Showing posts with label public value. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public value. Show all posts

Monday, July 27, 2009

Global Speak: Virtual Seminar


I'm really pleased to have been invited to present a virtual seminar as part of the PolicyNet group of which the Crawford School is a member. This will see me beamed around the world to institutions such as Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton, USA), Peking University School of Government, Hertie School of Governance (Berlin), Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (Carleton University, Canada), Balsillie School of International Affairs (Canada), The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), and Tsinghua University School of Public Affairs (Tsinghua University, China). This is a great chance to link up with people in other parts of the world and to connect up our students (some schools use the seminar series as a basis for a course) - hopefully my Australian accent will not be too thick!!


I settled on the following title Understanding The Role of Public Managers in the 21st Century: Challenges and Debates. This will enable me to speak broadly about the changing role of public managers and how this has changed over time as waves of reform have redefined this role. It will also provide a chance to discuss some of the interesting debates that are emerging around the public value framework something I have spent quite a bit of time delving into over the last few years.

Recently John Alford and I published a piece in a special issue of the International Journal of Public Administration titled Making Sense of Public Value: Concepts, Critiques and Emergent Meanings. In the paper we revisited Mark Moore's original work on the public value framework - essentially a strategic management framework for the public sector - and then we considered how the notion of public value has taken off in different ways, especially over the last few years.

A fairly heated debate has been sparked through a serious of exchanges in the Australian Journal of Public Administration through a series of articles since 2007 which are essentially focused on the politics, management and whether this approach travels well outside the USA. More recently the debate has internationalised with our piece in the IJPA and a piece by Rod Rhodes and John Wanna being published in Public Administration. Expect this one to continue on for a while!

Friday, March 27, 2009

Blogging in the Mother Country

Colin Talbot, an academic from the UK has recently started a blog on Whitehall and Public Management. I met Colin a few years ago at a conference in Nottingham where I was presenting a paper on public value and contracting and we have keep in touch since exchanging papers and thoughts on the topics. He works across a range of public management topics but I found his book The Paradoxical Primate a fabulous read - highly recommended!






Colin has been doing some work in the area of public value - one of my areas of interest - and recently edited a special issue of the International Journal of Public Administration on the topic where I had an article with John Alford, Australia and New Zealand School of Government.

Colin's blog has been an instant success and shows clearly the interest in public management around the world. You can check it out here: http://whitehallwatch.wordpress.com/