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Why does public management—the art of the state—so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service, and what are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services, and are the forces of modernity set to produce worldwide convergence in ways of organizing government? This study aims to explore such questions, which are central to debates over public management. It combines contemporary and historical experience, and employs grid/group cultural theory as an organizing frame and method of exploration. Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services—and contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues that variety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management. The book has three parts. Part I, Introductory, has three chapters that discuss various aspects of public management. Part II, Classic and Recurring Ideas in Public Management, has four chapters that discuss various ways of doing public management. Part III, Rhetoric, Modernity, and Science in Public Management, has three chapters that discuss the rhetoric, and culture of public management, contemporary public management, and the state of the art of the state.

Recent reforms in welfare states generate new challenges to social citizenship. Social citizenship depends on the readiness of voters to support reciprocity and social inclusion and their trust in welfare state institutions as services that will meet their needs. Reform programmes in most western countries combine New Public Management, linking market competition and regulation by targets to achieve greater efficiency and responsiveness to service-users, and welfare-to-work and make-work-pay activation policies to manage labour market change. Both developments rest on a rational actor approach to human motivation. The UK has pursued the reform programme with more vigour than any other major European country and provides a useful object less of its strengths and limitations. The book provides a detailed analytic account of social science approaches to agency. It shows that the rational actor approach has difficulties in explaining how social inclusion and social trust arise. Policies based on it provide weak support for these aspects of citizenship. It is attractive to policy-makers seeking solutions to the problem of improving the efficiency and responsiveness of welfare systems in a more globalised world, in which citizens are more critical and the authority of national governments is in decline. Recent reform programmes were undertaken to meet real pressures on existing patterns of provision. They have been largely successful in maintaining mass services but risk undermining social inclusion and eroding trust in public welfare institutions. In the longer term, they may destroy the social citizenship essential to sustain welfare states.

Regulation Inside Government analyses the army of inspectors, auditors, grievance‐chasers, standard‐setters, and other bodies overseeing contemporary public organizations. On the basis of a pioneering two‐year inside study of British Government by a team of leading scholars, this book provides an original analytical perspective on regulation within government. Given the limitations of orthodox constitutional checks on executive government, the courts, and elected politicians, regulation inside government deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. As one of the first comprehensive accounts of regulation inside government, this book begins to fill the gap. The empirical data for the study sets out the full range of modes of control applied to the public sector. The authors examine the relationship between formal oversight, of the traditional regulatory sort, with other forms of control based on competition, mutuality, and contrived randomness. They conclude that there is a failure in contemporary public management to deploy each of these modes of control to their full potential.

This book examines the issues central to the study of strategic management in a global context. The key premise of this book is that developing an understanding of global strategic management requires analytic tools different from those of purely domestic strategies. As global integration between companies and countries continues to march forward, managers and strategy researchers will have to find new ways to deal with globalization. The various topics examined in this book are intended to provide guidance as to how to deal with the realities of globalization and strategic management. The book goes beyond the boundaries of received wisdom to examine some of the practical realities that have yet to receive theoretical scrutiny. The book blends theoretical insights that form the mainstay for strategy students with the practical relevance that international managers should find valuable. A series of issues, scenarios, and decision areas associated with global strategy choices are presented. The case study illustrations offer insights into many of the issues that both international strategy researchers and practitioners are currently grappling with.

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in organizations and the management of their impact has been the traditional domain of computer specialists and management consultants. The former have offered multiple ways to represent, model, and build applications that streamline and accelerate data flows, while the latter have been busy linking the deployment of ICTs with strategy and the redesign of business processes. This book takes quite a different approach altogether. It uses a string of metaphors, such as Bricolage, Krisis, Gestell, etc., to place a concern for human existence and our working lives at the centre of the study of ICTs and their diffusion in business organizations, and looks at our practices, improvisations, and moods. It draws upon the author's own extensive research and consulting experience to throw a fresh light on some key questions: why are systems ambiguous? Why do they not give us more time to do things? Is there strategic value in tinkering even in high-tech settings? What is the value of age-old practices in dealing with new technologies? What is the role of moods and affections in influencing action and cognition? The book presents an alternative to the current approaches in management, software-engineering, and strategy.

