New Perspectives on Public Services

Christopher Pollitt is Research Professor of Public Management at the Public Management Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is author of more than 60 scientific articles and author or editor of more than a dozen scholarly books, including Managerialism and the Public Services, The Essential Public Manager, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (with Geert Bouckaert - third edition), and Time, Policy, Management. He has also undertaken extensive consultancy and advice work for a wide variety of organizations, including the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank, H.M Treasury, the Finnish Ministry of Finance, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, and the Danish Top Executives Forum. From 1980-1989 he was editor of Public Administration and since 2006 he has been editor-in-chief of the International Review of Administrative Sciences.

• 1. Introduction: Where is the Government? ; 2. Theories of Place and Technology: a Review ; 3. Placeshifts: Technologies and the Scale of Change ; 4. Governments as Placemakers: Modalities and Effects ; 5. Capital Flight - Moving Out from the Big City ; 6. Save our Hospital! ; 7. Births, Marriages, Deaths, and Identities ; 8. The Police ; 9. Discussion and Conclusions ; Annex A: Technology, Place and Task (TPT): Brief Summary of a Research Programme

I have lost count of the number of books and articles about public management that begin with a shopping list of (usually exaggerated) socio-economic, technological, and other changes that are supposedly driving change. Yet there is usually then a complete void, a chasm, between these lists and the analysis of public policy and organizational change that follows. Christopher Pollitt continues, in this book, a journey to fill the gap to analyse precisely how social and technological changes shape, and are shaped by, government actions. Through analysis of concrete cases, and focussing here on the relationship between place and technology, Pollitt teases out the actual links in the chains of recursive causality that literally shape government-context interactions. Highly recommended to those who prefer to see the goods and not just the shopping list!