Christopher Pollitt
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 253106 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Christopher Pollitt |
| NOMBRES | Christopher |
| APELLIDO | Pollitt |
| FIRMA | POLLITT C |
| AFILIACIONES | KU Leuven |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 77 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 718 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 73 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1974 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2016 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Managerialism Redux?
This paper argues that managerialism is still very much with us. NPM (one prominent manifestation of managerialism) is not dead. Alongside NPM, other species of managerialism have evolved. Across Europe patterns of management reform have been complex, with layers of traditional bureaucracy, NPM, other forms of managerialism and post‐NPM forms being sedimented on top of, or woven alongside, each other in a variety of national formations. The adven…
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2015) The Quest for Good Governance
Be prepared? An outside-in perspective on the future public sector in Europe
This paper takes an outside-in perspective on recent public sector reforms in Europe. It selects three of the most consequential and probable external trends, and then looks at how far management reforms are anticipating them. The conclusion is that European Union government responses to predictable external trends have been limited and unstrategic. Many official studies of climate change and demographic change have been written, but concrete res…
Towards a new world
On the global stage, public management has grown up over the past 30 years as a topic dominated by the ‘Anglosphere’. Now there are reasons to believe that this era is ending. There are three main reasons for this. First, the dominance of Anglosphere ideas and practices was never as complete as it may sometimes have appeared. Second, the effectiveness of typical Anglosphere reforms has been problematic. Recent scholarship indicates that only a mo…
Stephen Wilks (2013) The Political Power of the Business Corporation
Sandford Borins, The persistence of innovation in government
Avaliando reformas da gestão pública
Avaliar as reformas da gestão pública numa perspectiva internacional é um exercício científico difícil e problemático. Cinco problemas parecem emergir: a unidade de análise para uma comparação internacional é menos óbvia do que parece. Níveis de governo são diferentes de setores e de instrumentos e processos específicos. A unidade de sentido é o segundo problema, pois pode ser que uma agência não seja uma agência. A ausência e a qualidade dos dad…
Context in Public Policy and Management
Back in the OECD … an oblique comment on the World Bank’s Better Results from Public Sector Institutions
This brief commentary questions some of the usual assumptions made about the differences between public management reform in the developed world compared with the developing world. It suggests that reform failure is common in both, as is a lack of evidence about the final impacts of reform. In both cases the best available evidence indicates that management reform is an iterative and exploratory process that needs local, contextualized knowledge …
The logics of performance management
There is now a huge literature on public sector performance management systems (PMSs), but only a small fraction of it directly addresses the logics used by those who use or are subject to such systems. This article analyses a variety of ‘alternative logics’, covering a range of different types of gaming, cheating and symbolic uses. A synthesis is advanced, indicating how the different logics are inter-related and how they are likely to affect di…
Patrick Dunleavy and Leandro Carrera (2013) Growing the Productivity of Government Services
Ray Pawson (2013) The Science of Evaluation
Matt Andrews (2013) The limits of institutional reform in development
status: Published
Years of public management reform in UK central government – promises, promises
Despite the UK’s leading role in public management reform, and decades of continuous change, little has been learned of the final outcomes. Our understandings of the impacts are fragmentary. A theoretical explanation has three elements. The first comprises the inherent technical and methodological difficulties of evaluating complex major organisational change over time. The second identifies reasons why it is unlikely that most executive politici…
Sanford Borins (2011) Governing fables
status: Published
Talking About Government
This article examines the phenomenon of ‘magic’ concepts – those key terms which seem to be pervasive among both academics and practitioners. Within that category our focus is on ‘governance’, ‘accountability’ and ‘networks’. Our prime purpose is to map their meanings and how they are used. Following an analysis of a wide range of literature – both academic and practitioner – we find that these concepts have properties in common which help promot…
Not Odious but Onerous
This paper asks, first, how have comparative publications (academic ‘outputs’) developed during the past three decades; second, what theories have been in play, and, third, how can we best explain the picture of comparative PA that is thus revealed? The trajectories of themes and theories are set within a wider story of the development of networks and academic communities. Changes in practitioner concerns and networks have had significant impacts…
Mainstreaming Technological Change in the Study of Public Management
