Reimagining Public Managers


Book Description

Public value theory speaks to the co-creation of value between politicians, citizens, and public managers, with a focus on the public manager in terms of her contributions, initiatives, and limitations in value creation. But just who are public managers? Public value regularly treats the "public manager" as synonymous with bureaucrat, government official, civil servant, or public administrator. However, the categories of public managers represent a more versatile and expansive set of agents in society than they are given credit for, and the discourse of public value has typically not delved sufficiently into the variety of possible cadres that might comprise the "public manager." This book seeks to go beyond the assumed understandings of who the public manager is and what she does. It does so by examining the processes of value creation that are driven by non-traditional sets of public managers, which include the judiciary, the armed forces, multilateral institutions, and central banks. It applies public value tools to understand their value creation and uses their unique attributes to inform our understanding of public value theory. Tailored to an audience comprising public administration scholars, students of government, public officials, practitioners, and social scientists interested in contemporary problems of values in society, this book helps to advance public administration thought by re-examining the theory’s ultimate protagonist: the public manager. It therefore constitutes an important effort to take public value theory forward by going "beyond" conceptions of the public manager as she has thus far been understood.




Reimagining Public Sector Management


Book Description

Reimagining Public Sector Management delves into the crisis and emergency management of the pandemic, exploring the ways in which different agencies responded to the pandemic and the lessons learnt in terms of disaster planning and co-ordination.




Reimagining the Future Public Service Workforce


Book Description

This book investigates the professional needs and training requirements of an ever-changing public service workforce in Australia and the United Kingdom. It explores the nature of future roles, the types of skills and competencies that will be required and how organisations might recruit, train and develop public servants for these roles. Leading international research - practitioners make recommendations for how local organisations can equip future public servants with the skills and professional capacities for these shifting professional demands, and the skillsets they will require. Drawing on ideas that have been developed in the Australian and UK context, the book delves into the major themes involved in re-imagining the public service workforce and the various forms of capacities and capabilities that this entails. It then explores delivery of this future vision, and its implications in terms of development, recruitment and strategy.




Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire


Book Description

A renowned Harvard professor debunks prevailing orthodoxy with a new intellectual foundation and a practical pathway forward for a system that has lost its moral and ethical foundation. Free market capitalism is one of humanity's greatest inventions and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But this success has been costly. Capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society as wealth rushes to the top. The time for action is running short. Rebecca Henderson's rigorous research in economics, psychology, and organizational behavior, as well as her many years of work with companies around the world, give us a path forward. She debunks the worldview that the only purpose of business is to make money and maximize shareholder value. She shows that we have failed to reimagine capitalism so that it is not only an engine of prosperity but also a system that is in harmony with environmental realities, the striving for social justice, and the demands of truly democratic institutions. Henderson's deep understanding of how change takes place, combined with fascinating in-depth stories of companies that have made the first steps towards reimagining capitalism, provide inspiring insight into what capitalism can be. Together with rich discussions of important role of government and how the worlds of finance, governance, and leadership must also evolve, Henderson provides the pragmatic foundation for navigating a world faced with unprecedented challenge, but also with extraordinary opportunity for those who can get it right.




Reimagining Public Spaces and Built Environments in the Post-Pandemic World


Book Description

This book considers the implications of the emerging post-pandemic reality for public space and the built environment. It addresses changes to our cities, parks, neighborhoods, transportation modes, schools, streetscapes, cultural spaces, and engineering systems present in each of these. The chapters’ broad topics include public space and the built environment; tactical urbanism and temporality; designing built environments and hybrid remote spaces; engaging community and participation; connection with nature for mental health and wellness; the future of post pandemic space; and disaster preparedness. Recurring themes are design flexibility, repurposed cities, building standards, virtual connectedness, environmental vigilance, refocus on wellness and green space, gender perspectives, and community organization. It will be an important reference work for researchers, students and practitioners.




