Michael Barzelay

Central Audit Institutions and Performance Auditing: A Comparative Analysis of Organizational Strategies in the OECD

The New Public Management supplies a rationale for broadening the mandate of external audit institutions to encompass performance auditing. This article examines conceptual, empirical, and managerial issues raised by external performance auditing. Conceptually, performance auditing is a misnomer for a class of mainly evaluative review activities. Empirically, OECD countries vary in terms of the specific types of performance audits conducted by their principal external audit bodies. Explaining such variation offers some insight into the contemporary politics of public management policy. Managerially, audit bodies whose mandate includes performance auditing confront two major strategic issues: whether to conduct such evaluative reviews in an auditing style and whether to gear their work to achieving performance improvement in auditee organizations.

The New Public Management: a bibliographical essay for Latin American (and other) scholars

The New Public Management is a field of professional and policy discussion—conducted internationally—about public management policy, executive leadership, design of programmatic organizations, and government operations. Scholars specializing in public administration/political science have contributed to this discussion for a decade; however, their contribution has yet to be examined as a whole. The paper—a bibliographical essay, rather than a literature review—attempts to fill this gap. Studies published in the 1990–96 period are examined in detail, while subsequent works are briefly discussed. The paper aims to help scholars situated outside the original English-speaking precincts of the NPM discussion to benefit from and contribute to this maturing literature. This aim is pursued here in three main ways: first, by reviewing each study’s distinctive methodological and theoretical approach; second, by contrasting each item with a common benchmark; and, third, by including two studies about Latin America within the review. The bibliographical essay can be used for envisioning the public administration/political science contribution to the NPM discussion in its second decade, as well.

How to argue about the new public management

Abstract Hood and Jacksons (1991) distinction between administrative argument and administrative philosophy has been largely overlooked in writings on NPM. This seemingly subtle distinction flows from the more obvious one between “practical argument” and “social scientific explanation.” These terms refer to different scholarly practices. Practical reasoning is a highly-developed form of scholarship in law, public policy, and political theory. Explanation is a highly-developed scholarly activity in political science and related disciplines. The fact that practical argument and explanation are, in principle, complementary scholarly activities in practically-oriented fields such as public management is not a reason to overlook the distinction between them. If scholars writing on NPM made more of this distinction, it might prove easier for their readers to see precisely how social science explanations and practical arguments are interrelated. Discussion of how well claims have been supported would then be facilitated. Also, it would be easier for writers to decide how to engage the NPM literature. Not only would the issues be clearer, but it would also be easier to discuss the merits of alternative approaches to tackling them. If more weight is given to the distinction between practical argumentation and social scientific research by scholars of NPM, an urgent question is: how should the scholarly practice of practical argumentation be characterized?

Explaining public management policy change: Germany in comparative perspective

Public management policies have changed significantly in numerous countries in recent times. Policy entrepreneurs remain active in this policy domain, which encompasses government-wide rules and routines in the areas of expenditure planning and financial management, civil service and labor relations, procurement, organization and methods, and audit and evaluation. Case-oriented comparative research provides policy entrepreneurs with historically and theoretically informed knowledge useful in designing or improvising change strategies in this domain. This article focuses on the case of public management policymaking in the German federal government during the 1980s and 1990s. A coherent explanation of the careers of the “overbureaucratization” issue in the 1980s and the “lean state” issue in the 1990s is provided, along with an explanation for marked changes in selected public management policies in the 1990s. Analysis of this case is also harmonized with findings about public management policy change in the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. Limited generalizations about the process of public management policy change are proposed. Policy entrepreneurs can factor these generalizations, plus analysis of the Germany case, into their prospective, situational analysis of the process of public management policy change.

Innovating government-wide public management practices to implement development policy: the case of "Brazil in Action"

ABSTRACT This article examines analytical and historical relationships between the topics of state capacity building and public management policy change. It does so by presenting an instrumental case study of Brazil in Action, a program that became the hallmark of the first presidential term of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The development of the program is explained on the basis of institutional processual meta-theories of policy and organizational change. The operation of the program is considered in terms of the clinical analysis of organizational practices. Implications for research on innovative administrative practice, public management policy change, and state capacity building are considered.

