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The Handbook of Public Organization Management: Bureaucracy, Accountability, and Performance in Government Agencies A Graduate Text for Public Adminis
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ISBN13: 9798193301899
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 460
Weight: 2.33
Height: 0.93 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 460
Weight: 2.33
Height: 0.93 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
Run it like a business.
Every public manager hears it. The advice is confident, widely repeated, and it fails in ways that could
have been predicted before anyone tried.
A manager in government may act only on authority that can be traced to a source. They answer to
several principals who disagree with one another and none of whom can overrule the rest. Their
Every public manager hears it. The advice is confident, widely repeated, and it fails in ways that could
have been predicted before anyone tried.
A manager in government may act only on authority that can be traced to a source. They answer to
several principals who disagree with one another and none of whom can overrule the rest. Their
objectives arrive from a political process that transmits its unresolved disagreements rather than
settling them. They frequently cannot observe the outcomes their work is supposed to produce. Their
money arrives through instruments that generate predictable and perverse behaviour. They are held to
account through four different relationships that detect different failures and are blind to one another's.
And a growing share of what they answer for is delivered by organizations they do not employ.
None of that is dysfunction. Nearly all of it follows from things a democratic society reasonably insists
upon. But a manager who has not been taught to see it will spend a career frustrated by constraints they
have misdiagnosed, applying techniques whose assumptions do not hold, and surprised by
consequences that were entirely foreseeable.
This book treats those conditions as the subject rather than the background. Working from a single
frame - authority, ambiguity, and accountability - it shows where room to act actually comes from,
why it closes, and what competence looks like when it cannot be widened.
What this book helps you do:
- Trace a proposed action from its constitutional source through the enabling law to the instrument
being used, before the decision rather than after it.
- Recognise which kind of goal ambiguity you are facing, and why the type governs what can be
measured and what cannot.
- Anticipate how a performance measure will be gamed, and design the set so the distortion stays
visible.
- Read the field of political authority around an agency instead of asking who is in charge of it.
- Diagnose why a rule is producing delay, and tell the rules that work from the ones that only
accumulate.
- Supervise frontline discretion where policy is actually settled, rather than pretending it can be
removed.
- Judge what a contract or a delivery network can carry, and where accountability goes when the
work moves outside. Key topics: the legal and constitutional architecture of administrative authority; oversight and the
problem of many masters; structure, formalisation, and red tape; mission, goal ambiguity, and culture;
decision-making under bounded rationality; motivation, values, and the ethics of office; leadership
without command; frontline discretion and administrative burden; budgets and fiscal constraint;
performance measurement and its distortions; accountability and control; collaboration, networks, and
contracting; why reform recurs; and crisis, reliability, and algorithmic administration.
Who it is for: graduate and professional students in public administration and public policy, and
practitioners who want the analytic apparatus behind decisions they are already making. No prior
coursework is assumed.
Start with the chapter that matches the problem in front of you, and build the frame that turns a
constraint you resented into one you can work.
settling them. They frequently cannot observe the outcomes their work is supposed to produce. Their
money arrives through instruments that generate predictable and perverse behaviour. They are held to
account through four different relationships that detect different failures and are blind to one another's.
And a growing share of what they answer for is delivered by organizations they do not employ.
None of that is dysfunction. Nearly all of it follows from things a democratic society reasonably insists
upon. But a manager who has not been taught to see it will spend a career frustrated by constraints they
have misdiagnosed, applying techniques whose assumptions do not hold, and surprised by
consequences that were entirely foreseeable.
This book treats those conditions as the subject rather than the background. Working from a single
frame - authority, ambiguity, and accountability - it shows where room to act actually comes from,
why it closes, and what competence looks like when it cannot be widened.
What this book helps you do:
- Trace a proposed action from its constitutional source through the enabling law to the instrument
being used, before the decision rather than after it.
- Recognise which kind of goal ambiguity you are facing, and why the type governs what can be
measured and what cannot.
- Anticipate how a performance measure will be gamed, and design the set so the distortion stays
visible.
- Read the field of political authority around an agency instead of asking who is in charge of it.
- Diagnose why a rule is producing delay, and tell the rules that work from the ones that only
accumulate.
- Supervise frontline discretion where policy is actually settled, rather than pretending it can be
removed.
- Judge what a contract or a delivery network can carry, and where accountability goes when the
work moves outside. Key topics: the legal and constitutional architecture of administrative authority; oversight and the
problem of many masters; structure, formalisation, and red tape; mission, goal ambiguity, and culture;
decision-making under bounded rationality; motivation, values, and the ethics of office; leadership
without command; frontline discretion and administrative burden; budgets and fiscal constraint;
performance measurement and its distortions; accountability and control; collaboration, networks, and
contracting; why reform recurs; and crisis, reliability, and algorithmic administration.
Who it is for: graduate and professional students in public administration and public policy, and
practitioners who want the analytic apparatus behind decisions they are already making. No prior
coursework is assumed.
Start with the chapter that matches the problem in front of you, and build the frame that turns a
constraint you resented into one you can work.
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