Governments contract both for products and services that are inputs into what government produces (ranging from office supplies or computers on the desks of government employees to fighter aircraft ...or cost-benefit studies of a proposed regulation) and for actual government outputs (including debt collection for delinquent college student loans, operation of customer service hotlines, garbage collection, and delivery of job training). In all, the U.S. federal government spends about $200 billion a year buying goods and services, an amount equivalent to about 30 percent of discretionary spending.¹
It is tempting to believe that when government makes the decision that something
This chapter will explore organisational change in government with the aim of enhancing productivity or bringing about service delivery improvements. Specifically, in the context of government ...austerity and budget cutbacks, I will discuss how we can unleash change as a response to those conditions. In particular, I will focus on how we can initiate a change process and then how we can consolidate it to good effect. My perspective will be one of a manager at any level, from a Director-General or Minister right down to a frontline supervisor. The chapter is based on my bookUnleashing Change(Kelman 2005).
A noteworthy example of public sector performance management was launched by the UK's Labour government in 1997. Starting in 1998, departments established a central capacity to deal with "public ...service agreements" negotiated with Treasury and the performance of frontline units in its domain. In 2001 the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU) was established to work on prime ministerial priorities involving 21 targets in four departments. This paper examines the role of central government in contributing to performance improvement where actual performance is delivered by dispersed subunits. It seeks to identify techniques the central government uses for performance management, and asks whether these techniques appear likely to have positive effects on performance. It develops a framework using concepts from organization theory and uses it to evaluate the activities and effectiveness of the PMDU in influencing frontline service delivery.
Behavioral Public Administration Kelman, Steven
Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings,
01/2015, Letnik:
2015, Številka:
1
Conference Proceeding
Compared with other societies, the United States makes unusually extensive use of adversary institutions for resolving public conflicts--that is, institutions where the job of advocates is to present ...for a third party the strongest possible case for their own point of view and where responsibility for actual political choice is then left to the third party. This article presents a case for placing greater reliance on "cooperationist institutions," that is, ones where parties talk with each other rather than to a third party and where the parties attempt to reach agreement among themselves, acceptable to most or all the participants, about the issue in question. The case for cooperationist institutions is argued in terms of the effects of such an institutional design on the development of public spirit among participants in the policymaking process. The article also considers objections against cooperationist institutions and concludes by making some suggestions about the concrete forms that such institutions might take in the United States.
