As a subfield of Public Administration that is primarily concerned with improving performance within state institutions, administrative reform fails to fulfill its goals in developing countries due ...to the ethnocentricity of ready-made and replicable global strategies. Administrative reforms as top-down models of development marginalize local implementers who neither understand nor support the full adoption of the assigned models. Drawing on the significance of an all-inclusive synergy among local stakeholders for successful change, this study introduces the Blue Ocean strategy as an innovative managerial approach reflecting the temporal and spatial particularities of developing countries’ operational contexts. This study builds a conceptual framework for reforming public and non-profit sectors in developing countries in light of the guidelines of the Blue Ocean strategy as the expression of local stakeholders’ goal of improving organizational performance in compliance with existing opportunities and challenges. In doing so, it examines how the managers and employees of an Egyptian non-profit organization have benefited from the Blue Ocean strategy in improving their NGO’s performance through the adoption of effective strategic planning that restructured human resources functions and boosted employees’ productivity. The author conducted seven open-ended and semi-structured expert interviews with a selection of the NGO’s working staff and two managers in order to depict how the Blue Ocean strategy has enabled them to formulate and implement human resources strategic management as a customized administrative reform conforming to contextual exigencies.
The digital transformation of public administration is expected to fundamentally reshape the institutional setting of local service delivery, administration, and governance in Europe. Against this ...background, it is a cause for concern and criticism that the actual state of implementation, the impacts, and the hurdles faced at the local level of government have only scarcely been studied in public administration. The results of this study reveal several unintended and negative impacts of digital government reforms on public employees and citizens. This article provides policy-makers and managers with guiding principles for the implementation of digital change in organizations.
This article analyzes the administrative reforms that took place in the national governments of Portugal and Spain in the last 100 years. The shifts of administrative paradigms are the bureaucratic ...transition, the managerialist transition and the digital transition. The dimensions of analysis are the doctrines of the reforms; their justifications and underlying values; policy leadership, implementation styles and instruments; and resistance to change. We conducted a systematic literature review consulting 33 peer-reviewed articles on public management paradigms and 46 on administrative reforms in Portugal and Spain, and analyzed 32 official documents on the theme. The results show that the digital transition, compared with the two previous reforms, has relied on networked policy entrepreneurship, various instruments for policy change (beyond regulation), integration of values and a shift in the pattern of resistance to change. The article concludes that incremental changes occur between administrative reforms (punctuations), and the introduction of instruments inspired by one public management paradigm does not halt or replace the introduction of other instruments derived from other paradigms. Points for practitioners: Portugal and in Spain are vivid examples where public administration reforms have become more frequent and integrative of normative values. Over time, policy change leadership has moved down the organizational hierarchy and even been outsourced to external agents. Also, diversity of policy instruments has expanded, and the patterns of resistance to reforms shifted from a political/ideological type of resistance to a human/organizational type. The discursiveness of “new public governance” has ceded to the digital transformation of public administration.
The purpose of the study is to identify the content of modern administrative reform and the characteristics of its impact on the quality and efficiency of public administration in Russia. The ...methodological basis of the study includes the dialectical, systemic, comparative historical and comparative legal approaches. The formal legal method, methods of data collection, analysis of secondary data, methods of analysis, induction, legal comparative studies were also used herein. The results of the study showed that state reform, contributing to a successful democratic transition to a developed social and legal state, is implemented by eliminating excessive centralization of state power, creating conditions for business development, removing excessive government interference and administrative barriers, ensuring competition and countering corruption. The introduction of criteria for the effectiveness of performance evaluation, monitoring and public control of the state apparatus contributes to real public control. Based on the results of the study, priority trends in the deployment of modern state reform were identified and the author’s recommendations for its further improvement were formulated. Moreover, it was noted that the central directions of improving the system of public administration, in which systematic work is being carried out are the reduction of excessive government regulation; improving the quality of public services; increasing the efficiency of government bodies; increasing information transparency, overcoming corruption. The novelty of the work lies in the identified features of the political and administrative culture of Russia in the context of its constructive influence on the nature of modern administrative reform. Moreover, it includes the implementation of a systematic analysis of the modern Russian administrative reform and a comprehensive assessment of its results, consisting not only in improving the quality of public services provided to the population, but also in strengthening the vertical of executive power. Proposals have been developed to improve the organizational and legal mechanisms of state reform.
The author examines the problem of forming new foundations of the managerial ethos in the Rus-sian Empire in the first years of the reign of Alexander II. As an example, there is analyzed the Note of ...legal adviser of the Naval Ministry V.E. Wrangel, as well as the opinions of high-ranking officials on it. The purpose of the research is to establish the foundations of new ethical standards that the authorities intended to apply to officials. The article shows an important aspect of the problem of reforming the administrative apparatus - the change in the moral character of senior officials, most of whom were never classified by either contemporaries or researchers as the so-called enlightened bureaucracy. There are also identified new ethical standards that laid the basis for the formation of new ethical principles. The author comes to the conclusion that the appearance of the Note indicated the continuation and acceleration of the important process of professionalization of the bureaucracy, a change in the moral guidelines of officials, which was fully consistent with the very spirit of the times. Although the Note itself was never officially enforced, the problems it raised, and the changes planned served as an important basis for the development of new manage-rial ethos in the future.
