Since the third edition of this authoritative volume, most of Western Europe and North America have entered an era of austerity which has pervasive effects on programmes of public management reform. Even in Australasia extensive measures of fiscal restraint have been implemented. In this fourth edition the basic structure of the book has been retained but there has been a line-by-line rewriting, including the addition of extensive analyses and information about the impacts of austerity. Ma...

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.In this Advanced Introduction, Christopher Pollitt starts a penetrating account of the theories, methods and possible trajectories of the study...

Public sector bureaucracies have been subjected to harsh criticism. One solution which has been widely adopted over the past two decades has been to 'unbundle government' - that is to break down monolithic departments and ministries into smaller, semi-autonomous 'agencies'. These are often governed by some type of performance contract, are at 'arm's length' or further from their 'parent' ministry or department and are freed from many of the normal rules governing civil service bodies. This...

This book analyzes the controversy surrounding imperialism associated with capitalist development. The last dozen years passed under the shadow of two momentous events: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conducted in the framework of the broader «war on terror», and the economic crisis. They occurred against the backdrop of global economic integration, but also against the contradictions in its development. Those events and processes are explained in the theory of contemporary capitalist imp...

This book describes struggles of different countries and their development after World War II. It presents a panorama of different ideologies of accelerated development, which dominated the world just before the war and in the next 40 years. The author explains why in the 1970s global and local elites began to turn away from the state, exchanging statism for the belief in the «invisible hand of the market» as a panacea for underdevelopment. He focuses not only on the genesis of underdevelo...

What does it take to design effective government institutions and sustain positive changes? What have we learnt about the attempts to deliberately design and redesign public sector institutions in different countries? What works and what doesn't, and why? What happens when reforms fail? This book looks at what the existing academic literature tells us about these questions, and intends to answer these questions to generate and define theoretical and practical knowledge about deliberate (vs...

In Capitalism and Commerce, Edward Younkins provides a clear and accessible introduction to the best moral and economic arguments for capitalism. Drawn from over a decade of business school teaching, Younkins's work offers the student of political economy and the educated layperson a clear, systematic treatment of the philosophical concepts that underpin the idea of capitalism and the business, legal, and political institutions that impact commercial enterprises. Divided into seve...

Public administration in Canada needs to change. A handful of scholars across Canada have been sounding the alarm for years but to no avail. Talented young bureaucrats have been joining the public service with fresh ideas capable of creating real change, but the black hole consumes all.In The Black Hole of Public Administration, experienced public servant Ruth Hubbard and public administration iconoclast Gilles Paquet sound a wake-up call to the federal public service. The...

Business analysis is the fastest growing field in business today and the role of the business analyst is both strategic and tactical. Business analysts are part strategist, part program or project manager, part architect and part systems analyst. They work as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, and communicate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. Early works on business analysis suggest that use of specific diagrams, posses...

The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. In The Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenom...

America’s Failing Experiment: How We the People Have Become the Problem, makes the controversial claim that the American political system suffers from too much democracy. An accomplished public policy expert coeditor of the Journal Survey Practice, Kirby Goidel argues that our elected officials are overly responsive to public opinion which is often poorly informed, incoherent, and uncertain. The result is a more polarized political system, rising inequality, and institutional gridlock. The...

Every century has witnessed the birth of a few world-transcending intellectuals as well as talented emerging scholars. Noam Chomsky and Pierre W. Orelus are no exception. Using dialogues exchanged over the course of nine years, combined with heartfelt critical essays, Chomsky and Orelus analytically examine social justice issues, such as unbalanced relationships between dominant and subjugated languages, democratic schooling, neoliberalism, colonization, and the harmful effect of Western g...