Several scholars have commented on the marginalization of information technology within the field of academic public administration – how it has tended to become the preserve of a minority of e-government specialists. This paper extends the point to the larger issue of technological change as a whole. In response to this, the paper develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of technological change, which relates it to some of the mainstream…
Cuts and reforms — Public services as we move into a new era
Most countries now share the prospect of an extended period of public fiscal austerity. Yet at the same time the demands for improved public services continues. This paper reviews the relationship between expenditure restraint and reform. It describes three broad strategies for achieving savings, noting that each has a different mixture of advantages and disadvantages. It then identifies four significant considerations that public service leaders…
Performance Regimes in Health Care
The Netherlands and England are near neighbours whose health care systems have much in common and whose health policy communities have also usually been well aware of what is going on in the other country. Nevertheless, for the two decades from 1982, England adopted and repeatedly redeveloped performance indicator (PI) systems in the health care field while the Netherlands virtually shunned them. A broad institutional explanation for this diverge…
To mark the 80th anniversary of Iias. A note by the Editor-In-Chief of International Review of Administrative Sciences/Revue internationale des Sciences administratives
Riggs on comparative public administration
status: Published
The changing of the guard and the guarding of the change
status: Published
The history and future of nation-building
status: Published
Managerialism and the Public Services
Managerialism and the Public Services shows how, during the 1980s, a new orthodoxy was imposed on many American and British public services. In health care, education and the civil/federal service 'new right' governments attempted to rebuild the welfare state according to their own organizational and political principles. In this second edition, Christopher Pollitt carefully analyses the ideas and practices that went into this would-be revolution…
Joined-up Government
This paper first identifies the varied meanings and objectives of joined-up government (JUG). Subsequently it explores the costs and risks involved, and briefly reviews some of the relevant academic literature. Having thus clarified the key concepts and situated the current fashion for a ‘holistic approach’ within the broader literature on co-ordination, the paper also considers a range of approaches to the assessment of progress with JUG
Performance Management in Practice
This article reports a study of performance management practices in four functions across four European Union member states (Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). The focus is on how and to what extent performance indicators influenced the top management of the agencies concerned and the degree to which performance data were used by ministries as steering instruments. The research uses a historical institutionalist perspectiv…
Convergence
Many academics have questioned the thesis (most prominently associated with Osborne and Gaebler’s Re‐inventing government ) that there is an inevitable and global convergence towards a particular, new style of public management. Yet, despite the ongoing production of scholarly evidence of global diversity, pronouncements of convergence continue to be made by politicians, civil servants and some academics. In this paper it is suggested that, bette…
Justification by Works or by Faith
The article first defines a set of policy measures that constitute the 'New Public Management' (NPM). Evidence is cited to support the contention that the NPM has been widely adopted, with local variations, in many Western states. The impacts of such large-scale reform are considerable. The article therefore explores the extent to which the NPM has been subject to serious and systematic evaluation. It is argued that there have been relatively few…
Bringing Consumers into Performance Measurement
As the practice of formal measurement of the performance of public services spreads attempts are beginning to be made to combine this measurement with the even more recent fashion for a ‘consumer approach’. This paper argues that there are a range of sometimes incompatible ideas at play behind the popular label of ‘consumerism’. The consequences of combining performance measurement with a consumer approach will depend very much on which concept o…
Performance Information for Democracy
This article examines research into the use of performance information by ministers, parliamentarians and citizens. These ‘end users’ are of crucial importance to the claim that performance information is not merely managerially useful, but also contributes to the quality of democratic debate and to the ability of citizens to make choices. A literature review indicates that research into use by these groups has been very patchy, and that much of …
The logics of performance management
There is now a huge literature on public sector performance management systems (PMSs), but only a small fraction of it directly addresses the logics used by those who use or are subject to such systems. This article analyses a variety of ‘alternative logics’, covering a range of different types of gaming, cheating and symbolic uses. A synthesis is advanced, indicating how the different logics are inter-related and how they are likely to affect di…
Bureaucracies Remember, Post‐bureaucratic Organizations Forget
