Public services performance

Public Employment Services: Managing Performance

Individual Employee Voice: Renegotiation and Performance Management in Public Services

Periodically, the ‘zone of acceptance’ within which management may use its authority to direct employees’ work needs to be adapted to the changing needs of organisations. This article focuses especially on the non-codified elements of employees’ work, such as those commonly the subject of ‘psychological contracts’, and considers the role of individual employee voice in the process of adaptation...

Analysing Performance Assessment in Public Services: How Useful Is the Concept of a Performance Regime?

Approaches to performance assessment have been described as 'performance regimes', but there has been little analysis of what is meant by this concept and whether it has any real value. We draw on four perspectives on regimes - 'institutions and instruments', 'risk regulation regimes', 'internal logics and effects' and 'analytics of government' - to explore how the concept of a multi-dimensiona...

What Is Public about Public Services?

On my first visit to Prague after the 'Velvet' revolution of 1989, I spent a morning discussing the post-communist future of public services with Czech labour leaders. For a while I was perplexed: why were they so sanguine about the prospect of hospitals being privatized? They were baffled too: why would a Londoner favour state control of pubs? It soon dawned on us that we were at cross purpose...

The Public Medical Services