Innovation in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors: A Public Solutions Handbook

Patria de Lancer Julnes and Ed Gibson, Eds. Innovation in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors: A Public Solutions Handbook New York, NY: Routledge, 2016Routledge has a venerable and admirable history as a publishing house with many excellent books in the social sciences to its credit. Its series of Public Solutions Handbooks is no exception. Under the steady hand of Marc Holzer, Dean of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University, the series already includes eight substantial volumes with such titles as Partnership Governance and The Public Manager's Guide to Implementing a Performance Management System (both co-written by Holzer). It is looking forward adding books on such topics as interpersonal skills, leadership, coalition building, budgeting, and project management. It is a weighty venture. The book at hand is a most creditable collection of essays that go a boldly beyond the normal set of presumptions about public sector innovation.One of those presumptions is the belief that public institutions lag behind the private sector and are, at best, reactive if not entirely stagnant, routinized and bureaucratic in the worst possible sense of the term. Risk avoiders and preternaturally fearful of change, stereotypical civil servants are expected to deploy a Mobius strip of clerical and administrative processes that, in the end, accomplish nothing-which, of course, is suspected to be their intention in the first place. In the alternative, real innovation is thought to be the consequence of a frantic, neoDarwinian struggle for scarce resources rather than cooperation in support of common project. Competition is deemed to be the engine of excellence. Improved quality and cost is said to be the inevitable consequence of forces that drive incompetence and inefficiency out of business. So, even if the immense benefits once promised by Joseph A. Schumpeter (2004) as a result of his celebrated notion of creative destruction may not have been fully realized, the dominant private sector still insists that relentless competition-concerns about financial, manufacturing, commercial and resource monopolies and oligopolies notwithstanding-is necessary for innovation and customer satisfaction.The second presumption is that, if the public sector is to survive at all, it must adopt a sleek, nimble business that mimics the manners and morals of the private sector. Under the sway of public management, the public sector has experienced over three decades of change in culture and circumstance. This change commonly boiled down to the prescription to do more with less, and urged that the market model be permitted to determine both policy priorities and methods of public sector service delivery. In the process, citizens were rebranded as customers and the ideal of a professional (if occasionally overly patrician) civil service was jettisoned as obsolete in the new neoliberal world.I am pleased to report that Patria de Lancer Julnes and Ed Gibson have assembled a collection of articles that go some way toward restoring faith in the potential of the public sector, though it is more of a celebration of the embrace of the new techniques than a salute to a compromise with old-fashioned mandarin values. The book combines treatments of the public (seven chapters) and the nonprofit (four chapters) It is duly introduced with an opening contribution by both editors that addresses the general of innovation in the pertinent domains and a commentary by Ms. Julnes alone, on the state of the art and a framework for analysis of the public and nonprofit sectors. They are more than competently presented and allow both practitioners and students to enter into the remaining substantive chapters with confidence.I will give relatively short shrift to the smaller part of the book that deals with nonprofits, other than to acknowledge with Evers (2005) that new hybrid public-private and third sector/public sector organizations are increasingly occupying social service territory. …

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