Theorizing Contemporary Public Management: International and Comparative Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ten years ago, the British Journal of Management devoted a special issue to public sector management. The issue identified a series of characteristics associated with public management research, most notably a strong organizational behaviour orientation, a qualitative bent and a predominant healthcare and UK focus. That special issue voiced a ‘call to arms’ for public management researchers to speak more directly to management research, elucidate a more nuanced account of public management reform, adopt a more explicit theoretical basis and become more internationally comparative. This paper provides a comment on progress against these objectives. We find that public management research has become more diverse, often characterized by an international focus and a wide range of methodological approaches. The paper echoes concerns regarding an increasingly one‐way relationship with general management studies but highlights a more reciprocal connection with organization studies. In doing so, we emphasize three sections of organization scholarship in particular − sociological institutionalism, Foucauldianism and theories of identity. We demonstrate that engagement with these perspectives has improved our understanding of public service reforms and provided opportunities for theoretical contributions beyond the field of public management. The paper concludes with reflections on future public management research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".