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‘Language policy’ is a highly diverse term, encompassing all attempts to purposefully influence language use. Government language policy is broadly considered to have originated as a distinct field of research and policymaking in the 1970s, but we begin the chapter with a historical review of its precursors dating back several centuries. We trace the roots of contemporary language policy to two broad historical developments: Bible translation and universal education. These laid the foundations for what would become language policy. In the contemporary language policy period, we divide our discussion across three fields: modern foreign languages (MFL), indigenous languages and community languages. These categorisations come from policy, not linguistics or sociology. These groups of languages are treated differently in policy, so we divide them accordingly and trace their origins and developments in three political eras from the 1970s onwards: neoliberalism (1970s–80s), New Public Management (1990s–2000s), and austerity (2008 onwards). We show how each field of language policy has been indelibly shaped and contoured by changing political conditions and priorities. Lastly, we consider forms of language that tend to fall outside the scope of government policy, and what extra this reveals about language policy.
This Element focuses on New Public Governance as one of the major administrative narratives of our times. It offers a critical interpretation of NPG as a hybrid tool for management, governance, and reform, arguing that NPG coexists with and is likely to gradually merge into New Public Management. Several arguments support the 'continuity and hybridization' hypothesis, whereby the transition from NPM to NPG occurred through the retention of key elements and a layering and sedimentation process. These arguments challenge the “linear substitution” hypothesis, accounting for NPM's persistence and dominance. The Element develops a new interpretation of NPG and discusses the challenges that NPG poses. Finally, it shows that exploring hybridity is critical for evaluating the potential of NPG in terms of a shift in public administration and understanding governance trajectories and reform scenarios.
Most ICC commentators are enthusiastic about the promise of management as a way to optimise the court’s performance. Yet few are as eager to historicise the practices they advocate. Chapter 2 seeks to read the court’s managerial present through its past deployments, journeys, and consequences for other institutional projects long predating the contemporary Rome Statute system. The chapter begins by tracing the uses of management in such institutions as the plantation, war, and the nineteenth-century factory before following them as they entered the practice of early international institutions. Beyond these spaces, a major part of management’s pre-history lies in its invocation at the United Nations after decolonisation. The chapter demonstrates that two of management’s key assumptions – regarding its lack of history and its claim to political neutrality – are only the ‘truth effects’ of protracted expert and political struggle within various institutional spaces. The most important of these for the ICC has been the United Nations, where management formed part of a counter-strategy against the democratisation efforts of newly decolonised states. Whilst purportedly neutral today, the management practices taken up at the ICC continue to bear the scars of these earlier political wins and losses.
This chapter reflects on how both Soviet and neoclassical economic doctrines impose a practice of ‘organised forgetting’: the omission and rejection of knowledge that does conform to the presumed ontology. In adopting the language of science, both Soviet and neoliberal ideologies would attack their political opponents as primitives, unschooled in their singular methods of reasoning. Neoliberalism, in particular, is neverthless more accurately understood as working against the scientific method, depending as it does on argument from abstract, de-historicized assumption, as distinct from evidence-based justification, theoretical review and adaptation. The chapter traces how neoclassical theory was translated into a political agenda for the New Right through the 1970s. It closes by introducing the neoliberal governmental toolkit of the New Public Management, and explains why, following the isomorphism in their forms of reasoning, NPM would recreate the Stalinist toolkit of quantification, output planning, targets and managerial ‘correct lines’, only now in capitalist form. The analytical foundations are thus set for the policy chapters that follow.
Contemporary educational reformers strive to balance education for some (elite knowledge workers) with education for all. British and Danish policymakers resolve this conflict in different ways that resonate with long-term cultural frames. British politicians applaud vocational education but devote few resources to it. Efforts to equalize schooling focus on rewarding winners from the working class, but these interventions do little to develop skills for nonacademic learners. Denmark devotes more resources to vocational education, yet reformers have problems meeting the contradictory needs of high and low-skill workers, and immigrants are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poorly educated. Cultural legacies echo in young people’s views of education in an internet survey of 2100 British and Danish young people. British respondents support national quality standards and uniform curricula more than Danish ones, who prefer individualized learning experiences. Danish students are happier with their educational experiences, support educational investments to strengthen society, and appreciate practical, real-life skills. Upper-secondary vocational education students are more likely to report obtaining useful skills than their British colleagues. Yet Danish NEETs feel shut out of the core economy and their exclusion may be more agonizing because it goes against the historical commitment to a strong society.
