Norman Flynn

The future of public sector management

If we try to look at the future of public sector management in the UK, it might be more useful to think about what is happening in the rest of Europe, rather than looking at the USA (“reinventing government”, etc.) and especially New Zealand. There are some common pressures on the public sector in Europe, but not a unified or convergent approach to management. In the areas of structural arrangements about policy making and service delivery, relationships between tiers of government, goal setting, planning, budgeting, evaluation, “user” orientation and personnel management, there are choices to be made.

Strategy and strategists in UK local government

Top‐down or outside‐in change methodologies are increasingly seen to be ineffective. Systems thinking suggests that change in organizations is a much less straightforward and more subtle phenomenon than previous models allow. Since the late 1970s and as organic metaphors have become used more, the concept of organizational learning has emerged as central to the issue. However, an understanding of how this may take place is still undeveloped. Recently technologies for whole systems development have emerged based on Weisbord′s dictum that for change or learning to occur we need to “get everybody into improving the whole”. Whole systems development can offer a way to realizing the learning organization. Provides a case study of whole systems development in action within Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council in the UK. Begins with a brief account of the ideas on which whole systems development is based and concludes with a commentary on the case study.

A consumer‐oriented culture?

Public sector managers are asked to ‘stay close to the customer’ and to develop a consumer‐oriented culture. While important lessons from the private sector ‐ if properly translated—can be applied to the public sector, this does not mean that existing skills need to be abandoned, rather supplemented.

The Impact of Compulsory Competition on Public Sector Management: 'Competition Within the Field'

While there has been a tradition of sealed tenders for contracts for public works from the nineteenth century, the post war period saw an expansion of the use of directly employed labour on building and road works. By the middle of the 1970s there were scandals involving cost overruns on several local authority housing schemes. In 1978 the Labour government proposed that local authority building departments should run trading accounts as a first step towards exposing costs and encouraging competition. The Local Government Planning and Land Act 1980 and the Local Government Act 1988 made competitive tendering compulsory in a range of services provided by manual workers and the management of leisure facilities. A consultation paper has suggested that a much wider range of services could be included. In the National Health Service, the

Delegating financial responsibility and policy‐making within social services departments

Throughout the public sector experiments are being made in delegating responsibility and decentralising management. However, the difficulties should not be underestimated, both in accounting terms and in terms of accountability for policy decisions. In short, a new type of public sector manager is required if the experiments are to succeed.