Case teaching and intellectual performances in public management

The educational process should enable students to engage in specific kinds of intellectual performance. We believe that many of the kinds of intellectual performances important to the practice of public management can best be taught via the case method. Nevertheless, we have reservations about the way cases are usually taught. In most instances, case teaching is deficient in developing students’ understanding of the intellectual performances undertaken in case analysis and practice. Among the most significant limitations of case teaching is the relevant absence of explicit discussion of how public managers systematically combine conceptual material drawn from diverse disciplinary and professional bodies of thought. We show how case teaching can be upgraded to enhance its effectiveness in teaching students how to craft appropriate responses to administrative situations.

A Review of: “Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach. Paula Jarzabkowski”

This book undertakes the needed task of coalescing organizational theorizing about the executive function in complex organizations. The specific topic is strategizing. This term refers to goal-directed effort through which organizationally significant choices come to be made—ones that are thought of as significantly affecting an organization’s nature and overall achievements. The novelty of the book is to construct a corpus of social and organizational theorizing based on ‘‘activity theory’’ and to challenge scholars to work this approach into the study of strategizing. It is not a how-to book, but rather a point of departure for fresh lines of theory-building and research about leadership, strategy, and organizational change. Public management researchers who have developed case studies to analyze the activities of high officials in relation to organizational change in the public sector will find the practice approach to be instinctively familiar. To use a centuries-old cliché, many of us have long been speaking (practice theory) prose. However, Strategy as Practice opens up a vista where the work of strategizing is systematically theorized. The book will provide public management researchers with ample clues about how to achieve more significant intellectual achievements as they pursue established research agendas about leadership, strategy, and organizational change in the public sector. Chapter 1, ‘‘Core Social Theory Themes in Strategy as Practice,’’ on its own is worth the price of admission. This chapter provides a satisfactory introduction to the burgeoning multi-disciplinary literature on activity and practice theory. This synthetic chapter-length discussion complements such book-length treatments of practice theory as Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and International Public Management Journal

From Integration to Integrity: Administrative Ethics and Reform in the European Commission

Revolution, exacerbated by a view that ideologies are scientific manifestations of politics, fuelled heated debates among intellectual elites, all of whom were vying to have their model of unity prevail. Hayward also details how the idea of French exceptionalism was fashioned. In addition, he charts the violent struggles that pitted the right against the left, and the liberals against the Jacobine movement. Conflicts endured and consensus proved elusive. The book not only studies tensions among national elites, it also points to the importance of social stratification and urban–rural cleavages. A liberal democratic republic was established in 1878 as a result of a process that had started following Napoleon Bonaparte’s fall, despite a series of chaotic changes in the constitutional regime. The second part, called Selective Memory and Stalled Self Scrutiny, shows that the republic was far from stabilised and was not based on consensual support. A national identity had not formed, pragmatic compromises were numerous and also fragile. In addition, ideological wars about normative discourses of identity were flourishing. From 1878 these dialectics between continuity and change have continued up until the present day. While this part of the book covers only 90 pages, much is to be learned from it. For example Hayward examines several major political actors, ranging from trade unions and peasantry to freemasonry and political parties. He also investigates several major political causes from the separation of the church and state to women’s rights, the polarisation of political culture and the hegemonic influence of partisan intellectuals. Hayward suggests that French political culture has been diluted by European social liberalism. Fragmented France should attract attention from political scientists and historians. This book should also be of great interest to a much wider readership. Today France is still debating issues of national identity and its performance in cross-national perspective. Public opinion and the media fuel these obsessive passions. Selfdepreciation, if not self-flagellation have become quite common. The coq gaulois has lost some of its Gaullist arrogance. French political culture has indeed been diluted by European social liberalism, as Hayward suggests. The book also provides the background to a basic French paradox, namely the way of conducting public affairs through formal hyper-centralisation and normative unity while at the same time encountering highly fragmented governmental policy-making and differentiated, if not derogatory practices.

A Conceptual Framework and Methodological Guide for Research on Public Management Policy Change in the Latin America Region

This article presents a conceptual framework and methodological guide for researching the process of public management policy change in the Latin America region. It provides an explicit the methodological approach for case study research on this topic.The focus on the Latin America region is due to the sponsorship of the Inter-American Development Bank, which desired an explicit methodological guide for conducting research on public sector management reform. While the article is specifically geared to this purpose, it also exhibits a distinctive general approach to a large class of case study research designs. This class includes instrumental case study research about processes, incorporating variants that are rich in narrative, explicit in their explanatory framework, and comparative. Publishing the article in IMPR is appropriate since a) this class of case study research has not benefited from specialized methodological exposition and b) much public management research fits within this class. Accordingly, the article is addressed to both public management researchers interested in the specific research topic and those engaged in instrumental case-oriented research on processes, more generally.