The era of economic liberalization, spanning 1978 to 2008, is often regarded as a period in which government was simply dismantled. In fact, government was reconstructed to meet the needs of a globalized economy. Central banking, fiscal control, tax collection, regulation, port and airport management, infrastructure development—in all of these areas, radical reforms were made to the architecture of government. A common philosophy shaped all of these reforms: the logic of discipline. It was premised on deep skepticism about the ability of democratic processes to make sensible policy choices. It sought to impose constraints on elected officials and citizens, often by shifting power to technocrat-guardians who were shielded from political influence. It placed great faith in the power of legal changes—new laws, treaties, and contracts—to produce significant alterations in the performance of governmental systems. Even before the global economic crisis of 2007-2009, the logic of discipline was under assault. Faced with many failed reform projects, advocates of discipline realized that they had underestimated the complexity of governmental change. Opponents of discipline emphasized the damage to democratic values that followed from the empowerment of new groups of technocrat-guardians. The financial crisis did further damage to the logic of discipline, as governments modified their attitudes about central bank independence and fiscal control, and global financial and trade flows declined. It was the market that now appeared to behave myopically and erratically, and which now insisted that governments should abandon precepts about the role of government that it had once insisted were inviolable. An account of neoliberal governmental restructuring across the world, The Logic of Discipline offers an analysis of how this undemocratic model is unravelling in the face of a monumental and ongoing failure of the market.

This book reflects the author's experience across more than forty years in assessing and helping to shape policy about nuclear weapons, mostly at senior levels close to the centre both of British governmental decision-making and of NATO's development of plans and deployments, with much interaction also with comparable levels of United States activity in the Pentagon and the State Department. From this exceptional background of practical experience Part I of this book seeks to distill basic conceptual ways of understanding the nuclear revolution—the transformation brought about by the existence of nuclear weapons, and their significance in preventing major war. It also surveys NATO's progressive development of thinking about nuclear deterrence, and then discusses the deep moral dilemmas posed—for all possible standpoints—by the existence of such weapons. Part II considers the risks and costs of nuclear-weapon possession, including proliferation dangers, and looks at both successful and unsuccessful ideas for risk-management. Part III illustrates specific issues by reviewing the history and current policies of one long-established possessor, the United Kingdom, and two more recent ones in South Asia. Part IV turns to the future, examines the goal of the eventual abolition of all nuclear armouries, and then discusses the practical agenda, short of such a goal, which governments can usefully tackle in reducing the risks of proliferation and other dangers while not surrendering prematurely the war-prevention benefits which nuclear weapons have brought since 1945.

This book examines the dynamics between informal groups of states and the UN Security Council in the management of conflicts in Namibia, El Salvador, and Kosovo. It sets forth three main arguments. Firstly, that informal groups of states are agents of incremental change. They proliferated in the 1990s out of the increasing demands on the United Nations to adapt to the new security environment of the post-bipolar world, without formally changing the constitutional foundation of the Organization. Secondly, that informal mechanisms may narrow the operational and participatory gap growing out of the multiple incapacities that prevent the Security Council from formulating an effective response to crisis situations. Informal groups of states may enhance Council governance if they strike a balance between competing demands of inclusiveness, efficiency, informality, transparency, and accountability. Thirdly, that the post-Cold War era has fostered an environment where the substance of conflict resolution and the process of its legitimation have become increasingly detached. The former tends to be delegated to informal groups or coalition of states, while the Security Council provides the latter. The successful merger of right process and substantive outcome may strengthen the legitimacy of the Council and make actions taken by informal settings more acceptable.

