Suchergebnisse

The literature on the politics of public management reform in Italy broadly contends that the country's legalistic administrative tradition suppresses reform. This article questions and qualifies this line of argument on the basis of a newly reported case of public management reform that endured for more than 10 years. The study tracks and explains the emergence of the policy issue of "government innovation" and its persistence on the specialized policy agenda of the Ministry for Public Administration. The initial emergence of the government innovation policy in Italy and its directional stability is explained by applying event‐centric approaches to historical analysis, together with the institutional concept of policy subsystems. The article shows the need for modifying central arguments—both substantive and theoretical—about the politics of public management reform in Italy.

This article contributes to the understanding of inter‐agency coordination among international organizations, conceived as international public administrations (IPAs). We adopt a practice‐based approach to study the dilemmas of coordination across levels of government in the empirical setting of United Nations agencies involved in field‐level development activities. Based on elite interviews in both pilot countries and agency headquarters, complemented by extensive archival analysis, we track the emergence of a specific type of coordination dilemma that has been understudied, that is, the dilemma of inter‐ and intra‐agency coordination. We identify two sets of coordinating practices that aided in balancing the dilemma, that is, 'systemic thinking' and 'jointly mobilizing resources and consensus', and we discuss the organizational factors mediating the perception of each set of practices.

This paper analyses the two most important international programmes for the voluntary regulation of corporate behaviour: the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Corporations and the UN Global Compact. It argues that international organizations adopted them mostly for reasons of political feasibility: by imposing minimal constraints on constituents the codes circumvented the most pressing problems of political acceptability associated with standard setting. It finds no clear evidence, however, that the network solutions adopted are technically more effective than traditional forms of regulation. The paper concludes that while it is unlikely that corporate behaviour will change simply as a result of participation in these programmes, if the programmes increase their ability to consistently discriminate between good and bad performers, the resulting 'soft' sanctioning power has the potential to alter corporate behaviour in the long run.

AbstractAfter a relatively slow policy intervention and scholarly take‐up, recent developments created the urgency for massive efforts to implement and regulate telework in public organizations. We contribute to this debate through a systematic review of 120 studies across disciplines. Findings from our analysis reveal a few established antecedents of telework, including individual characteristics like family responsibilities and expected productivity, but also organizational aspects like supportive leadership, and contextual features like natural disasters. Self‐reported productivity and work‐life balance stand out as telework's most widely studied outcomes, although evidence is often conflicting when coming to the effects of telework. We present our results by distinguishing pre‐ and post‐pandemic findings. Complementing our systematic review, we engage in a generative exercise by identifying emerging debates on telework in public bureaucracies. We conclude by indicating future research directions.

Abstract
Over the last decades, one of the most significant changes in the workplaces of government agencies around the world has been the introduction of telework. The relatively scant public administration research on this innovation and on its semantic or substantive variations such as telecommuting, home-work, remote work, and smart work has examined its effects on teleworkers and only recently on non-teleworkers. However, scholars have overlooked the relational dynamics triggered by telework. This is the focus of our study. We start by connecting telework with specific features of public bureaucracies, such as control, modularity, and the separation of professional and personal life. Next, we explore through a mixed-methods design a relational dynamic overlooked by previous studies, that is, the preferences of non-teleworkers towards teleworking colleagues and the motives behind them. Results from a discrete choice experiment with over 1,000 non-teleworking public employees revealed a remarkably strong preference toward non-teleworkers. A qualitative follow-up based on semi-structured interviews found the workplace collective as the locus of the tensions caused by telework and illuminated critical issues perceived by non-teleworkers, ensuring a more fine-grained understanding of the impacts of flexible work arrangements on the functioning of public organizations.