Public Sector Values Research Articles

Changing Public Sector Values. By Montgomery Van Wart. New York: Garland, 1998. 328p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Changing Public Sector Values. By Montgomery Van Wart. New York: Garland, 1998. 328p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The Effectiveness Of Codes Of Conduct

Studies of the prevalence and contents of codes of conduct in the private sector show that their use to define an ethical environment or culture, and their effective implementation, must be as part of a learning process that requires inculcation, reinforcement and measurement. Consequently, the public sector must realise it cannot look solely to formal codes to revive and sustain public sector values. Alan Doig is Professor of Public Services Management, and John Wilson is Principal Lecturer and Head of the Centre for Public Services Management, at Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University.

Public and private values at odds: can private sector values be transplanted into public sector institutions?

In the last few years, it has become widely accepted that the answer to many of the shortcomings of public sector administration lie in the wholesale adoption of private sector values like ‘risk-taking’, ‘customer focus’, and ‘bottom-line orientation’. This prescription seems self-evident to many business executives, and even has some appeal among public sector managers. However, it is based on a false premise: that the relationship of the state to citizens is, or should be, basically similar to that existing between private enterprise and its clients. Public administration is about choices. It necessarily means satisfying some citizens while frustrating others. If carried to its logical conclusion, the process of privatizing public sector values would make state bodies more responsive to their direct customers while stripping them of their public legitimacy. The challenge for public sector administrators is to find ways to integrate appropriate private sector values into their organizations while safeguarding their overall role as guardian of the public interest. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

The ‘Publicness’ of Public Organizations

This article analyses the diversity of public organizations focusing on variations in their degree of publicness. We define ‘publicness’ as organizational attachment to public sector values: for example, due process, accountability, and welfare provision. Based on a survey of Danish public organizations, we show that organizations with a high degree of publicness differ from organizations with a low degree of publicness. The former are characterized by complex tasks, professional orientation, many external stakeholders, conflicting environmental demands, and low managerial autonomy. The latter are the opposite. We explore in detail both the relationship between the organizations and their parent ministries and their responses to organizational change. Organizations with a high degree of publicness are subject to a tight ministerial control and have formal and distant relations with the ministry. They also have strong vertical links, externally and internally. High internal control is the joint product of ministerial control and the stress on the public sector value of rule compliance. All organizations ranked high on publicness are reluctant to adopt organizational changes stemming from the ‘New Public Management’. Again, organizations with a low degree of publicness are the opposite, keen to adopt new ideas. We show that degree of publicness matters, across both functional types of organizations and policy sectors. Finally, we discuss alternative theoretical explanations of publicness drawn from contingency theory and the new institutionalism.

Challenges of Upgrading Strategic Capability in Public Sector

Noting significant shifts in public expectations of government transportation policy, management at the Minnesota Department of Transportation concluded that its approach to internal operations and external affairs required adjustment. After thoughtful discussion of the options, management decided to import and adapt advanced management techniques from the private sector in ways that were consistent with public sector values and introduce them by means that would support healthy development of a learning organization. This innovative approach produced benefits for the organization. It also demonstrated the unique challenges public sector organizations have in upgrading strategic capability: creating a framework of outcomes that are clear and congruent; adapting strategic techniques to agree with public sector organizational values and introducing them in ways that garner public acceptance; being accountable for shaping a future according to shared public aspiration; creating systems to provide the grist for strategic analysis in forms compatible with the methodologies; creating clarity in the organization's conceptual and strategy framework so that strategic techniques achieve their promise; producing an aspiration for the future that is shared by the general public; and setting a longer-term goal that inspires commitment. A conceptual framework is offered. Analysis of the challenges—challenges anticipated and challenges apparent only in after-the-fact reflection—highlights complex issues faced by public-sector management executing a strategic upgrade.

Challenges of Upgrading Strategic Capability in Public Sector

Noting significant shifts in public expectations of government transportation policy, management at the Minnesota Department of Transportation concluded that its approach to internal operations and external affairs required adjustment. After thoughtful discussion of the options, management decided to import and adapt advanced management techniques from the private sector in ways that were consistent with public sector values and introduce them by means that would support healthy development of a learning organization. This innovative approach produced benefits for the organization. It also demonstrated the unique challenges public sector organizations have in upgrading strategic capability: creating a framework of outcomes that are clear and congruent; adapting strategic techniques to agree with public sector organizational values and introducing them in ways that garner public acceptance; being accountable for shaping a future according to shared public aspiration; creating systems to provide the grist f...

Professionals, Quality and the Marketing Change Process

The election of the Conservative Government in 1979 heralded a diversion from the post‐war, Keynesian public policy model which envisaged incrementally expanding, centrally‐funded service provision (Hall, 1988). Largely in response to mounting financial crises, and building on earlier managerialist initiatives (eg. Griffiths, 1983), a new public sector management paradigm began to emerge at the beginning of the 1990s (Booth, 1993). This new paradigm, which was informed by the New Right's ‘public choice theory’ emphasised: fiscal re‐organisation, privatisation, the separation of purchaser and provider roles within quasi‐markets and the sovereignty of the customer (Butler and Vaile, 1991; Thompson, 1992). These ideological and structural changes are now recognised as a significant break with the past (Fitzgerald, 1993), and even John Major acknowledges the programme as a ‘revolution in progress’ (Major, 1989:1). Importantly, the reformers have often ritualistically, cast aside traditional, public sector and professional values (Pollitt, 1990a; Hood, 1991). In their place, a diffuse set of management ideas have been imported from the private sector. These have subsequently been aggregated and termed the “New Public Management” by commentators such as Harrow and Wilcocks (1990) and Steward and Walsh (1992).

PUBLIC SECTOR CULTURE MANAGERIALISM OR MULTICULTURALISM?

Abstract: Despite dramatic change in the Australian public sector, little attention has been paid to organisational culture. With the importation of private sector strategies and structures the traditional values of public administration have been eroded. Public organisations and their members have experienced consequences of “culture shock”, even “cultural revolution”. Managerialism is an introduced culture which has been criticised by some academics and public servants. It is seen as inappropriate to the distinctive values and operating context of the public domain, as purporting to value‐free technique while in effect operating as the mystifying ideology of a dominant elite. Managerialism has been constructed, it is argued, on simplistic and now superseded concepts of rational “management man”, goal setting and planning. While managerialism is not the culture which will endow public organisations with new meaning and propel them to excellence, it can expect to increase its hold in the absence of the development of new models of the culture of public organisation. While new public sector cultures will need to be organisation‐specific, to accommodate the differentiation between and within public organisations, an overarching framework of public sector values and principles will be required. One of the distinctive features of most public sector organisations is die number and diversity of their stakeholders. A multi‐cultural model of public sector culture is proposed, which construes this diversity of subcultures as an instrument of strategic flexibility.

Family Planning in Cross‐National Perspective: An Overview

Population control is a social problem involving the quality of life the slowing of economic progress and the inability of couples to maintain their desired family size. Factors affecting population dynamics at the family and societal levels include the private sector (individual attitudes about family size and birth-control knowledge) the mediating networks and the public sector (laws religious institutions public norms and values). There is a need for social scientists to examine social and psychological variables affecting family size desires especially in the U.S. and how these variables can be changed in order to control population growth.