Description
Book SynopsisThis major book reviews and analyses the changes that have taken place in public administration in Britain and North America over the last ten years and which will continue to have a profound impact on central and local bureaucracies well into the next century.
Managing the Public Sector provides a critical introduction and successfully combines a review of the literature with original research. It relates theory to practice and highlights the problem of implementation. It covers all the major issues including privatization, and the importance of the business sector both as a partner and a powerful lobby for efforts to use market mechanisms to devolve power.
This thoroughly modern, up-to-date book will be essential reading for all courses on public administration and policy analysis and the management of the public sector.
Trade Review'. . . particularly valuable in its treatment of the British and American central bureaucracies and on the impact of the private market on American and British practice. A thoughtful and persuasive account. . .' -- Dilys M. Hill, Parliamentary Affairs
'Massey incorporates documentary research, literature reviews, and his own interview data to provide a rich examination of an important phenomenon.' -- A.M. Khademian, Choice
'Massey's excellent book should be read by all managers who are beginning to feel uneasy that, by analogy, the private sector helps us manage public services.' -- Andrew Wall, Health Services Management
'Andrew Massey has produced a timely comparative analysis of public sector management. His book deals with recent developments, provides a critical commentary, and places them in both an historical and Anglo-American context. To these novel features are added two vital and often overlooked considerations: first that there is a limit to the transferability of private sector techniques into public sector management; and secondly that the administration of public policy cannot be viewed in isolation from the political milieu in which it operates. Managing the Public Sector is to be warmly recommended to teachers and students in political science, management and business studies and applied economics.' -- Trevor Smith, President of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ulster
'. . . a thorough survey of government reform in two influential Western democracies. The book provides a thorough guide of where the reform movement is at present, and will provide a useful historical marker in relation to future reforms, particularly in the United States.' -- Russell Harding, Public Administration Review
Table of ContentsThe question of governance - epidemic malady of constitutions; value for money and the British civil service; enforcing bureaucratic change; managing federal bureaucrats; the resurgent market - privatization in the USA; the parvenus' market - liberalization in the UK; managing sub-national government - a check and balance?; not a seamless web - bureaucrats, managers and markets.
