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The traditional understandings that structure the relationships between public servants and the wider political system are said to have undergone considerable change. But what are these formalized and implicit understandings? What are the key dimensions of such bargains? In what conditions do bargains rise and fall? And has there been a universal and uniform change in these bargains? This book offers a distinct perspective to answer these questions. It develops a unique analytical perspective to account for diverse bargains within systems of executive government. Drawing on comparative experiences from different state traditions, it examines ideas and contemporary developments along three key dimensions of any Public Service Bargain: reward, competency, and loyalty and responsibility. The book points to diverse and differentiated developments across national systems of executive government, and suggests how different ‘bargains’ are prone to cheating by their constituent parties. It explores the context in which managerial bargains — widely seen to be at the heart of contemporary administrative reform movements — are likely to catch on and considers how cheating is likely to destabilize such bargains.

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.

Presents a comparative study of the senior civil service in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Greece, Denmark, and Sweden, which provides information about the structures and the composition of the higher civil service, and its position in the political structure. Explores how the higher civil service has developed in the light of the massive changes in European societies over the past thirty years. These changes include the size of the top level of the civil service, the growing social diversity of its ranks, and the tendency to recruit from outside the civil service. Also examines whether wider social changes, such as the democratization of education, the growth of interest groups, and the increasing importance of the European Union have an impact on the higher levels of bureaucracy and produce similar patterns of change throughout Europe.

Needs assessments are a vital part of an organization's planning, service provision, and evaluation process. Social and human service agencies contemplating starting a new program, expanding an existing one, or reviewing existing services ought to conduct a needs assessment. This book is designed to help social workers assess macro problems within their communities and agencies. It provides the essentials needed to understand various ways to conceptualize need and offers practical advice about selecting an appropriate data collection design that incorporates considerations of purpose, stakeholders, and expertise. Two “applied” chapters illustrate how needs assessments can be employed within an agency to identify areas for new staff training, and across a state to obtain an accurate picture of the extent of substance abuse prevention and treatment needs.

Cities in Karnataka, as in India, suffer from inadequate data and information, which has undermined their ability and that of analysts and policymakers to comprehend the complex forces shaping cities and to develop and implement effective urban policies. Given the importance of cities in Karnataka’s economic growth and development, the book undertakes a review of 15 major cities. While it is clear that no existing studies present the state of cities in India’s context, not collecting this information has disastrous consequences for cities, since they would not be in a position to understand their own growth nor predict their future planning for public services. This book attempts to fill in this vacuum. In this book, indicators and benchmarks are developed for six thematic areas that capture the dynamics and potential of urban areas: history and governance, demographics, economic dimensions, infrastructure and public services, resources, and quality of life. Policymakers, city officials, investors, real estate developers, infrastructure agencies, financiers, industry, credit rating agencies, the educated general public, and researchers would be interested in the book since it has implications for the business environment and quality of living in these cities. The book also provides a description of best practices in service delivery across the 15 cities, so that these can be shared across the cities, and competition encouraged among them for firms, investment, and better residents with promise of a better quality of living.

Managerial supervisors are those persons who supervise direct service staff, who oversee human service programs, and who perform macro practice tasks in their agencies on a daily basis. They are not clinical supervisors who oversee the treatment aspects of direct practice; nor are they administrators at the executive level. This book addresses the challenges facing the often under-appreciated managerial supervisors who oversee and provide a crucial organizational structure for work that occurs in human service across the country. The successful managerial supervisor must be able to create and develop the organizational culture in which client-centered practice can occur, balance the demands of administrative leadership with those of workers who see clients, keep a client-centered focus amid the paradoxes that arise in the process, and maintain a healthy professional presence.

The associational life of middle-class women in 20th-century England has been largely ignored by historians. During the Second World War women's clubs, guilds, and institutes provided a basis for the mobilization of up to a million women, mainly housewives, into unpaid part-time work. Women's Voluntary Services (WVS) — which was set up by the government in 1938 to organize this work — generated a rich archive of reports and correspondence which provide the social historian with a unique window into the female public sphere. Questioning the view that world war two served to democratize English society, the book shows how the mobilization enabled middle-class social leaders to reinforce their claims to authority. Displaying ‘character’ through their voluntary work, the leisured women at the centre of this study made themselves indispensable to the war effort. The book delineates these ‘continuities of class’, reconstructing intimate portraits of local female social leadership in contrasting settings across provincial England, tracing complex and often acerbic rivalries within the voluntary sector, and uncovering gulfs of mutual distrust and incomprehension dividing publicly active women along gendered frontiers of class and party. Britain's wartime mobilization relied on an uneasy balance between voluntarism and the expanding power of the state, calling on a Victorian ethos of public service to cope with the profoundly un-Victorian problems of total war. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that these female social leaders finally found themselves marginalized by bureaucracy and professionalization.

