Books in the Routledge Critical Studies in Public Management series

Public Management in Times of Austerity seeks to explore the austerity policies adopted by European governments and their consequences to public management. It asks how governments have implemented new rules leading to more stringency in public budgeting and financial management, and how they have cut back public expenditure.

This book deeply explores and integrates existing network theory and related theories from a number of perspectives, levels and jurisdictions to develop a framework to guide network design, governance and management. The book focuses on the important issue of network performance, looking at networks as bounded and consciously arranged; the actors who participate in them design the relationships among a bounded set of individual organizations to purse common objectives. Finally, the chapters tease out the variety of governance modes or regimes that intersect with network governance. This book offers a comprehensive, integrative, interdisciplinary approach that enables specialists, practitioners and administrators across a wide array of interests and fields to formulate and work on problems using a common language, analytical framework and theoretical basis.

The ability to manage government departments and operations has become less important than the ability to navigate the complex world of interconnected policy implementation processes. Public sector reform policies and programmes, as a consequence, are a study in the complexities of the institutional and environmental context in which these reforms are pursued. Building on theory and practice, this book argues that advancing the theoretical frontlines of development management research and practice can benefit from developing models based on innovation, collaboration and governance.

Public Administration Reform examines several commonly-held assumptions about public administration: the public sector is slow and bureaucratic; government employees are frequently disengaged; and government agencies are sometimes wasteful. This book takes a timely look at the heightened need for public administration reform as a result of the economic challenges currently faced by nations across the globe.

Presenting a multi-disciplinary approach to public procurement, this book offers its readers a practical description and analysis of the relevant policies, law and jurisprudence and explores possible future trends in public procurement regulation.

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 is about rethinking public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the wake of the global financial crisis and aims to give a clearer picture of the kind of conceptual frameworks that researchers might employ to now study PPPs. The crisis took much of the glamour out of PPPs, but theoretical advances have been made by researchers in a number of areas and this book examines selected new research approaches to the study of PPPs.