Books in the Routledge Critical Studies in Public Management series

What is trust? Can trust be boosted through regulation? What role does leadership play in rebuilding trust? How does trust and confidence affect public services? The chapters in this collection explore these questions across several countries and different sectors of public service provision: health, education, social services, the police, and the third sector. The contributions offer empirical evidence about how the issues of trust and confidence differ across countries and sectors, and develop ideas about how trust and confidence in government and public services may adjust in the information age.

This book provides an overview of the study of public management from some of the most authoritative experts in this area of study in Europe and the United States, establishing a dialogue between different approaches to this discipline.

In recent years public management research in a variety of disciplines has paid increasing attention to the role of citizens and the third sector in the provision of public services. Several of these efforts have employed the concept of co-production to better understand and explain this trend. This book aims to go further by systematizing the growing body of academic papers and reports that focus on various aspects of co-production and its potential contribution to new public governance. It has an interdisciplinary focus that makes a unique contribution to the body of knowledge in this field, at the cross-roads of a number of disciplines - including business administration, policy studies, political science, public management, sociology, third sector studies, etc. The unique presentation of them together in this volume both allows for comparing and contrasting these different perspectives and for potential theoretical collaboration and development. More particularly, this volume addresses the following concerns: What is the nature of co-production and what challenges does it face? How can we conceptualize the concept of co-production? How does co-production works in practice? How does co-production unfold in reality? What can be the effects of co-production? And more specific, firstly, how can co-production contribute to service quality and service management in public services, and secondly, what is the input of co-production on growing citizen involvement and development of participative democracy?

Presents an overview of the scientific study of public management. This book seeks to present the national distinctiveness of the study of public management, in the context of specific state administration. It highlights the underlying differences between Europe and the United States in relation to their political-administrative circumstances.

This book presents, uniquely, a variety of cases from differing national and international contexts that enable a valuable, comparative analysis of policy transferring and learning that is absent from most books currently available. These cases suggest a number of exciting research directions with implications for policy making, transference and implementation in the future.

This volume brings together researchers from a range of disciplines including accounting, political science, management, sociology and policy studies to discuss and develop our knowledge and theory of the nature of `accountability¿ in contemporary global society and the challenges it may pose for public policy and management.

Offers readers an understanding of the main objective of public management in complexity - namely complex process system - and a strategy for accepting and dealing with complexity based on the idea of dual thinking and dual action strategies satisfying the desires of controlling processes and the need to adjust to changes simultaneously.

This book brings together public services policy and public services management in a new way, challenging many old ideas in this field and presenting the debate of what 'critical' constitutes when applied to public services policy and management.