Public management research over the decades: what are we writing about?

Abstract

Public management research over the decades: what are we writing about? Public Management Review (PMR) has just completed its eighteenth volume. It commenced publication in 1999 with Blair as prime minister of the United Kingdom and Clinton as president of the United States, with the transformation of public management (and society) through IT and the internet barely begun, and with Lou Bega ruling the pop charts as a one-hit wonder with 'Mambo No. 5'. As part of a review of the evolution of PMR I recently completed a review of papers published in the journal then and now. This review comprised 103 papers from 1999 to 2002 covering 14 issues of the journal and 108 from 2015 to 2016 covering 16 issues-211 papers in total. 1 Of course, such a review has to be treated with utmost caution. It represents only one journal, not the field, can be skewed by special issues (though these do also represent topics that are/were central to the discipline), and is very much a survey of the 'quick and dirty' variety. Each paper was classified once only, against its prime topic. Nonetheless, it presents an interesting snapshot of the evolution of our preoccupations as public management researchers. Three trends are apparentthose topics that have decreased in interest, those that have increased, and those that have remained stable (Table 1). The first group is those topics that have decreased in researcher interest. There has been a slight decrease in papers focusing on public and social policy, i.e. from 9 to 5 per cent. The early period saw an interest with topics such as policy globalization and convergence (Carroll 1999), volunteering policy (Brudney and Williamson 2000) and the governance of the policy process (Sibeon 2000). More recently the focus has shifted to the policy process in relation to policy evaluation (Pattyn 2015), to policy professionals (van Engen et al. 2016), and to public policy and reform and social cohesion (Andrews, Guarneros-Meza, and Downe 2016). There has been a significant drop, however, in those papers exploring public management reform in general (from 16 to 4 per cent) and the New Public Management (NPM) and its implementation in particular (from 19 to 7 per cent). Thus the early period saw a plethora of empirical papers exploring such issues as privatization (Kawashima 1999), contracting (Christensen and Laegreid 2001) and managerialism (Doolin 2001). The more recent papers have moved towards a more evaluative and/or critical deconstruction of the NPMsuch as Aoki (2015), Wynen and Verhoest (2015), Alonso, Clifton, and Díaz-Fuentes (2015) and Dan and Pollitt (2015). The second group of topics are those where interest has maintained at a stable level between the two periodson performance management and accountability

Hybridizing the institutional logics of performance improvement and budgetary stewardship in English and Welsh local government

“…In recent decades, governments in various developed countries have sought to introduce performance management frameworks in order to try and ensure that their policy objectives are delivered at the local level (van Dooren et al 2015;Osborne, 2017). In particular, successive UK Governments introduced a range of centralized frameworks that set out how English local government should operate and what it should focus on (Ferry et al, 2015).…”

Public servants’ appreciation for themes in public administration scholarship

“…After the turmoil of the sponsorship scandal and the increasingly poor reputation of politicians, ethics and accountability rank logically high for civil servants but are not much studied. We also asked IPAC members about topics frequently found in other journals in the field (Osborne ; Fitzpatrick et al ). From the most interesting topic, here is our respondents’ top five: “Innovation and change,” “Public policy,” “Public service motivation,” “Socio/economic issues,” and “Governance.” Three of the five topics seen as more interesting by IPAC members were not topics included in Wake Carroll and Kpessa () nor Althaus ().…”

“…Providing a panorama of topics covered in Public Management Review ( PMR ) over two periods (1999‐2002 and 2015‐2016), Osborne () contrasted the most popular topics. For the 2015‐2016 period in PMR , the most frequent topics were human resources management, performance management and accountability, strategic management and marketing, network and governance, innovation and change, and citizen involvement and co‐production (Osborne : 110).…”

A human resource management review on public management and public administration research: stop right there…before we go any further…

“…In the period 1999-2002, 5 per cent of the publications in Public Management Review (PMR) were explicitly focused on HRM. In 2015-2016, this has increased to 14 per cent according to Osborne (2017) who performed an analysis on paper topics across 1999-2002 and 2015-2016 in PMR. HRM has not only gained popularity, but has become one of the dominant themes in PMR comparable to other popular themes such as performance management and accountability.…”