The paper examines the hypothesis that post‐bureaucratic forms of organization perform less well than traditional bureaucracies with respect both to organizational memory and learning from experience. First, the paper discusses the meanings of the main terms and concepts to be used in the argument, and delimits its domain. Second, it identifies a series of mechanisms that are likely to bring about memory loss. Third, it examines the empirical lit…
Reflexive Watchdogs? How Supreme Audit Institutions Account for Themselves
Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) such as the UK National Audit Office and the French Cour des Comptes play important roles within the institutional mechanisms of the democratic state. They are given high independence in order to secure public accountability for, first, the probity and legality of public spending and, second, economy, efficiency and effectiveness. During the last twenty years several SAIs’ mandates have been adjusted to reflect t…
Cuts and reforms — Public services as we move into a new era
Most countries now share the prospect of an extended period of public fiscal austerity. Yet at the same time the demands for improved public services continues. This paper reviews the relationship between expenditure restraint and reform. It describes three broad strategies for achieving savings, noting that each has a different mixture of advantages and disadvantages. It then identifies four significant considerations that public service leaders…
Not Odious but Onerous
This paper asks, first, how have comparative publications (academic ‘outputs’) developed during the past three decades; second, what theories have been in play, and, third, how can we best explain the picture of comparative PA that is thus revealed? The trajectories of themes and theories are set within a wider story of the development of networks and academic communities. Changes in practitioner concerns and networks have had significant impacts…
Years of public management reform in UK central government – promises, promises
Despite the UK’s leading role in public management reform, and decades of continuous change, little has been learned of the final outcomes. Our understandings of the impacts are fragmentary. A theoretical explanation has three elements. The first comprises the inherent technical and methodological difficulties of evaluating complex major organisational change over time. The second identifies reasons why it is unlikely that most executive politici…
Audit or Evaluation? A National Audit Office VFM Study
This article presents a case study of an important but relatively neglected aspect of the British policy process ‐ the Value for Money (VIM) studies undertaken by the National Audit Office. It analyses in detail the conduct of one particular study, including the reactions of the audited bodies and the parliamentary activity which followed the publication of the NAO report. The case is then used to illuminate what appear to be some more general ch…
Doing Business in the Temple? Managers and Quality Assurance in the Public Services
Quality’ is now high on the policy agenda for many of our major public services. This article raises the question of what are the respective roles in securing quality of, on the one hand, professional service deliverers and, on the other, managers. It reviews a range of possible roles for managers and concludes that some of these are likely to be illegitimate and ineffective. Even the more appropriate roles will, however, often prove difficult to…
Performance Regimes in Health Care
The Netherlands and England are near neighbours whose health care systems have much in common and whose health policy communities have also usually been well aware of what is going on in the other country. Nevertheless, for the two decades from 1982, England adopted and repeatedly redeveloped performance indicator (PI) systems in the health care field while the Netherlands virtually shunned them. A broad institutional explanation for this diverge…
The Struggle for Quality
Almost everybody, it seems, is currently in favour of improving the ‘quality’ of public services. However, analysis soon reveals that different groups define quality differently, adopt different approaches to its improvement and wield greater or lesser leverage in the struggle to determine which definitions, methods and measurements will be adopted in its pursuit. The NHS offers a particularly vivid example of the ‘politics of quality’. Close exa…
Towards a new world
On the global stage, public management has grown up over the past 30 years as a topic dominated by the ‘Anglosphere’. Now there are reasons to believe that this era is ending. There are three main reasons for this. First, the dominance of Anglosphere ideas and practices was never as complete as it may sometimes have appeared. Second, the effectiveness of typical Anglosphere reforms has been problematic. Recent scholarship indicates that only a mo…
Avaliando reformas da gestão pública
Avaliar as reformas da gestão pública numa perspectiva internacional é um exercício científico difícil e problemático. Cinco problemas parecem emergir: a unidade de análise para uma comparação internacional é menos óbvia do que parece. Níveis de governo são diferentes de setores e de instrumentos e processos específicos. A unidade de sentido é o segundo problema, pois pode ser que uma agência não seja uma agência. A ausência e a qualidade dos dad…
General Management in the NHS
