A typical image of the making and administration of policy suggests that it takes place on an incremental basis, involving public servants, their ministers and, to a more limited extent, a variety of interest groups. Yet, much policy making is based on similar policy developed in other jurisdictions, both domestic and international and in the major international organizations such as the WTO and the OECD. In other words, significant aspects of nationally developed policies are copied from elsewhere in what is described as a process of policy transfer and learning.

Hence, studies of...

The current economic and political climate places ever greater pressure on public organizations to deliver services in a cost-efficient way. Focused on the costs of service delivery, governments across the world have introduced a series of business like practices - from performance management to public-private partnership - in the belief that these will increase the efficiency of their public services. However, both the debate about public service efficiency and the policies and practices introduced to advance it, have developed without a coherent account of what efficiency means in this...

The global financial crisis hit the world in a remarkable way in late 2008. Many governments and private sector organizations, who had considered Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to be their future, were forced to rethink their strategy in the wake of the crisis, as a lot of the available private funding upon which PPPs relied, was suddenly no longer available to the same extent. At the same time, governments and international organizations, like the European Union, were striving to make closer partnerships between the public sector and the private sector economy a hallmark for future...

Broadly, a Public-Private Partnership (or PPP) is any collaboration between the public and private sector, but research in the UK has tended to focus on those that have been used for major infrastructure projects, such as roads, schools, and hospitals. This book compares and contrasts PPP research in the UK with that of cases in the USA, including interviews with some of the key stakeholders (decision makers in the public sector, contractors, and users) of PPPs in North America, and observations of PPPs in action (such as schools and roads).

No prior major studies have...

Critical approaches to leadership studies have sought to challenge the normative position of leadership as residing solely within the formal leader and have gone as far as to undermine the traditionally held assumption of leadership as a "real" phenomenon.

The book offers a critical account of the nature of leadership and management in modern organizations. Specifically it examines the forces that affect the influence relationships between leaders and followers in public sector organizational settings and thus, how these relationships inform social influence processes. Although the book...

Networks have been described in terms of metaphors, governance arrangements and structural or institutional arrangements. These different perspectives of networks come out of a variety of disciplines, including political science, public administration, urban affairs, social welfare, public management and organizational/sociological research. This wealth of research, while contributing to a deeper understanding of networks, presents a dilemma which is addressed by this book. That is the question of whether there is a theory of public networks that informs networks in their various forms,...