How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This general question is the concern of officials in all branches and at all levels of the public sector: legislators, elected and appointed executives, and judges at federal,...

How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This general question is the concern of officials in all branches and at all levels of the public sector: legislators, elected and appointed executives, and judges at federal,...

The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) allows for considerable differentiation in administrative structures and management strategies in the more than 600 local service delivery areas created under the Act. Data collected for the National JTPA Study permit empirical analysis of a relatively...

Within schools of public policy, there is general recognition that public management mediates the relationship between policy analysis and policy making, on the one hand, and the concrete, documentable outcomes of public policies, on the other. Understanding this mediating process toward...

Promoting innovative government has attracted a bipartisan constituency. But if the concept of innovation is watered down to encompass any promising idea or any program change that hasn't been tried before, it will lose its power as a device to stimulate non-trivial improvements in governmental...

The theory of policy implementation yields conflicting predictions. Depending on the case and the perspective of the observer, policy control over the bureaucracy ranges from loose or non-existent to oppressive and pernicious right down to the street level. This paper presents a theoretical...

Though Canada, Mexico, and the United States have distinctly different administrative histories, the language of "performance," "customers," "accountability," "privatization," and "decentralization" is heard throughout North America, and all three countries are engaged in public management...

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the policy analysis “movement” irrupted into American political life. Opportunistically assembling rudiments of authority, knowledge, technical skill and application that began to accumulate with the emergence of the modern administrative state, a...

The U.S. Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) was enacted to promote strategic planning and performance management in the U.S. Federal Government. This act and its effects to date are considered in three contexts: (1) of recurring efforts by U.S. political leadership to improve...

During his relatively short tenure in office, Illinois Department on Aging (IDOA) Director Victor Wirth performed an apparent managerial miracle. Inheriting an agency ridden with internal conflicts and in bad repute with its contractors and constituencies, Wirth successfully refocused his...