The 'Little Heresies' seminars provide an important public platform to debate the future of public services. This is the second published collection of talks given at those seminars. Both books takes their title from the first seminar, Kittens are Evil: it is still widely believed that private sector management methods and policies work well in the public sector. To suggest that they create perverse incentives and lasting damage to the social fabric is still a heresy. In this seco...

As many social inequalities widen, this is a crucial survey of local authorities’ evolving role in health, social care and wellbeing.Health and social and public policy experts review structural changes in provision and procurement, and explore social determinants of health including intergenerational needs and housing. With detailed assessments of regional disparities and case studies of effective strategies and interventions from local authorities, this collaborative study addres...

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.How can public services and social interventions create and sustain good outcomes for the populations they serve?Building on research in public health, social epidemiology and the social determinants of health, this book presents complexity theory as an alternative basis for an outcome-oriented public management praxis. It takes a critical approach towards New Public Management and provides new conceptual inroads...

The majority of employees currently working in the private sector are now employed in small firms, yet little is known about their working conditions. This collection of essays addresses this gap. Based on theoretical analysis supported by contemporary empirical evidence, the book explores key areas of the employment relationship adding a new perspective to our understanding of contemporary work.

How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand ...

UK workers are stuck in a low-pay, low-productivity rut, with far too many people working in poor quality, insecure jobs, with little training or chance of getting on. Katy Jones and Ashwin Kumar question the mantra that “work is the best way out of poverty” and examine the in-work poverty that now defines employment for many.The state’s engagement with people out of work is shown to ignore the needs of lone parents and disabled people, and has little concern for skills and career ...

This volume provides a rigorous examination of key issues relating to employment in small businesses. These include an anlysis of the true extent of job crreation provided by small firms, the rleative quality of jobs in small firms, the growth of self-employment during the 1980s and the way in which the small firm interacts with its local labour markets. These issues are examined in an international context, wth comparative examples from the USA, the UK and Europe.

As a Chinese proverb says 'The fish rots from the head' and so it is with businesses and other organisations - the buck starts and stops in the boardroom. This third edition of Bob Garratt's bestselling book that highlights the importance of effective corporate governance has been extensively updated following the corporate scandals of the early 2000s - Enron, WorldCom, Tyco - and the abysmal boardroom standards that the credit crunch and ensuing global financial crisis brought to light.

"Education, education, education" has become an obsession for politicians and the public alike. It is seen as an economic panacea: an engine for growth and prosperity. But is there a link between increased spending on higher eductaion and economicgrowth? Professor Alison Wolf takes a critical look at successive governments' education policy and challenges many of the tenets of received wisdom: there are no economic reasons for spending more on higher education in order to stimulate growth....

A fresh approach to managing organizational change by looking at it as complex, dynamic and messy as opposed to a series of neat, linear stages and processes leading to success.Key to the approach is the idea that change, creativity and innovation all overlap and interconnect rather than being three separate areas of study and that managing the three together is central to organizations having the competitive edge in developing new technologies and techniques, products and services...

Here is a practical guide to the essentials of business. This book provides everything you need to know about the key concepts and terms, from accountability to zero-sum game. Everything from management, economics and finance to marketing, organizational behaviour and operations is covered in just the right amount of detail to make things clear and intelligible.Business: The Key Concepts:* is detailed yet approachable* considers new developments in business,...

This book reflects the enormous interest in work-life balance and current pressing concerns about the impacts of austerity more broadly. It draws on contemporary research and practitioner experiences to explore how work-life balance and related workplace and social policy fare in turbulent economic times and the implications for employees, employers and wider societies. Authors consider workplace trends, practices and employment relations and the impacts on work, care and well-being of div...