purpose, a systematic review of 84 articles published in peer-reviewed high-quality journals has been conducted. The article shows that, so far, the post-New Public Management idea has been very influential as an ‘ideational weapon’ to indicate a crisis of the New Public Management model. The use of the post-New Public Management idea as a blueprint for future reform, however, still needs further treatment.
Points for practitioners
Since the 1980s, New Public Management has served as a toolbox for the reform of public administrations all over the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and beyond. In the course of its ‘pick and choose’ application, New Public Management has become an object of manifold criticism. In order to overcome the New Public Management ‘leftovers’, reformers of public management have reintroduced old concepts or invented new reform tools since the late 1990s. Systematically reviewing both theoretical and empirical academic works on this ‘post-New Public Management’ movement, we – inter alia – shed light on the question of whether ‘post-New Public Management’ can be considered a (new) model for practitioners of public management reform.
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This cross-country comparison of administrative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany and Sweden is aimed at exploring how institutional contexts and administrative cultures have ...shaped strategies of problem-solving and governance modes during the pandemic, and to what extent the crisis has been used for opportunity management. The article shows that in France, the central government reacted determinedly and hierarchically, with tough containment measures. By contrast, the response in Germany was characterized by an initial bottom-up approach that gave way to remarkable federal unity in the further course of the crisis, followed again by a return to regional variance and local discretion. In Sweden, there was a continuation of ‘normal governance’ and a strategy of relying on voluntary compliance largely based on recommendations and less – as in Germany and France – on a strategy of imposing legally binding regulations. The comparative analysis also reveals that relevant stakeholders in all three countries have used the crisis as an opportunity for changes in the institutional settings and administrative procedures.
Points for practitioners
COVID-19 has shown that national political and administrative standard operating procedures in preparation for crises are, at best, partially helpful. Notwithstanding the fact that dealing with the unpredictable is a necessary part of crisis management, a need to further improve the institutional preparedness for pandemic crises in all three countries examined here has also become clear. This should be done particularly by way of shifting resources to the health and care sectors, strengthening the decentralized management of health emergencies, stocking and/or self-producing protection material, assessing the effects of crisis measures, and opening the scientific discourse to broader arenas of experts.
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Public sector reforms used to be easier to understand in the past – or so it seems – especially during the heyday of New Public Management (NPM) from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Indeed, what ...Christopher Hood (1991) once called ‘New Public Management’ was a generalised reform programme that was implemented throughout the whole Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) world and beyond, at the supranational level as well as at the national and local levels. It was all about business-like changes in public sector organisations (e.g. corporatisation), including the replacement of hierarchical coordination by competition, the market mechanism as a possible modus operandi for improving the efficiency of public services, the introduction of a product culture intended to strengthen accountability and so on (Lindberg et al., 2015: 3). Without doubt, the reality has always been much more complex than the NPM label suggested. NPM has been an umbrella concept covering various reform features. However, it was not until the early 2000s that a rising number of publications acknowledged the huge variety of reform paths at the national, regional and local levels, as well as across different service sectors. In this context, various authors also pointed to an increasing differentiation in public sector goals, particularly efficiency, quality and accountability, and to the contingency of reform measures. Scholars of public administration frequently use the rather vague term of ‘post-NPM’ (cf. Christensen and Laegreid, 2007; De Vries and Nemec, 2013) to describe the overall reform picture, which has since created a hybridisation of both the public sector as such and the organisations operating within it. Like NPM, post-NPM is a ‘shopping basket’ (Christensen, 2012: 1) of selected reform elements. The post-NPM selection, however, differs decisively from the NPM selection. The post-NPM label embraces reforms seeking to improve coordination vertically between government and other actors and horizontally in terms of inter-agency coordination. Hence, post-NPM reforms pay attention to a holistic management style, boundary-spanning skills and joined-up targets. They aim to improve the steering capacity of the centre. However, civil servants are thought to be network managers and partnership leaders instead of being the pure business managers suggested by the NPM model (Christensen and Lægreid, 2007; Lodge and Gill, 2011).
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Focusing on the phase-coexistence region in Langmuir films of poly(l-lactide), we investigated changes in nonequilibrated morphologies and the corresponding features of the isotherms induced by ...different experimental pathways of lateral compression and expansion. In this coexistence region, the surface pressure Π was larger than the expected equilibrium value and was found to increase upon compression, i.e., exhibited a nonhorizontal plateau. As shown earlier by using microscopic techniques Langmuir 2019, 35, 6129–6136, in this plateau region, well-ordered mesoscopic clusters coexisted with a surrounding matrix phase. We succeeded in reducing Π either by slowing down the rate of compression or through increasing the waiting time after stopping the movement of the barriers, which allowed for relaxations in the coexistence region. Intriguingly, the most significant pressure reduction was observed when recompressing a film that had already been compressed and expanded, if the recompression was started from an area value smaller than the one anticipated for the onset of the coexistence region. This observation suggests a “self-seeding” behavior, i.e., pre-existing nuclei allowed to circumvent the nucleation step. The decrease in Π was accompanied by a transformation of the initially formed metastable mesoscopic clusters into a thermodynamically favored filamentary morphology. Our results demonstrate that it is practically impossible to obtain fully equilibrated coexisting phases in a Langmuir polymer film, neither under conditions of extremely slow continuous compression nor for long waiting times at a constant area in the coexistence region which allow for reorganization.