Opening with a brief sketch of the evolution of research evaluation is followed by a description of the publication-oriented nature of academia today. The Introduction provides the necessary contextual information for investigating research evaluation systems. It then defines two critical blind spots in the contemporary literature on research evaluation systems. The first is the absence, within histories of the science of measuring and evaluating research, of the Soviet Union and post-socialist countries. This is despite the fact that these countries have played a key part in this history, from its very inception. The second relates to thinking about global differences in studies of the transformations in scholarly communication. It is stressed that the contexts in which countries confront the challenges of the publish or perish culture and questionable journals and conferences should be taken into account in discussions about them. Through its overview of diverse histories of evaluation and its identification of core issues in the literature, the chapter introduces readers to the book’s core arguments.
We introduce a themed collection of articles examining how the public sector has responded to, and been impacted by, the COVID-19 crisis. Although the pandemic has affected the roles, functions, economies, governance and structures of public sectors, this themed collection focuses on public sector employment relations. Authors examine significant areas which have been subject to accelerated change stemming from the pandemic. Building on decades of public sector reform, these changes impact public sector enterprise bargaining, terms and conditions of employment, working arrangements and practices, and the relationship between public servants and their employer. The articles in this collection provide important insights into the longer-term influences of the COVID-19 pandemic for public sector workforces. The collection also raises questions around whether the positive lessons from this crisis can be sustained to help manage serious crises in the future, or whether the public sector will slip back into a state of unpreparedness.
Major reforms in education, globally, have focused on increased accountability and devolution of responsibility to the local school level to improve the efficiency and quality of education. While emerging research is considering implications of these changed governance arrangements at both a school and system level, little attention has been afforded to teacher union responses to devolutionary reform, despite teaching being a highly union-organised profession and the endurance of decentralising-style reforms in education for over 40 years. Drawing upon a power resources approach, this article examines union responses in cases of devolutionary reform in a populous Australian state. Through analysing evolving policy discourse, from anti-bureaucratic, managerialising rhetoric to a ‘post-bureaucratic, empowerment’ agenda, this article contributes to understandings of union power for resisting decentralising, neoliberal policy agendas by exposing the limits of public sector unions mobilising traditional power resources and arguing for strengthening of discursive and symbolic power.
This article maps the major changes taking place in academic work within the broader context of the neoliberalisation of universities. Recognising the great variability in the form and pace of neoliberalisation across institutions and national contexts, the article identifies a set of features and indicators to aid in the comparative assessment of the extent and effect of neoliberal processes at different institutions. The authors use conceptual tools from labour process theory to highlight the ways that neoliberalisation has resulted in academic work that is fragmented, deskilled, intensified, and made subject to greater levels of surveillance, hierarchy, and precarity. In doing so, the authors also demonstrate the importance of combining political economy and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, to highlight the way that external structural conditions and subjective processes combine to create new labour processes to which participants find themselves consenting and actively reproducing.
This chapter examines the role of the administrative arm of government known as the bureaucracy, public service or civil service. The first section of the chapter charts the origins and development of bureaucracy as a model of organisation, which contrasts with the popular, and largely negative, understanding of the term. Turning to the Australian context, the chapter then provides an overview of the Australian federal bureaucracy, the Australian Public Service (APS). In explaining the bureaucracy’s role, the chapter outlines a key activity: policymaking. It examines definitions and stages of public policy, noting that in practice these stages represent an idealised understanding of the policy work of the bureaucracy. In reality, the world of policymaking is often chaotic, ad hoc and subject to opportunities and political leadership.
New public management reforms and modern policymaking are then placed in a broader context of a shift from government to governance that has taken place in recent decades. The chapter concludes by discussing the challenges the public service faces in the 21st century.
The introduction sets the scene for Articulating Security, providing a snapshot of post-Millennium global security under the aegis of the United Nations, and focusing on the organization’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. It explains that the principal intervention the book makes is to show that, even though this managerial security strategy has not been very effective in countering security threats, it is not without effect: specifically, it is affecting the ability of law to speak out against injustice. The Introduction sets out the three key interventions made in the book. First, it transplants Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power to a globalized and flexibilized twenty-first-century context. Second, it introduces the book’s key idea of infra-law, a concept that makes sense of the relationship between managerial governance and juridico-political government. Finally, it presents law with a stark choice between articulating security and articulating justice, arguing that law must relocate its force from authority to anger if it is to serve those rendered insecure by security measures.
The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost. Often overlooked in this narrative is how far actually existing neoliberalism strayed from the original designs of public choice theorists and neoliberal ideologues. By examining the history of the Thatcher government's public sector reforms, we demonstrate how neoliberal plans for marketisation ran aground, forcing neoliberal governments to turn to an approach of Managed Competition that owed more to practices of postwar planning born in Cold War US than neoliberal theory. Rather than impose a market-like transformation of the public sector, Managed Competition systematically empowered top managers and turned governance into a managerial process; two developments that ran directly against core precepts of neoliberalism. The history of these early failures and adjustments provides vital insights into the politics of managerial governance in the neoliberal era.
