Suchergebnisse

Front Matter -- Copyright -- Contents -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The public governance orthodoxy -- 3. From sovereign to interactive political leadership -- 4. From policy program implementation to public value creation -- 5. From control- to trust-based governance and management -- 6. From the efficient use of existing resources to the mobilization of new ones -- 7. From unicentric to pluricentric coordination -- 8. From national- to multi-level governance -- 9. From hard to soft power -- 10. From intra-organizational to inter-organizational leadership -- 11. From stability and continuous improvement to innovation -- 12. From spectator and counter-democracy to interactive democracy -- 13. Reinvigorating public governance studies -- Index.

Public sector innovation is important because the pressures of growing expectations from citizens, budget crunches, and a surge of complex governance problems cannot be solved by standard government solutions or increased funding. In order to innovate, government increasingly needs to collaborate with networks of partners across agency boundaries and especially with the nonprofit and private sectors to find new solutions. This interaction within a network can enhance creative and effective governance solutions. In this book, Jacob Torfing closely examines the link between network-based collaborative governance and innovation, proposes a framework for the study of collaborative innovation, and discusses this approach in light of theoretical insights from other disciplines and from examples of public innovation drawn from the United States, Europe, and Australia. This book will move scholars closer to being able to develop a theory of collaborative innovation

The present paper aims to apply the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau in a concrete study of the ideologization of the welfare state in Denmark in the postwar period. Why was 'the welfare state', initially, constructed as an empty signifier, which constituted a nodal point in totalizing vision about how to organize the whole of society? How was, later, the empty universalism filled by a particular political project. My claim is that 'the welfare state' emerged as an empty signifier in response to societal dislocation. The particular content of the welfare state project was determined in and through policitical struggles in which the social-democratic party played a crucial role. The paper first discusses Laclaus account of the relation between the universal and the particular. It then offers some methodological reflections about how to apply discourse theory in empirical studies. Finally it provides a detailed discourse analysis of some crucial historical texts and contexts.

Political attempts to reform existing policies often fail to bring about substantial change. When they succeed, the new policy is heavily influenced by the pre‐existing policy path. This is confirmed by the story of Danish welfare reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be explained in terms of their path dependency. In order to understand better the mechanisms of path dependency I draw on the fundamental insights of the new institutionalisms: rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and social constructivist institutionalism. The article begins with a brief presentation and comparison of the three new institutionalisms. It then discusses the dialectics of path shaping and path dependency before seeking to explicate the mechanisms of path dependency. Finally, the various accounts of path dependency are applied in an empirical study of the failure of welfare retrenchment in the 1980s and the relatively successful restructuring of the welfare state in the 1990s.