Public Governance Paradigms

Competing and Co-Existing

Policy, Administrative and Institutional Change series

Jacob Torfing, Professor of Politics and Institutions, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark and Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Nord University, Norway, Lotte Bøgh Andersen, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Carsten Greve, Professor, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Kurt Klaudi Klausen, Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

This enlightening book scrutinizes the shifting governance paradigms that inform public administration reforms. From the rise to supremacy of New Public Management to new the growing preference for alternatives, four world-renowned authors launch a powerful and systematic comparison of the competing and co-existing paradigms, explaining the core features of public bureaucracy and professional rule in the modern day.

作为一个excel的书lent addition to the public governance resources available in the academic and practitioner community. Students and researchers studying public sector reforms will be able to use it to conceptualise theoretical and empirical perspectives on public governance, whereas policy-makers and practitioners will perceive it as a guide on how to govern and how to be governed in today’s public sector organisations.’
– Katarzyna Lakoma, Local Government Studies

‘The Danes have done it again: advancing the field of public administration in a way that is both imaginative and helpful. Public Governance Paradigms provides us with a highly sophisticated “think piece” about the consecutive philosophies and designs of how to design and run a system of government that have emerged since Max Weber laid down his model of bureaucracy. Clear, concise, balanced, and constructive, this book effortlessly traverses a hundred years of public sector scholarship and reform. Easily the single best compass available to students, researchers and practitioners seeking to balance continuity and innovation in the ways in which we envisage and craft our public institutions and their professional practices.’
– Paul 't Hart, Utrecht University and Netherlands School of Public Administration, the Netherlands

‘This book orients readers to the major issues and debates concerning how the public sector should be organized and run. The authors brilliantly use their “public governance diamond” to provide back-to-back comparisons of seven different public governance paradigms, bringing each paradigm’s relative strengths and weaknesses into clear focus.’
– Christopher Ansell, University of California, Berkeley