This book examines the role of bureaucracy in modern technologically advanced societies, the traditional models of governance, and the potential of information technology to fundamentally change and improve governance. In the area of public-domain governance, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered public agencies to improve their activities and to strengthen the efficiency of their operations. Technology has enabled optimized transfer of knowledge and information between government agencies, more efficient supervision and control of relationships with citizens, and higher efficiency in law enforcement through better access to information. Throughout the last decades, technology has been used to strengthen the role of state bureaucracies and the relationship between the civil service and the citizens. We have witnessed the transformative powers of ICTs in private-sector enterprises in well-structured technological landscapes, which has produced new ecosystems comprised of software developers, providers, and consumers who provide and consume new products and services in ecosystems that are based on clear technological standards and shared modular generic artefacts, which allow for distributed peer production. ICTs will shape cultural and civic discourse and create products, services and tools, relying on the open toolsets, technologies and exchange of knowledge between peers. This book will be of particular interest to government CIOs, IT/IS managers, researchers, students, and practitioners in technical sciences, public administration, business management, public policy and IS management.

First published in 1998, this volume has been a significant contribution to current debates over the future of the public services. Professionalism has been and is a major feature of the British welfare state. Yet the political, social and economic context in which the profession emerged and flourished is changing rapidly. The professional ideal of disinterested expertise serving the public interest has lost much of its original gloss. Professional status and careers are threatened by major shifts in the structure of the welfare state which can be summed up as the decline of the big government bureaucratic model. Professions themselves face challenges to their special claims to expertise and public service from: politicians, senior managers, new social movements and pressure groups, technological change and not least from those citizens whom they aspire to serve. This volume asks how these new challenges are changing professions and how professionals themselves are adapting.

Traditional public policy and welfare economics have held that market failures are common, requiring the intervention of government in order to serve and protect the public good. In Beyond Politics, William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons carefully scrutinize this traditional view through the modern theory of public choice. The authors enlighten the relationship of government and markets by emphasizing the actual rather than the ideal workings of governments and by reuniting the insights of economics with those of political science. Beyond Politics traces the anatomy of government failure and a pathology of contemporary political institutions as government has become a vehicle for private gain at public expense. In so doing, this brisk and vigorous book examines a host of public issues, including social welfare, consumer protection, and the environment. Offering a unified and powerful perspective on the market process, property rights, politics, contracts, and government bureaucracy, Beyond Politics is a lucid and comprehensive book on the foundations and institutions of a free and humane society.

Discretion has re-emerged as an issue of central importance for welfare professionals over the last two decades in the face of an intensification of management culture across the public sector. This book presents an innovative framework for the analysis of discretion, offering three accounts of the managerial role - the domination model, the street level model and the author's alternative discursive perspective. These different regimes of discretion are examined through a case study within a social services department, comparing and contrasting social work discretion in an Older Persons Team and a Mental Health Team. This innovative, theoretical and empirical analysis will be of great interest to postgraduate students and researchers in social work and related disciplines including social policy, public administration and organizational studies, as well as professionals in social work, health and education.

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

Bureaucracy is a curse – it seems we can’t live with it, we can’t live without it. It is without doubt one of the fundamental ideas which underpin the business world and society at large. In this book, Tom Vine observes, analyses and critiques the concept, placing it at the heart of our understanding of organisation. The author unveils bureaucracy as an endlessly emergent phenomenon which defies binary debate – in analysing organisation, we are all bureaucrats. In building an experiential perspective, the book develops more effective ways to interact with bureaucracy in theory and practice. Empirical material take centre stage, whilst the book employs ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methods to illuminate the existential function of bureaucracy. Taking examples from art, history and culture, this book provides an entertaining alternative academic analysis of bureaucracy as a key idea in business and society which will be essential reading for students and scholars of work and organisation

Like it or not, contemporary man is man-in-bureaucracy. He spends the majority of his waking hours in a bureaucracy; es-tablishes an identity and status in a bureaucracy; garners most of his satis-factions and disappointments in a bu-reaucracy; and, increasingly, he is what he does. Aside from the importance of understand-ing those institutions that shape our values, behavior, and experience, bu-reaucracy is a vital area for study because it reveals a wide range of social behavior in a compact and comprehensible way. The abstract and ephemeral problems of society at large are brought down to earth made measurable, comprehensible and visible in the bureaucratic microcosm. Problems of power and influence, change and innovation, intergroup conflict, ambition and aspiration, self-realization versus participative democracy, technology versus humanism: all can be observed and analyzed in human organizations. This volume pinpoints the dilemma of present bureaucratic organizations: the conflict between the need to sustain innovation and bureaucratic drives toward rationality and stability. The essays it contains discuss specific human needs that bureaucracy must meet if it is to continue to attract talented people and takes a step into the future to analyze the kinds of organizations that may be expected to evolve as institutions seek more flexible use of human resources.

The International Handbook of Educational Change is a state of the art collection of the most important ideas and evidence of educational change. The book brings together some of the most influential thinkers and writers on educational change. It deals with issues like educational innovation, reform, restructuring, culture-building, inspection, school-review, and change management. It asks why some people resist change and what their resistance means. It looks at how men and women, older teachers and younger teachers, experience change differently. It looks at the positive aspects of change but does not hesitate to raise uncomfortable questions about many aspects of educational change either. It looks critically and controversially at the social, economic, cultural and political forces that are driving educational change. School leaders, system administration, teacher leaders, consultants, facilitators, educational researchers, staff developers and change agents of all kinds will find this book an indispensable resource for guiding them to both classic and cutting-edge understandings of educational change, no other work provides as comprehensive coverage of the field of educational change.

Providing students of economics, politics, and policy with a concise explanation of public choice, markets, property, and political and economic processes, this record identifies what kinds of actions are beyond the ability of government. Combining public choice with studies of the value of property rights, markets, and institutions, this account produces a much different picture of modern political economy than the one accepted by mainstream political scientists and welfare economists. It demonstrates that when citizens request that their governments do more than it is possible, net benefits are reduced, costs are increased, and wealth and freedom are diminished. Solutions are also suggested with the goal to improve the lot of those who should be the ultimate sovereigns in a democracy: the citizens.