In the past few decades the number of women entering graduate and professional schools has been going up and up, while the number of women reaching the top rung of the corporate and academic worlds has remained relatively stagnant. Why are so many women falling off the fast track? This book traces the career paths of the first generation of ambitious women who started careers in academia, law, medicine, business, and the media in large numbers in the 1970s and '80s. Many women who had started families but continued working had ended up veering off the path to upper management at a point the author calls “the second glass ceiling.” Rather than sticking to their original career goals, they allowed themselves to slide into a second tier of management that offers fewer hours, less pay, lower prestige, and limited upward mobility. Men who did likewise—entered the career world with high aspirations and then started families while working—not only did not show the same trend, they reached even higher levels of professional success than men who had no families at all. Along with her daughter, an aspiring journalist, the author has written a guide for young women who are facing the tough decision of when—and if—to start a family. It is also a guide for older women seeking a second chance to break through to the next level, as the author herself did in academia.

‘Transparency’ is widely canvassed as a key to better governance, increasing trust in public-office holders. But it is more often preached than practised, more often referred to than defined, and more often advocated than critically analysed. This book exposes this doctrine to critical scrutiny from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including political science, philosophy, and economics. It traces the history of transparency as a doctrine of good governance and social organization, and identifies its different forms; assesses the benefits and drawbacks of measures to enhance various forms of transparency; and examines how institutions respond to measures intended to increase transparency, and with what consequences. Transparency is shown not to be a new doctrine. It can come into conflict with other doctrines of good governance, and there are some important exceptions to Jeremy Bentham's famous dictum that ‘the more closely we are watched, the better we behave’. Instead of heralding a new culture of openness in government, measures to improve transparency tend to lead to tighter and more centralized management of information.

Drawing on a three‐year, in‐depth, ‘fly‐on‐the‐wall’ study of client‐management consultant interactions, knowledge flow in management consultancy projects is shown to be mediated by multiple and shifting boundaries or ‘insider‐outsider’ relationships. This challenges dominant assumptions about management consultancy as being either a source of new ideas and processes or simply the legitimation of client knowledge. Rather, different actors, roles, and types of knowledge are involved in an interactive and dynamic process where various boundaries are constructed, reinforced, negotiated, and transformed. The chapters selectively explore these dynamics, revealing the importance of boundary complexity; the role of humour and challenge in often tense relationships; and the importance of shared knowledge domains such as sector knowledge. They are based upon a model of client–consultant relationships developed from theories of knowledge and social boundaries. A wide range of consultancy contexts are covered, including: a US‐based strategy firm and a multinational client; the public and private sectors; a sole practitioner consultant; and IT implementation in financial services. These have a wider significance in terms of our understanding of project working, innovation/change, inter-organizational relations and professional and business services.

Two themes have become epicentres of new management thinking in the late 1990s: knowledge management and competence-based approaches to strategic management. These two themes share a common interest in identifying important forms of organizational knowledge and in understanding processes through which knowledge can be transformed into organizational capabilities and competences. Drawing on the latest research by a number of noted management scholars, this book presents new insights into various kinds of knowledge that are of value to organizations, organizational interactions that can create strategically useful knowledge, alternative processes for managing knowledge, and approaches to integrating key forms of knowledge into organizational processes of competence building and leveraging. The papers in the volume collectively define a powerful conceptual framework for understanding organizational knowledge and its central role in building and leveraging organizational competence. They present well articulated, logically consistent conceptualizations that will provide new theoretical impetus for management researchers, while at the same time providing case studies and examples of practical applications that suggest useful new methods and tools for management practitioners.

This book examines the impact of the knowledge economy on the knowledge production of management studies. It highlights the important parts of theorizing that have emerged within the strategy and organization fields to accommodate those tendencies thought of as characterising the knowledge economy. It seeks to resolve existing tensions between ‘competence’ and ‘governance’ approaches to organization and strategy.

A closely held firm is not a smaller version of a large public firm, anymore than a child is a miniature adult. While realizing that like large corporations, value comes from a business' ability to generate future cash flows, this book emphasize the differences between the two. The primary question is does a separate entity exist or is the business just an extension of its principal owner or manager? If yes, how does this business vary from a large publicly traded firm with market and not management control? This book gets to the fundamental differences between the two and the adjustments made to value correctly. It avoids the traditional multiples of earnings or multiple of sales and other cookie-cutter approaches, to focus on the basic ability to create value. The book also avoids specifics in tax laws as they change and vary between countries.