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Using optical microscopy and atomic force microscopy, we studied systematically crystallization patterns in thin films of a low molecular weight poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) resulting from a ...kinetically controlled self-seeding approach. In particular, the influence of seeding temperature (T s) and heating rate (V h) on the various resulting crystallization patterns was investigated. Crystallization at 49 °C resulted in dendritic PEO crystals consisting of almost exclusively twice-folded chains. Upon heating these crystals, we observed crystal thickening due to a reduction in the average number of chain folds. On the basis of the detected morphology, we deduced that the density of seeded PEO crystals decreased when increasing T s from 54 to 57 °C. At the highest V h (i.e., 100 °C/min), only a few well-separated faceted single crystals of PEO were grown from individual seeds. In contrast to such random distribution of crystals, because of a faster reduction of chain folds at the edges of PEO lamellae, an almost continuous sequence of seeded crystals was formed at the periphery of the original crystals at significantly lower V h (i.e., 10 °C/min). Interestingly, reflecting the different metastable states within the initial crystal resulting from seeding at T s = 54 °C, the seeding probability for crystals at the diagonals was higher than for the major side branches. In addition, we estimated activation energies (213–376 kJ/mol) for thickening of PEO lamellar crystal from an Arrhenius-type behavior of the lateral spreading rates as a function of V h. Our findings suggest that the interplay between thickening and melting of metastable states within the initial crystals is considered as responsible for the resulting nucleation density and crystal morphology induced by self-seeding.
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‘Social investment’ as an idea to justify social policy reforms has become more and more accepted in recent years and has decisively shaped agenda setting and policy formulation in European welfare ...states. The effectiveness of this new welfare state model, however, depends highly on the capacity to provide social services. Social services – job training, counselling and support for care work – are a key component of the social investment model. Drawing on the policy capacity approach, the article provides an analytical framework to study the ‘operational core’ of the social investment state. This implementation perspective allows us to assess whether governance actors actually have the resources to fulfil the social investment idea of enhancing citizens’ freedom to act. Empirically, the article concentrates on two selected European welfare states, Germany and France, countries with similar welfare systems but very different politico-administrative systems, and on two fields of social service provision that are addressed differently in the social investment debate: early childhood education and care (ECEC) and elderly care. Empirically, we use systematic content analysis to intensively study policy documents and secondary analyses. We show that both countries (still) lack policy capacities in these two sectors as a basis for resilient implementation of the social investment paradigm.
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Morphological variations of lamellae of isotactic polypropylene (iPP) grown in thin films have been examined experimentally by optical microscopy (OM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and transmission ...electron microscopy (TEM). A flower-shaped morphology of iPP crystals, composed of several petal-like lamellae radiating from a nucleus, was typically found. At crystallization temperatures (T c) below 135 °C, initially petal-like lamellae with a flat α-iPP backbone and many regular branches were formed, which were able to induce epitaxial nucleation of γ-iPP, resulting in features similar to a dendrite growing in the plane of the slow growth direction (i.e., b-axis of α-iPP). With increasing T c, these dendritic structures disappeared gradually, and the lamellae exhibited a faceted lath-like shape for T c > 150 °C. Interestingly, periodic lateral splitting (the crystal splayed into a pair of branches) at the fast growth plane was observed at a critical width (W max) which increased with T c. In particular, the measured temperature dependence of the products of W max 2 G (G represents the growth rate along the a*-axis) was found to be constant. We discuss the role of the diffusion field at the growth front and epitaxial crystallization with respect to morphological changes of iPP lamellae in thin films.
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We melted, annealed, and recrystallized ultrathin films of oriented polyethylene (PE) molecules prepared by melt-drawing. A large number of randomly oriented asymmetric leaf-shaped crystalline ...structures consisting of preferentially oriented lamellae were formed simultaneously, as observed by optical and atomic force microscopies. The structural arrangement within these leaf-shaped crystalline structures was identified by grazing incidence X-ray diffraction. These structures consisted of two distinct sections, both differing strongly from circular spherulites obtained by crystalizing an isotropic melt. Besides, regions containing groups of stacks of slightly inclined but well-aligned flat-on lamellae and regions of less orderly arranged edge-on lamellae were found. When increasing the annealing temperature and/or annealing time, a change in morphology from the leaf-shaped crystalline structures to spherulites with two symmetric “eyes” was observed. Intriguingly, the annealing times required for such a change in crystalline morphology were about four orders of magnitude longer than the longest bulk relaxation time (reptation time). Because the appearance of spherulites indicates that films became equilibrated and reached a state of an isotropic melt before recrystallization, we may conclude that oriented PE chains in ultrathin films possessed a long-term memory of the preparation-induced chain stretching. Considering that the morphology and relaxation kinetics of PE films depended appreciably on the substrate properties and film thickness, we conclude that the formation of asymmetric leaf-shaped crystalline structures was also affected by the interaction of PE chains with the substrate and spatial confinement. The present results may shed new light on slow relaxation and reorganization processes encountered when long-chain polymers became oriented during sample processing.
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