Public Management and Educational Performance: The Impact of Managerial Networking

Abstract

Policies are implemented in complex networks of organizations and target populations. Effective action often requires managers to deal with an array of actors to procure resources, build support, coproduce results, and overcome obstacles to implementation. Few large-n studies have examined the crucial role that networks and network management can play in the execution of public policy. This study begins to fill this gap by analyzing performance over a five-year period in more than 500 U.S. school districts using a nonlinear, interactive, contingent model of management previously developed by the authors. The core idea is that management matters in policy implementation, but its impact is often nonlinear. One way that public managers can make a difference is by leveraging resources and buffering constraints in the program context. This investigation finds empirical support for key elements of the network-management portion of the model. Implications for public management are sketched.Public policies are developed and implemented in complex networks. Analysts have documented this phenomenon in a number of countries and have sketched myriad reasons for its ubiquity (Bogason and Toonen 1998;

Understanding Interoperability in Collaborative Network Management: the Case of Metro High School

“…The most central participants-the Metro principal and the CEO of the Educational Council-apparently are significant for information flow and planning, but they do not dominate the operations of the network. The school principal is indeed the center of the Metro universe, but there is substantial evidence from previous network research that suggests a focal "hub" or hubs can be critical to network success [25]. Although the classical approach views networks as flat, self-organizing, completely interdependent entities, we have found that, in practice, a network center that appears to emerge operationally is not uncommon.…”

Organizational Social Capital and Performance Information Use: Analyzing the Link and Its Implications for Public Management

“…From a political science perspective, social capital has a positive correlation with political accountability (Claibourn & Martin, 2007), political tolerance attitudes (Cigler & Joslyn, 2002) and political culture (Jackman & Miller, 1998). From a sociological and public administration perspective, social capital improves organizational performance (Andrews, 2010(Andrews, , 2011Coffé & Geys, 2005;Pierce et al, 2002;Rice, 2001;Tantardini et al, forthcoming), quality of government (Knack, 2002), and educational performance (Meier &O'Toole, 2003). However, as it will be described later in the chapter, the literature has not only focused on the positive aspects of social capital but also on its negative impact (Arrow, 2000;DeFilippis, 2001;Durlauf, 2002;Ganapati, 2013;Portes, 1998;Solow, 2000).…”

Primary Health Care Policy Implementation Performance in Bangladesh: Affecting Factors

“…These authorizations of hypothesis fifth contented by the scholars who studied previously in different content and context as such the study results of; Giacchino & Kakabadse, (2003), Meier & O"Toole, (2003), Voradej Chandarasorn, (2005, & Horn & Thiel, (2014). Hence, the findings of this study completely validated with previous work of world famous scholars as the result found in line with the previous study.…”