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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

"What, fundamentally, is public management? This question is rarely answered clearly and confidently, whether by students of public management or academics in the field. This book answers this question, as its readers come to know why and how public management is a design-oriented professional discipline. The argument of the book is grounded in Herbert Simon's ideas about design-oriented professional disciplines. However, Michael Barzelay's argument runs counter to the idea that public management is a design science. It envisions the discipline as a professional practice that requires the thoughtful and skilful use of purposive theories of public organizations, along with reverse-engineered design-precedents, in problem-solving for public programs and organizations. How professional knowledge about public management is to be expanded through research and analytical synthesis is therefore a major thrust of the book's overall argument. Michael Barzelay develops these arguments in a unique way, including guiding the reader through a fictional "Public Management Gallery" featuring key contributions to purposive theorizing about public management as a professional practice. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to strengthen the professional practice of public management - and the discipline - through education and research immediately and for years to come"--

How policymakers should guide, manage, and oversee public bureaucracies is a question that lies at the heart of contemporary debates about government and public administration. In their search for better systems of public management, reformers have looked in particular at the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries are exemplars of the New Public Management, a term used to describe distinctive new themes, styles, and patterns of public service management. Calling for public management to become a vibrant field of public policy, this valuable book consolidates recent work on

Talking about the field of public management is a convenient way to idealize research, teaching, and learning about aspects of public policy and administration. The view that public management is concerned with the development and operation of public programs and government organizations falls within the idealization. So, too, does the field's interdisciplinary constitution. However, what works in staging public management within a patchwork of strategic action fields -- universities, the social science academy, and public administration professionals -- does not provide a basis for academics to address deeper questions about its character. The need to address such questions has been forcefully stated by the field's leading thinkers, from time to time. This paper idealizes public management as a design-oriented social science, similar in concept to what Herbert Simon called a proper "science of the artificial." The paper shows that to idealize public management in such a way requires much clarification (and extension) of Simon's own ideas as he presented them. The resulting idealization of public management as a field of study provides a basis for a rich dialogue about the pursuit of academic excellence in the study of public policy and administration.

A nova gestão pública oferece um arcabouço teórico para ampliar a competência legal das instituições de auditoria governamental de forma a incluir a auditoria de desempenho. Este artigo examina questões conceituais, empíricas e administrativas suscitadas pela auditoria de desempenho. Conceitualmente, a auditoria de desempenho é termo dúbio para uma classe de atividades de revisão predominantemente avaliativas. Empiricamente, observa-se que os principais órgãos de auditoria dos países-membros da OCDE apresentam variações quanto aos tipos específicos de auditorias de desempenho realizadas. A explicação dessas variações permite algumas incursões na política contemporânea de gerenciamento público. Do ponto de vista administrativo, os órgãos de auditoria cujos mandatos legais incluem a auditoria de desempenho confrontam-se com duas questões estratégicas principais: realizar essas revisões avaliativas na modalidade tradicional de auditoria ou direcionar seu trabalho para promover a melhoria do desempenho nos órgãos auditados.

Critics of public management reform complain that governments copy legitimated foreign practices. Recent work by Eugene Bardach helps to explain why: neither government analysts nor academic researchers possess an adequate methodology to examine practices in source sites, with a view toward adaptation in target sites. Rather than complain, Bardach takes steps to develop such a methodology, drawing analogies with reverse engineering. This article offers specific guidance about how researchers can effectively investigate practices in source sites to prepare the ground for disciplined and ingenious extrapolation of practices from source to target sites. The resulting translation is illustrated by an extrapolation‐oriented case study.

Critics of public management reform complain that governments copy legitimated foreign practices. Recent work by Eugene Bardach helps to explain why: neither government analysts nor academic researchers possess an adequate methodology to examine practices in source sites, with a view toward adaptation in target sites. Rather than complain, Bardach takes steps to develop such a methodology, drawing analogies with reverse engineering. This article offers specific guidance about how researchers can effectively investigate practices in source sites to prepare the ground for disciplined and ingenious extrapolation of practices from source to target sites. The resulting translation is illustrated by an extrapolation-oriented case study. Adapted from the source document.

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.