Transparency is today considered as a key feature of good governance. Almost undisputed, the concept has gained importance in both academic and practitioners' circles due to its strong intrinsic ...and/or instrumental value. Recent years have seen the emergence of the open-data movement and its growing impact on government policies. Nevertheless, evidence related to impacts on transparency remains fragmented. This study aims to contribute to the field of research on transparency and open data by providing a conceptual clarification and by showing how both concepts are related and perceived in the Swiss public administration. This allows avoiding further confusion and better understanding the relation between the two notions. Moreover, this contribution also explores the implementation of the open-data logic in Switzerland. Although it does not participate in the Open Government Partnership, an international platform of 75 governments committed to making their activities more transparent, the country launched the federal Open Government Data project in 2015 with the aim of establishing an open-data culture within the administration. However, implementation of the open-data logic has been rather halting so far. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with civil servants in Switzerland, this contribution identifies four main types of barriers that impact on the uptake of open data in Switzerland: cultural, institutional, individual and economic.
Introduction. The article examines the situation in the existing historiography on the interpretation of the essence of the transformations in Russia under Ivan the Terrible in the middle of the XVI ...century, especially the administrative reforms of the highest, central and local institutions of the state, especially since in recent literature there have been significant disputes about the foreign and domestic policy of this monarch, including direct apologetics of his rule, atypical for Russian historiography in general, including in relation to this transformative subject.
Materials and methods. The author of the article does not limit himself to listing controversial points in this topic and evaluating them by a number of, first of all, Soviet and modern Russian researchers, but also in some cases expresses his point of view, for example, on the issue of the abolition of feeding in that era, with which the author does not agree, regarding the extreme originality of local government reforms in in connection with the admission of elements of electability and self-government of territories, which, from his point of view, has not been sufficiently addressed in historiography.
Results. The author also shows the specifics of the central state institutions (orders) that developed in that era, expresses his position with regard to the characteristics of the zemstvo councils that originate with the reforms of the so-called Izbrannaj Rada.
Conclusion. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that today in the historiography of the reforms, the general picture of the existing model of the administrative system is clearly visible - with the admission of an elective beginning at the local level and the preservation of the previous orders at the central and higher levels (albeit with some limitation of the system of parochialism). The resolution of the essence of the problem associated with the reforms of Ivan the Terrible of that time is hardly completely possible due to a very limited number of sources, but this era itself is interesting precisely because of its alternativeness in the history of the Russian political system, as an option, not carried out to the end for very specific reasons.
Reforms are usually come out when a country is encountering a crisis. When Japan was totally destructed at the end of World War II, a crisis of identity and public trust to the government, together ...with the tight supervision and intervention of Allied power under the SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Power), gave all possibilities for the significant economic and political reforms in the country. During the period of Allied occupation in 1945-1952, therefore, Japanese monolithic political system and the strong adherence to the Emperor have been changed into a more democratic and pluralistic system. This fundamental change established a strong basis for Japan to boost economic activities with even higher growth. However, it is proved that administrative or bureaucratic reforms have not been successful during that period. There were still much politicking and vested interests involved in the bureaucratic system which was influenced by hegemonic and crony system. This was because SCAP adopted an "indirect administration system" during the occupation period with lack of commitment for administrative reforms. There are some lessons which can be learnt by Indonesian policy makers. Among others, one important thing is that bureaucrats are usually havk. a high resilience for administrative reforms. To materialize a big change, reformers have to consider the culture and conduct reform with a strong political will and commitment.
The aim of this article is to categorise the factors of tension in public organisational settings. The context of the administrative reforms undertaken in Tunisia has been chosen as an empirical ...illustration of the public governance tensions associated with managerial artefacts. The study focuses on three types of factors. An analysis of these factors confirms the theories on the appropriation of management tools and helps raise the existing level of knowledge in relation to the processes to mitigate public governance tensions within public organisations.
Points for practitioners
Today, the modernisation of public governance goes hand in hand with the introduction of new public management tools in administrative settings. On a practical level, the appropriation of these tools generates a tense relationship between political decision-makers and public managers. Often perceived from the perspective of paradoxical demands and antagonistic relationships that disrupt the daily life of state organisations, public governance tensions can be managed as long as they are identified and categorised in the light of the factors of tension associated with the reforms undertaken.
The article presents materials on the intermediary role of Tatar mullahs in the process of implementing administrative reforms in the 20–30s of 19th century on the territory of the Middle and Junior ...zhuzes. The Tatar mullahs, both with the diwan okruzhnoy prikaz, the volost sultans of the Siberian Kazakh region and with the three parts (Western, Middle, Eastern) of the Orenburg Kazakh region, were engaged not only in explaining the rules of the imperial laws in the Kazakh Steppe. In fact, the range of their activities was wide: taking the oath of senior sultans and sultan rulers, organizing paperwork, teaching Kazakh children Tatar literacy, collecting information about inner political events in Kazakh nomads for the regional administration and St. Petersburg, tracking the mood of the Kazakh population and the behavior of the Kazakh nomadic elite representatives.
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