Confessions of a Civil Servant is filled with lessons on leading change in government and the military. Bob Stone based the book on thirty years as a revolutionary in government. It comes at a time when the events of 9-11 are sharpening America's demands for government at all levels that works.
Representatives of leading private sector firms, public sector employers and former federal officials discussed new approaches to managing people. This report distills from their discussions a set of human resource management (HRM) principles and points that Congress could apply to the federal civil service.
Many countries are still struggling to adapt to the broad and unexpected effects of modernization initiatives. As changes take shape, governments are challenged to explore new reforms. The public sector is now characterized by profound transformation across the globe, with ramifications that are yet to be interpreted. To convert this transformation into an ongoing state of improvement, policymakers and civil service leaders must learn to implement and evaluate change. This book is an important contribution to that end. Reforming the Public Sector presents comparative perspectives of government reform and innovation, discussing three decades of reform in public sector strategic management across nations. The contributors examine specific reform-related issues including the uses and abuses of public sector transparency, the "Audit Explosion," and the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction in Europe. This volume will greatly aid practitioners and policymakers to better understand the principles underpinning ongoing reforms in the public sector. Giovanni Tria, Giovanni Valotti, and their cohorts offer a scientific understanding of the main issues at stake in this arduous process. They place the approach to public administration reform in a broad international context and identify a road map for public management. Contributors include: Michael Barzelay, Nicola Bellé, Andrea Bonomi Savignon, Geert Bouckaert, Luca Brusati, Paola Cantarelli, Denita Cepiku, Francesco Cerase, Luigi Corvo, Maria Cucciniello, Isabell Egger-Peitler, Paolo Fedele, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Mario Ianniello, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Irvine Lapsley, Peter Leisink, Mariannunziata Liguori, Renate Meyer, Greta Nasi, James L. Perry, Christopher Pollitt, Adrian Ritz, Raffaella Saporito, MariaFrancesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini, Bram Steijn, Wouter Vandenabeele, and Montgomery Van Wart.
The authors of this book contend that the civil service system, which was devised to create a uniform process for recruiting high-quality workers to government, is no longer uniform or a system. Nor does it help government find and retain the workers it needs to build a government that works. The current civil service system was designed for a government in which federal agencies directly delivered most public services. But over the last generation, privatization and devolution have increased the number and importance of government's partnerships with private companies, nonprofit organizations, and state and local governments. Government workers today spend much of their time managing these partnerships, not delivering services, and this trend will only accelerate in the future. The authors contend that the current system poorly develops government workers who can effectively manage these partnerships, resulting too often in a gap between promise and performance. This short, lively, and bipartisan volume, authored by the nation's leading experts on government management, describes what the government of the future will look like, what it will need to work well, and how in particular the nation can build the next generation of workers required to lead it.
This comparative study focuses on the changing relations between civil servants and politicians in the European Union in the last two decades. As well as national case studies this book also looks into politico-administrative relations in supranational institutions such as the European Commission and the European Parliament.
This report looks at the capacity and capabilities of civil servants of OECD countries and suggests approaches for addressing skills gaps through recruitment, development and workforce management
This revised and expanded edition of a benchmark collection compares how civil services around the world have adapted to cope with managing public services in the 21st century. The volume provides insights into multi-level governance, juridification and issues of efficiency and responsiveness as well as exploring the impact of fiscal austerity.
This book is concerned with the civil services of the United Kingdom, examining their characteristics and trends since 1970. It provides a map of the British civil service beyond Whitehall, giving an individual country-by-country analysis of the civil services of the UK. It considers the implications of the changing nature of the civil services for our understanding of British governance, especially in the context of the public sector management reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and the impact of constitutional change (chiefly devolution) since 1998. Given that devolution has been characterized as a process rather than an event, the book brings to bear evidence of how existing longstanding differences within some parts of British public administration may come to be replicated elsewhere in the UK. The authors also explore two controversial propositions. First they ask whether Britain is moving from the unitory, strong executive of the 'Westminster model' to a 'differentiated polity' characterized by institutional fragmentation. Second, they consider whether an unintended consequence of recent changes is a 'hollowing out of the state'. Is the British executive losing functions downwards to devolved governments and special-purpose bodies and outwards to regional offices and agencies with a resulting loss of central capacity? Substantial empirical data (both quantitative and qualitative) has been amassed here in order to give answers to these questions. Decentralizing the Civil Service assesses the UK's changing civil services in the wake of two decades of public sector management reforms and New Labour's constitutional reform programme, most notably devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This assessment has significant implications for how we view governance in the UK.