The Griffiths report of 1983 resulted in radical changes (to which the label ‘general management’ has been applied) to the formalities of organization and management in the national health service. We report the findings of a major study (involving more than 300 interviews) of the impact of these changes up to 1988. Although general management has been widely accepted in the service, and seems to have resulted in some improvements to management p…
Measuring Performance
On 22nd September 1983 the Department of Health and Social Security issued the first national package of ‘performance indicators’ to the 14 Regional Health Authorities (RHAs) and 192 District Health Authorities (DHAs) which make up the National Health Service in England. Introducing this central government initiative, the junior minister said that it gave ‘local managers, for the first time, the facility to compare local performance with what is …
Mainstreaming Technological Change in the Study of Public Management
Several scholars have commented on the marginalization of information technology within the field of academic public administration – how it has tended to become the preserve of a minority of e-government specialists. This paper extends the point to the larger issue of technological change as a whole. In response to this, the paper develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of technological change, which relates it to some of the mainstream…
Performance Measurement in the Public Services
PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN THE PUBLIC SERVICES: SOME POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS Christopher Pollitt Christopher Pollitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 39, Issue 3, July 1986, Pages 315–329, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a052048 Published: 01 July 1986
No Hiding Place
It has never been easy to conduct research into currently sensitive policy issues, but there is now accumulating evidence to indicate that various forms of resistence to scholarly investigation are on the increase. Such a climate handicaps all social policy research, but may have the greatest impact on ethnographic projects. Yet, it is argued, ethnography is increasingly widely recognised among academics as having a particularly valuable contribu…
Rationalizing the Machinery of Government
The White Paper The Reorganization of Central Government (Cmnd 4506) not merely announced extensive changes in the organizational structure of Whitehall, it did so in unusually ambitious and philosophically explicit terms. This paper traces the origins of the policies announced in the white paper, identifies the main groups and individuals involved, and shows how some elements were more successfully implemented than others. The concluding analysi…
The Central Policy Review Staff 1970–1974
The Central Policy Review Staff 1970–1974
The Public Expenditure Survey 1961–72
Modernisation des structures administratives
Modernizing administrative structures : the British experience (1970-1974). The Tory government published in October 1970 an ambitious plan for the reorganization of central government. Examining the sources and consequences of this reform, the author focuses on the decision-making procedures in the governmental machinery and tries to evaluate the relations between administrative structures and politics. His conclusions are rather pessimistic. Th…
Rationalizing the Machinery of Government
The White Paper The Reorganization of Central Government (Cmnd 4506) not merely announced extensive changes in the organizational structure of Whitehall, it did so in unusually ambitious and philosophically explicit terms. This paper traces the origins of the policies announced in the white paper, identifies the main groups and individuals involved, and shows how some elements were more successfully implemented than others. The concluding analysi…
The Political Administration of Economic Decline
Most British public administration textbooks still seem to conclude with discussion of the way ahead after the Fulton Report on the Civil Service; of the creation of new giant departments and semi-independent agencies; or of improving techniques for policy analysis and the medium-term planning of public expenditure. Yet to the designers of Whitehall these are the themes of a bygone age: tunes played with gusto in the late '60s and early '70s whic…
The CSD
Th Anniversary Essay Competition 1982
Measuring Performance
On 22nd September 1983 the Department of Health and Social Security issued the first national package of ‘performance indicators’ to the 14 Regional Health Authorities (RHAs) and 192 District Health Authorities (DHAs) which make up the National Health Service in England. Introducing this central government initiative, the junior minister said that it gave ‘local managers, for the first time, the facility to compare local performance with what is …
Performance Measurement in the Public Services
PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN THE PUBLIC SERVICES: SOME POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS Christopher Pollitt Christopher Pollitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 39, Issue 3, July 1986, Pages 315–329, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a052048 Published: 01 July 1986
Capturing Quality
The quality of health care services has recently become a prominent political issue in both Britain and America. Everyone is in favour of quality. Yet closer inspection reveals that the term is being used with several different meanings, and that its fashionability seems intimately connected with the collision, in both countries, between rising health care costs and a desire on the part of the purchasers or paymasters of health services to restri…
The politics of performance assessment
