Both "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrats" have taken on a pejorative hue over the years, but does the problem lie with those on the "street-level"--those organizations and people the public deals with directly--or is it in how they are managed? Norma Riccucci knows that management matters, and she addresses a critical gap in the understanding of public policy by uniquely focusing on the effects of public management on street-level bureaucrats.

How Management Matters examines not only how but where public management matters in government organizations. Looking at the 1996 welfare...

"Accountability" is a watchword of our era. Dissatisfaction with a range of public and private institutions is widespread and often expressed in strong critical rhetoric. The reasons for these views are varied and difficult to translate into concrete action, but this hasn't deterred governments and nongovernmental organizations from putting into place formal processes for determining whether their own and others' goals have been achieved and problems with performance have been avoided.

In this thought-provoking book, government and public administration scholar Beryl Radin takes on...

The prevailing notion that the best government is achieved through principles of management and business practices is hardly new--it echoes the early twentieth-century "gospel of efficiency" challenged by Dwight Waldo in 1948 in his pathbreaking book, The Administrative State. Asking, "Efficiency for what?," Waldo warned that public administrative efficiency must be backed by a framework of consciously held democratic values.

Revisiting Waldo's Administrative State brings together a group of distinguished authors who critically explore public administration's big ideas...

Measuring the Performance of the Hollow State is the first in-depth look at the influence of performance measurement on the effectiveness of the federal government. To do this, the authors examine the influence of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (with consideration of the later Program Assessment Rating Tool of 2002) on federal performance measurement, agency performance, and program outcomes. They focus a systematic examination on five agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services--the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and...

By the Cold War's end, U.S. military bases harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites. All told, cleaning the approximately 27 million acres is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet while progress has been made, efforts to integrate environmental and national security concerns into the military's operations have proven a daunting and intrigue-filled task that has fallen short of professed goals in the post-Cold War era.

In The Greening of the U.S. Military, Robert F. Durant delves into this too-little understood world of defense environmental policy to...

The real work of many governments is done not in stately domed capitols but by a network of federal and state officials working with local governments and nongovernmental organizations to address issues that cross governmental boundaries. Managing within Networks analyzes the structure, operations, and achievements of these public management networks that are trying to solve intractable problems at the field level.

It examines such areas as transportation, economic and rural development, communications systems and data management, water conservation, wastewater management,...

Economic individualism and market-based values dominate today's policymaking and public management circles--often at the expense of the common good. In his new book, Barry Bozeman demonstrates the continuing need for public interest theory in government. Public Values and Public Interest offers a direct theoretical challenge to the "utility of economic individualism," the prevailing political theory in the western world.

The book's arguments are steeped in a practical and practicable theory that advances public interest as a viable and important measure in any analysis of...

Efficiency. Innovation. Results. Accountability. These, advocates claim, are the fruits of performance management. In recent decades government organizations have eagerly embraced the performance model--but the rush to reform has not delivered as promised.

Drawing on research from state and federal levels, Moynihan illustrates how governments have emphasized some aspects of performance management--such as building measurement systems to acquire more performance data--but have neglected wider organizational change that would facilitate the use of such information. In his analysis of...

Contract management is a critical skill for all contemporary public managers. As more government duties are contracted out, managers must learn to coordinate and measure the performance of private contractors, and to write contract requirements and elicit bids that obtain important services and products at the best possible price and quality. They must also learn to work in teams that include both public and private sector partners.

The Responsible Contract Manager delves into the issues of how to ensure that the work done by private sector contractors serves the public...

Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy.

Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices,...