Reinventing Government: City Manager Attitudes and Actions

Abstract

With the aim of helping move research from rhetoric to empirical reality, this article reports results of a national survey of city managers on attitudes towards and actions taken to implement principles of reinventing government. A large majority of managers support key principles of reinvention. A smaller proportion of managers has taken actions to recommend adoption of reinvention programs in their budget proposals to council. Managers' action‐taking is influenced by certain characteristics of city managers, their communities, and their governments, including managers' attitudes and experiences, slack resources, and region.

Adaptation of Models Versus Variations in Form: Classifying Structures of City Government

“…Form is the constitutional and legal basis for assigning authority and functions to officials in government and creates its overall framework. It has typically been used as a dichotomous variable in research on topics such as spending and performance in city government (Hayes and Chang 1990;Nunn 1996;Morgan and Pelissero 1980;Feiock and Kim 2001;Reschenthaler and Thompson 1996;Strum and Corrigan 1998) or adoption of innovations (Kearney, Feldman, and Scavo 2000;Moon and deLeon 2001) even though it is evident that not all mayorcouncil and council-manager cities are identical in their characteristics. Recent spending studies differ on whether form of government is related to budget levels-MacDonald (2008) finds no difference based on form, whereas Coate and Knight (2009) do, but neither takes into account the differences within forms.…”

Exploring IT-Enabled Public Sector Innovation in U.S. States

“…Similarly, federal incentives can speed the diffusion of an innovation [28]. Innovation is often an organization's response to changing environment conditions [29] and this suggests that states may also adopt an innovation in response to the economic and education level of its citizens.…”

The Managerial Work of Italian City Managers: An Empirical Analysis

“…While conceivable in theory and by casual empiricism, the private-public distinction argument has been confirmed only partially by empirical analysis (Dargie, 1998;Kearney et al, 2000). Dargie (1998) discovered analogies as well as differences between the public sector chief executive's job and traditional management models, through the in-depth analysis of a week in the life of several local government chief executives in the UK.…”