The Handbook of Public Organization Management (Paperback)

Paperback. "Run it like a business."Every public manager hears it. The advice is confident, widely repeated, and it fails in ways that couldhave been predicted before anyone tried.A manager in government may act only on authority that can be traced to a source. They answer toseveral principals who disagree with one another and none of whom can overrule the rest. Theirobjectives arrive from a political process that transmits its unresolved disagreements rather thansettling them. They frequently cannot observe the outcomes their work is supposed to produce. Theirmoney arrives through instruments that generate predictable and perverse behaviour. They are held toaccount through four different relationships that detect different failures and are blind to one another's.And a growing share of what they answer for is delivered by organizations they do not employ.None of that is dysfunction. Nearly all of it follows from things a democratic society reasonably insistsupon. But a manager who has not been taught to see it will spend a career frustrated by constraints theyhave misdiagnosed, applying techniques whose assumptions do not hold, and surprised byconsequences that were entirely foreseeable.This book treats those conditions as the subject rather than the background. Working from a singleframe - authority, ambiguity, and accountability - it shows where room to act actually comes from, why it closes, and what competence looks like when it cannot be widened.What this book helps you do: - Trace a proposed action from its constitutional source through the enabling law to the instrumentbeing used, before the decision rather than after it.- Recognise which kind of goal ambiguity you are facing, and why the type governs what can bemeasured and what cannot.- Anticipate how a performance measure will be gamed, and design the set so the distortion staysvisible.- Read the field of political authority around an agency instead of asking who is in charge of it.- Diagnose why a rule is producing delay, and tell the rules that work from the ones that onlyaccumulate.- Supervise frontline discretion where policy is actually settled, rather than pretending it can beremoved.- Judge what a contract or a delivery network can carry, and where accountability goes when thework moves outside. Key topics: the legal and constitutional architecture of administrative authority; oversight and theproblem of many masters; structure, formalisation, and red tape; mission, goal ambiguity, and culture;decision-making under bounded rationality; motivation, values, and the ethics of office; leadershipwithout command; frontline discretion and administrative burden; budgets and fiscal constraint;performance measurement and its distortions; accountability and control; collaboration, networks, andcontracting; why reform recurs; and crisis, reliability, and algorithmic administration.Who it is for: graduate and professional students in public administration and public policy, andpractitioners who want the analytic apparatus behind decisions they are already making. No priorcoursework is assumed.Start with the chapter that matches the problem in front of you, and build the frame that turns aconstraint you resented into one you can work. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…