richard saltman and antonio duran take up the challenging issue of governance in their article “governance, government and the search for new provider models,” and use two case studies of health policy changes in sweden and spain to shed light on the subject. in this commentary, i seek to link their conceptualization of governance, especially its interrelated roles at the macro, meso, and micro...

The main questions which the literature on rule production by agencies and bureaucracies deals with are: To what extent should legislators delegate rule making to bureaucracy? How can procedural rules curb an agency’s discretion in making substantive rules? Do legislators select bureaucratic decisions for oversight randomly or on the basis of complaints? Who exactly controls bureaucracy: some a...

Improving the enforcement of rules is clearly the best way to combat corruption. The introduction of eGovernment can play a major role in this context as it automates several processes. However, in the case of post-communist transitioning countries such as Armenia, the challenges are unique. These countries are struggling with the transformation of their legacy bureaucratic and administrative p...

The consensus among legal philosophers is probably that rule-based legal expert systems leave much to be desired as aids in legal decision-making. Why? What can we do about it? A bureaucrat administering some set of complex rules will ascertain the facts and apply the rules to them in order to discover their consequences for the case in hand. This process of deductive reasoning is characteristi...

This paper examines the bureaucratization of safety, and the increase in safety as measurable bureaucratic accountability. The bureaucratization of safety—which has accelerated since the 1970s—revolves around hierarchy, specialization and division of labor, and formalized rules. Bureaucratic accountability refers to the activities expected of organization members to account for the safety perfo...

This paper’s interest is in understanding how bureaucracies should respond to their clients. I claim that because many services are not priced, bureaucratic responses to their clients will often be the opposite of the reactions of “normal” firms. Specifically, they ignore the most credible complaints from clients, provide the poorest service to clients to value the service most, and require mos...

Within the public sector, under the heading of ‘New Public Management’, ‘public management reform’, ‘Verwaltungsreform’ or other closely related labels, market-managerialism is promoted as a new way to gain control of public expenditure and make administration more receptive to political and societal demands. Governance should be based on the principles of market and competition with contractin...