Redesigning the Work of Human Services. This item is unavailable.Redesigning the Work of Human Services

Redesigning the Work of Human Services explores alternative organizational designs for the delivery of human services—designs that emphasize collaborative governance and partnerships among public and private agencies, local control and responsibility for results, and the use of innovative information, planning, and community capacity-building technologies. This book redefines the debate about whether human services should be privatized or not. The author suggests that the basic task of human services—to enable families to socialize the young—is one that can neither be fulfilled effectively by the state nor by private agencies. Rather, carefully crafted public-private partnerships, when combined with new accountability mechanisms and the sophisticated use of emerging information technologies, are likely to offer more in the way of effective, efficient, and appropriate human services. Because this work is solidly grounded in the literature on both human and business services, the author's suggestions for major redesign are comprehensive and intelligently qualified.

JOHN A. O'LOONEY is a Public Service Associate at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, University of Georgia. He has worked with local and state government officials and agencies as an adviser, consultant, and program evaluator, and is director of the Internet Education Project, designed to provide Internet tools and applications for governments, teachers, and human service workers. Among his many publications are Economic Development and Environmental Control: Balancing Business and Community in an Age of NIMBYs and LULUs (Quorum, 1995), and Redesigning the Work of Human Services (Quorum, 1996).