Managing to Improve Public Services

How are public service organizations governed? How can their performance be measured, managed and improved? Public services play a central role in the well-being, sustainability and growth of communities, cities and nations. Managing to Improve Public Services shows how management can be harnessed to improve a range of public services (e.g. policing, health, local government) by examining them through different theoretical lenses (e.g. governance, innovation and change, performance metrics and management). It advances both theory and practice, beyond traditional public administration and 'new public management', by considering the interrelationships between governance and public management. The book is written by a group of leading social science and management specialists, who were awarded the prestigious ESRC/EPSRC Public Service Fellow awards as part of the Advanced Institute of Management Research initiative. It will be of interest to graduate students, academics and policy makers involved in public service management and performance measurement.

'This is an important volume by an impressive collection of UK and international public management scholars, many of them linked to the major AIM Public Services research initiative. It combines a broad overview of current key developments and debates in public management, with valuable in depth chapters covering key topics. Its style is scholarly but clear and will appeal to reflective practitioners and academics alike.' Ewan Ferlie, King's College London, 'Ideally, the field of public management would develop as the field of medicine has done - through a close collaboration among scientists and clinicians struggling together to deal with particular concrete problems the world faced. A major obstacle to this vision has been the difficulty of creating a strong academic community that could have a sustained, cumulative discussion that ran alongside, and offered a powerful analytical and empirical commentary on, the past and emergent practices of the wider professional community. The AIM Initiative represented a bold effort to break this particular bottleneck, and the important results are contained in this book. Anyone who wants to enter into a serious discussion of public management reform should read these chapters, and get in touch with these authors. There is a lot of good science and no small amount of practical wisdom contained in these pages.' Mark Moore, Director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Jean Hartley is Professor of Organizational Analysis at the Institute of Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Cam Donaldson is the Health Foundation Chair in Health Economics and Director of the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University Business School. Chris Skelcher is Director of Research for the School of Public Policy and Professor of Public Governance at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham. Mike Wallace is Professor of Public Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University.