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.

This book attempts to solve two problems in deliberative democratic theory and practice: How can agreements reached inside deliberative forums be legitimate for those who did not take part? And why should people with strongly-held views participate in the first place? The solution involves rethinking deliberative theory, but also draws on lessons from practical experience with deliberative forums in Britain’s National Health Service. The book discusses the competing representation claims that different participants make, the pros and cons of different approaches to democratic accountability, and different conceptions of rationality and public reasoning. It concludes by rejecting the idea that we can have authentic, legitimate deliberation in any one forum. Instead, authentic, legitimate deliberation can only result from linkages between different kinds of institutions, drawing on different kinds of participants, at different points of a decision-making cycle. That is, it promotes a macro, society-wide view of deliberative democracy quite different from the micro, deliberative-forum view which dominates thinking on the subject in the UK. The book sketches the outline of such a deliberative system, suggesting how various institutions in civil society and elected government might link together to create public decisions, which are both more rational and more democratic.

Can we rely on the public service ethos to deliver high quality public services? Are professionals such as doctors and teachers really public‐spirited altruists—knights—or self‐interested egoists—knaves? And how should the recipients of those services, patients, parents, and pupils, be treated? As passive recipients—pawns—or as active consumers—queens?

This book offers answers to these questions. It argues that the original welfare state was designed on the assumptions that those who worked within it were basically altruists or knights and that the beneficiaries were passive recipients or pawns. In consequence, services were often of low quality, delivered in a patronising fashion and inequitable in outcome. However, services designed on an opposite set of assumptions—that public service professionals are knaves and that users should be queens—also face problems: exploitation by unscrupulous professionals, and overuse by demanding consumers, especially middle class ones.

The book draws on evidence from Britain and abroad to show that, in fact, public policies designed on the basis that professionals are a mixture of knight and knave and recipients a mixture of pawn and queen deliver better quality and greater equity than policies based on more simplistic assumptions about motivation and agency. In particular, contrary to popular mythology, the book shows that policies that offer choice and competition within public services such as education and health care can deliver both excellence and equity. And policies aimed at building up individual assets and wealth ownership can empower the poor and powerless more effectively than those aimed simply at bolstering their current income.

Given the primacy of public service delivery for cities to become engines of growth, this book answers two critical questions. Does low spending explain the state of poor public service delivery? How can Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) have access to greater resources so as to enable them to improve public service delivery? Using case studies of four cities — Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Jaipur, and Bangalore — the book examines urban services such as water supply, sewerage, sanitation, solid waste management, municipal roads, and street lighting. It compares the state of these services with international norms and suggests new ways in which they can be financed and improved. More specifically, the book examines the role of land as a revenue-generating source in India's cities.

One of the principal goals of antipoverty efforts should be to improve the absolute living standards of the least well-off. This book aims to enhance our understanding of how to do that, drawing on the experiences of twenty affluent countries since the 1970s. The book addresses a set of questions at the heart of political economy and public policy: How much does economic growth help the poor? When and why does growth fail to trickle down? How can social policy help? Can a country have a sizeable low-wage sector yet few poor households? Are universal programs better than targeted ones? What role can public services play in antipoverty efforts? What is the best tax mix? Is more social spending better for the poor? If we commit to improvement in the absolute living standards of the least well-off, must we sacrifice other desirable outcomes?

Community social work practice based on a capacity enhancement model offers tremendous potential for unifying communities consisting of groups from very different cultural backgrounds, and in the process of doing so, make physical changes in the community. This book emphasizes community and urban social work and explains how to create positive community environments in marginalized urban-based communities. The use of murals, gardens, playgrounds, and sculptures, for example provide social workers with an opportunity to identify, engage, and plan services with communities. These projects, in turn, are based upon a community's strengths and represent an effort at developing a community's capacity to help itself with assistance from professionals.