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This book examines why and how governments and representative bodies for senior staff in public service organizations have mounted major interventions over the past two decades to develop senior staff as leaders. A critical explanation is developed of the foundational contribution made by national leadership development interventions in the 2000s to the emergence, proliferation, and normalization of leadership development provision. The authors carried out qualitative research in England, investigating the national leadership development interventions for school education, healthcare, and higher education. Political elites in government were concerned with acculturating senior staff to act as conduits for the implementation of regulated marketization reforms furthering the neoliberalization of public services, rendering them more business-like. Representative bodies for senior staff and participants in the provision were concerned to enhance individual capability and prospects for career advancement, rendering public service leadership more professional. Senior officials responsible for operating the interventions moderately subverted the interventions by focusing on generic leading activity. Senior staff were scarcely acculturated as government change agents but were acculturated towards complying with government-set performance standards and targets within its accountability regime. The authors explored the contemporary legacy of these interventions within the growing international movement to develop senior staff in public service organizations as leaders, comparing interventions in the United States of America (USA), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and England. They conclude that leadership development has widely acculturated senior staff as leaders, though not necessarily committed to acting as government change agents. Leadership development makes a diffuse contribution towards the ongoing neoliberalization of public services

The potential of an ironic perspective for understanding public service change is portrayed through a re‐analysis of data on a merger between two English primary sector schools, an extreme change involving organizational termination alongside phoenix‐like emergence. The ironic perspective focuses on synchronic dissonance and diachronic divergence in meaning underlying verbal and situational forms of irony respectively, endemic sources of organizational ambiguity, its exacerbation by change which creates conditions favouring irony, and the dynamics of their relationship. The case illustrates how ironic consequences flowed iteratively from diverse sources of ambiguity for those managing the merger, often recursively generating further irony. It is suggested that an ironic perspective can deepen theoretical understanding of the relative unmanageability of public service change, within structural parameters delimiting its scope. This perspective also offers a generic heuristic for organizational analysis with potential to inform efforts to cope with ambiguity and consequent irony in the change process.

The metaphor of 'orchestration' is applied to an emergent change whereby developing different versions of a resource to solve local problems with managing hospitalized patient care in the USA became conceived as a nationwide innovation. A pluralistic framework incorporates Abbott's conception of a system of professions, a cultural and political perspective on interaction and the notion of 'orchestration' which is distinguished from leadership and management. Small‐scale research in diverse settings shows how key stakeholders including academic medical researchers orchestrated the coalescence of disparate practices into a unified movement, although working in a relatively decentralized healthcare system featuring a complex mix of public, private and voluntary sectors. Sufficient confluence between diverse interests was nurtured for widespread acceptance of a new 'hospitalist' role coordinating inpatient treatment. It is suggested that the metaphor of orchestration may have wider potential as a heuristic for understanding emergent change that becomes more complex as it spreads.

This book explores the management of change to improve public service effectiveness. It breaks new ground in addressing why public service change is becoming increasingly complex to manage, how people cope with this new complexity, what implications arise for improving policy and practice, and which avenues for further research and theory-building look particularly promising.The contributors are all leading researchers from the USA, Canada and the UK. Together they provide a synthesis of state-of-the-art thinking on the complex change process in Anglo-American contexts, policy-making for publi