Social Equity and Public Management Theory


Book Description

Social equity is a pillar of public service. Thus, social equity should be a central concern in public management in practice and scholarship. However, widespread incorporation and reflection of social equity practices in government and the anticipated public benefits still seem like an elusive goal. The ability to analytically assess social equity is the first step toward prescribing social equity reforms. Public affairs graduate programs, like a master’s in public administration or public policy, often teach public management separately from social equity. This book empirically and theoretically bridges social equity and public management for use in the public affairs graduate classroom. The book highlights international research that leverages public management theory to build reasonable social equity measures and applications. The research highlighted in the text includes studies from across countries in North and South America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia. This is the first book specifically designed for global public affairs classrooms that connects public management theory and practice with social equity reforms.




Creating Public Value


Book Description

A seminal figure in the field of public management, Mark H. Moore presents his summation of fifteen years of research, observation, and teaching about what public sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Useful for both practicing public executives and those who teach them, this book explicates some of the richest of several hundred cases used at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and illuminates their broader lessons for government managers. Moore addresses four questions that have long bedeviled public administration: What should citizens and their representatives expect and demand from public executives? What sources can public managers consult to learn what is valuable for them to produce? How should public managers cope with inconsistent and fickle political mandates? How can public managers find room to innovate? Moore’s answers respond to the well-understood difficulties of managing public enterprises in modern society by recommending specific, concrete changes in the practices of individual public managers: how they envision what is valuable to produce, how they engage their political overseers, and how they deliver services and fulfill obligations to clients. Following Moore’s cases, we witness dilemmas faced by a cross-section of public managers: William Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency; Jerome Miller and the Department of Youth Services; Miles Mahoney and the Park Plaza Redevelopment Project; David Sencer and the swine flu scare; Lee Brown and the Houston Police Department; Harry Spence and the Boston Housing Authority. Their work, together with Moore’s analysis, reveals how public managers can achieve their true goal of producing public value.




Pandemics and Public Value Management


Book Description

Widespread crisis-events such as pandemics can impose an immense strain on societies’ multi-stakeholder efforts to preserve and sustain the mechanisms of public value (PV) creation. The global coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic exemplifies this because it has pushed civil society, public managers, politicians, and society-at-large into uncharted waters, and at times brought them under exceptional duress. Then how can public value’s agents attempt to conceive, create, and preserve value under such disruptive circumstances? How could public value theory’s (PVT’s) theoretical precepts be informed by the pandemic? This book seeks to inform the PVT literature by drawing upon interesting lenses that have emerged in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It addresses PVT’s notions of value conflicts, post-Truth politics, multilateral PV, nationalism and the public, comparative PV creation, and PV in developing-country contexts, in order to construct a multi-stakeholder and internationally informed set of analyses on public value’s systems and agents in uniquely distressing circumstances such as pandemics. This book will therefore be of use to both academics and practitioners of public administration and public policy, as well as scholars of government, healthcare policy, and economics.




Reimagining Leadership on the Commons


Book Description

Reimagining Leadership on the Commons examines leadership approaches derived from an, open, whole systems perspective and a more collaborative paradigm that recognizes that rather than being individualist self-maximizers, people prefer to work together to share benefits and found a society based on equality and justice.




Public Value and the Digital Economy


Book Description

How can the public manager create and co-create value in the digital economy? While there is much exciting work being done, there is a pressing need to recontextualize public value theory (PVT), specifically in terms of its theoretical precepts, in the fluid and dynamic environment that the digital economy has produced. Much of the theoretical undergirding of PVT predates the full onset of today’s digital economy, leaving aside phenomena including citizen-driven innovations, decentralized digital structures, and the algorithmic foundations of new economic life. This is why a conceptually driven exercise in contemporizing PVT would be of great value to public administration’s theoreticians seeking to lead the theory in catching up to the praxis. This book seeks to answer the question of creating and co-creating public managerial value by developing chapters that revisit categories central to the functions of public managers in relation to other value-creating agents under PVT. It introduces new and important lenses to PVT that are grounded in the praxis of the digital economy, raising new questions about old problems in PVT and generating newer formulations that push PVT forward and make its debates salient to the futures that lay before the modern public manager. The book therefore constitutes an important effort to take PVT forward by shedding new light on the potency of the public manager in confronting and constructing the digital economy through co-creation with the other agents of public value. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and policy makers in the fields of public and nonprofit management, public administration and policy, and PVT.




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