This Element is about the challenges of working collaboratively in and with governments in countries with a strong New Public Management (NPM) influence. As the evidence from New Zealand analyzed in this study demonstrates, collaboration – working across organization boundaries and with the public – was not inherently a part of the NPM and was often discouraged or ignored. When the need for collaborative public management approaches became obvious, efforts centered around “retrofitting” collaboration into the NPM, with mixed results. This Element analyzes the impediments and catalysts to collaboration in strong NPM governments and concludes that significant modification of the standard NPM operational model is needed including: Alternative institutions for funding, design, delivery, monitoring and accountability; New performance indicators; Incentives and rewards for collaboration; Training public servants in collaboration; Collaboration champions, guardians, complexity translators, and stewards; and paradoxically, NPM governance processes designed to make collaborative decisions stick.
A value reinforcement hypothesis expects that governance structures reinforce the values of the representative governments they serve.If a political system embraces pluralism and collective rationality as process values, its governance structures will enhance those process beliefs.If a government faces strong electoral accountability, its governance structures will emphasize accountability values, making identifiable managers likely to face sanctions for their performance.Correlations such as these would be observed if the hypothesis has potential for guiding a positive research agenda.The value reinforcement hypothesis has both institutional and behavioral mechanisms behind it.
The chapter provides an initial definition of co-creation and explains why co-creation is a new and powerful vision. It proceeds to reflect on the current demands and possibilities for co-creation and then identifies the main enablers, before concluding with brief discussion of the wider perspectives and consequences of a turn to co-creation.
This article illustrates how the term “social innovation” is used in the public policy domain in Hong Kong in relation to the new public management (NPM) reform of the social service sector, which originated in the early 2000s. Through document reviews and interviews, the role that social innovation policy has played in instigating changes in the contemporary social service field in the post-NPM era is identified. This includes facilitating emergence of “new” forms of social entrepreneurial activities to fill unmet social needs, empowering new actors in entering the social service sector, and reinforcing the government’s position in the NPM reform. Adopting historical institutionalism as the analytical framework, multiple path-dependent characteristics arising from the historical legacies of the incumbent social service environment – such as the longstanding partnership between the state and non-profits – are highlighted. These historical factors have weakened the efficacy of the policy efforts aimed at enacting institutional change. Overall, this article demonstrates how historical context matters in the emergence and framing of social innovation policy. It contributes to the theorisation of the role of social innovation in social service sector development in East Asia.
Employees of the public employment services (PES) are street-level bureaucrats who shape activation policy on the ground. This paper examines how PES staff use enhanced discretion in an innovation project carried out by the German Federal Employment Agency. Applying a bottom-up perspective, we reconstruct PES employees’ logic of action and the dilemmas they face in improving counselling and placement services. According to our findings, placement staff use enhanced discretion to promote more individualised support and an adequate matching of jobseekers and employers. The use of discretion is framed by organisational norms and reward mechanisms and by the current labour market situation. Our analyses are based on qualitative interviews and group discussions with placement staff.
The chapter introduces core concepts to be explored throughout the book. The chapter begins by discussing the recent growth in public service motivation research and growth in related intellectual capital. In addition to a growth in research, more practical applications for examining public service values and motivations have emerged. The chapter subsequently addresses the continuing pressure being placed on traditional service systems. In the face of warnings about long-term mismanagement of human capital, governments around the world are under pressure. The chapter then outlines factors that tend to allow civil service systems to persist. Operating rules, which have rational origins as solutions to perceived problems, sensitize actors to values. The evolution of motivation is then discussed, with special attention towards New Public Management, contracting out, agentification, and high-powered incentives. Public service motivation is then proposed to be a foundation for reform. A comprehensive, coherent, evidence-based argument is outlined. The chapter concludes with a description of the organization of the book.
This chapter is focused on describing how systemic governance in higher education has changed in the two Northern American federal countries. To grasp the characteristics of governance and accountability in the higher education systems of Canada and the USA, the chapter shed lights on the systemic characteristics of such systems (the types of institutions are distinguished by their respective missions and ownership), on the role of and eventual changes to the state/provincial and federal governments across time, on the impact on New Public Management in the activities of the systems, and, finally, on the characteristics and roles of policy networks. By focusing on these four dimensions, it is possible to better describe and understand how systemic governance works in the USA and Canada, and how the countries have been changing by remaining quite different each other.
This chapter considers the national reforms that all the European governments have continuously designed and implemented. These reforms have been inspired by the same common template — the Anglo-American university governance model, actively promoted by the European Union — but national strategies have clearly interpreted this template according to their inherited legacies, and national reforms have subsequently been elaborated and implemented by the universities’ internal actors — with their power resources, culture, learning abilities — which have acted as ‘filters’ vis-à-vis the planned reforms. Even more importantly, as shown in this chapter, this has meant that the consequences of national reforms of university governance have largely differed from the expected results.