Most people can recall instances at work where thankless tasks get in the way of tasks that lead to big rewards. This typically leads people in a group to a struggle with others over how to approach their work and set priorities. Inspired by such conversations with many employees, we develop a theory to understand how task conflict can be linked to distributive injustice. Using a survey from 42…
In every society groups rather than individuals are given responsibility for producing results that individuals potentially could produce just as well, but without the benefits of group effort. Once a small discussion group is convened, the members can be counted on to interact, often at length and sometimes contentiously, incontrovertible evidence that their interaction accomplishes something …
Behavioural data are important for group research and are widely used to inform and validate relevant theoretical propositions. There is more debate about the role of such data in illuminating the psychological processes that underpin group behaviour itself. This article focuses on this debate and outlines that behavioral data are limited because (a) they have difficulty distinguishing between …
There has been a resurgence of interest in values in recent public administration research, based on two distinct arguments. For different reasons, neither approach is likely to secure a robust normative basis for public endeavours. These reasons are assessed, using an alternative body of theory rooted in contemporary social theory that we term, ‘new pragmatism’. New pragmatic ideas are deploye…
In this article, the authors examine the implementation of policy aimed to promote the role of organizational networks and distributed leadership in the establishment and consolidation of public service reform. In theory, leadership and networks should complement each other, with the less hierarchical logic of the network allowing leadership of change, distributed among network members, rather …
With regard to public management network theory development, among the most important issues that remain is a recognition of the limitations of networks. Networks often find reasonable solution approaches, but then run into operational, performance, or legal barriers that prevent the next action step. Networks face challenges in converting solutions into policy energy, assessing internal effect…
The relation between leadership, the context in which it takes place and the adoption of organizational innovations associated with New Public Management (NPM) is explored in an empirical analysis of Danish local government. Two different strategies for conceptualizing NPM are contrasted: (1) treating NPM as one phenomenon; and (2) acknowledging important differences between organizational inno…
The last two decades have seen a shift in public services organizations from hierarchies to networks. Network forms are seen as particularly suited to handling ‘wicked problems'. We make an assessment of the nature and impact of this shift. Using recent evidence from the United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS), we explore the nature and functioning of eight different public policy net…
The development of health policy is recognized as complex; however, there has been little development of the role of agency in this process. Kingdon developed the concept of policy entrepreneur (PE) within his ‘windows’ model. He argued inter-related ‘policy streams' must coincide for important issues to become addressed. The conjoining of these streams may be aided by a policy entrepreneur. We…
This paper examines data collected from senior executives in two Australian government agencies to identify patterns of adaptive and maladaptive responses to change in public sector environments. The conceptual categories of passive maladaptive, active maladaptive and active adaptive responses are all supported by the interview data, with half of the executives expressing predominantly active a…
While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises – that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed b…
The threat of cascading failures across critical infrastructures has been identified as a key challenge for governments. Cascading failure is seen as potentially catastrophic, extremely difficult to predict and increasingly likely to happen. Infrastructures are largely privately operated and private actors are thought to under-invest in mitigating this threat. Consequently, experts have demande…
In 2004 Norway implemented a food safety reform programme aimed at enhancing inter-organizational coordination processes and outcomes. Has this programme affected inter-organizational coordination processes and outcomes, both vertically and horizontally – and if so how? This article employs the concept of inter-organizational coordination as an analytical tool, examining it in the light of two …
A stream of reviews that take stock of EU governance trends shows that the EU's governance agenda produces mixed results. EU agencies are part of the EU's search for new governance mechanisms. They have not proven to be a break with EU policy-making processes – underpinning administrative stability rather than reform. This article explores the institutionalization of EU agencies. Using the case…
This article compares cabinet institutions for coordinating the transposition of EU legislation in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. It examines how national executives have adapted to European integration and what factors have shaped institutional variation across countries and over time. During pre-accession, the Hungarian, Polish and (to a lesser extent) Czech cabinets established stro…
This paper analyses the two most important international programmes for the voluntary regulation of corporate behaviour: the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Corporations and the UN Global Compact. It argues that international organizations adopted them mostly for reasons of political feasibility: by imposing minimal constraints on constituents the codes circumvented the most pressing problems…
Why do some local governments privatize water services, while others opt for public management? Economic literature has been unable to demonstrate that private management is more efficient than public management, so there must be other reasons that lead governments to privatize the service. But what are they? This paper presents the results of a study that analyses the factors behind the privat…
This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding key psychological barriers to implementing sustainable development in procurement process by local government and health care authorities. This task is an important one as a comprehension of psychological barriers is a prerequisite for understanding how individuals engage with the often more visible technical, budgetary or regulator…
Public bureaucracies are increasingly characterized by employee diversity in terms of ethnicity. Investigating relations between ethnic groups in bureaucracies is therefore important. This article focuses on the particularly interesting case of the Greenlandic administration. Being a former Danish colony, Greenland still recruits bureaucrats from mainland Denmark. These work alongside locally h…
We reflect upon the ‘governance narrative’ as a means of conceptualizing recent developments in the British state. Recent public administration research has advocated a ‘decentred approach’ that would reject the linear narrative of a shift from hierarchical to network governance. We seek to build on ‘decentring’ theorists' critique of existing governance literature by offering case studies of t…