Beginning with a typology of the purposes of performance assessment schemes in the public sector, the paper goes on to argue that in practice certain of these purposes have received much more political and organisational support than others. In particular, there has been a tendency in several public services for managerialist schemes to develop which place prime emphasis on economy and efficiency. This type of scheme may actually reduce the chanc…
The politics of performance assessment
Bringing Consumers into Performance Measurement
As the practice of formal measurement of the performance of public services spreads attempts are beginning to be made to combine this measurement with the even more recent fashion for a ‘consumer approach’. This paper argues that there are a range of sometimes incompatible ideas at play behind the popular label of ‘consumerism’. The consequences of combining performance measurement with a consumer approach will depend very much on which concept o…
Doing Business in the Temple? Managers and Quality Assurance in the Public Services
Quality’ is now high on the policy agenda for many of our major public services. This article raises the question of what are the respective roles in securing quality of, on the one hand, professional service deliverers and, on the other, managers. It reviews a range of possible roles for managers and concludes that some of these are likely to be illegitimate and ineffective. Even the more appropriate roles will, however, often prove difficult to…
No Hiding Place
It has never been easy to conduct research into currently sensitive policy issues, but there is now accumulating evidence to indicate that various forms of resistence to scholarly investigation are on the increase. Such a climate handicaps all social policy research, but may have the greatest impact on ethnographic projects. Yet, it is argued, ethnography is increasingly widely recognised among academics as having a particularly valuable contribu…
General Management in the NHS
The Griffiths report of 1983 resulted in radical changes (to which the label ‘general management’ has been applied) to the formalities of organization and management in the national health service. We report the findings of a major study (involving more than 300 interviews) of the impact of these changes up to 1988. Although general management has been widely accepted in the service, and seems to have resulted in some improvements to management p…
The Struggle for Quality
Almost everybody, it seems, is currently in favour of improving the ‘quality’ of public services. However, analysis soon reveals that different groups define quality differently, adopt different approaches to its improvement and wield greater or lesser leverage in the struggle to determine which definitions, methods and measurements will be adopted in its pursuit. The NHS offers a particularly vivid example of the ‘politics of quality’. Close exa…
Audit or Evaluation? A National Audit Office VFM Study
This article presents a case study of an important but relatively neglected aspect of the British policy process ‐ the Value for Money (VIM) studies undertaken by the National Audit Office. It analyses in detail the conduct of one particular study, including the reactions of the audited bodies and the parliamentary activity which followed the publication of the NAO report. The case is then used to illuminate what appear to be some more general ch…
Charters at the grass‐roots
1994). Charters at the grass‐roots: A first report. Local Government Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 202-225
Justification by Works or by Faith
The article first defines a set of policy measures that constitute the 'New Public Management' (NPM). Evidence is cited to support the contention that the NPM has been widely adopted, with local variations, in many Western states. The impacts of such large-scale reform are considerable. The article therefore explores the extent to which the NPM has been subject to serious and systematic evaluation. It is argued that there have been relatively few…
Antistatist Reforms and New Administrative Directions
Compared with the United States, the United Kingdom is a strong unitary state. There are few constitution constraints on the central executive; that executive is controlled by one, highly disciplined political party; that same party is usually able to dominate the proceedings o the legislature. The government of the d is accustomed to being able to get more than 90 percent of its legislation through Parliament unscathed (Rose, 1989). It is also a…
Reflexive Watchdogs? How Supreme Audit Institutions Account for Themselves
Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) such as the UK National Audit Office and the French Cour des Comptes play important roles within the institutional mechanisms of the democratic state. They are given high independence in order to secure public accountability for, first, the probity and legality of public spending and, second, economy, efficiency and effectiveness. During the last twenty years several SAIs’ mandates have been adjusted to reflect t…
Decentralising Public Service Management
Decentralise authority and let managers manage' has been an almost universal message in UK public services over the last 15 years. But does it really work? Drawing on their own - and a wide range of o
Improving the Quality of Social Services
Evaluation in Europe
status: Published
Political science (66 obras) · Law (41 obras) · Public Administration (40 obras) · Public Policy and Administration Research (36 obras) · Economics (32 obras) · Business (30 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Sociology (28 obras) · Public Administration (27 obras) · Public sector (19 obras)