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Reform is never far from the centre of public administration practice and scholarship. In this article Doug McTaggart, the chairman of the Queensland Public Service Commission, and Janine O'Flynn, from the University of Melbourne, explore the challenges of reform and the state of play. McTaggart, who was a commissioner on the Queensland Commission of Audit, sets out the case that business as usual will no longer suffice given the range of challenges faced by governments. He sets out to explain how we ended up in our current state and what needs to happen to repair it, drawing on deep experience in the practice of reform. O'Flynn positions reform as one of the central questions in public administration and management and makes the case for rethinking reform conceptually to drive change in practice. In doing so she points to our weaknesses in determining whether reform fails or succeeds and makes the case that, until we rethink reform, business as usual might be all we end up with. McTaggart and O'Flynn bring together the expertise of practice and academia to bring new insights in this persistent challenge of public administration, and raise a series of questions for debate.

Observations from three case studies of public sector reforms are reported. These observations concern managerial attitudes to personnel resistance, and they reveal how management talks of resistance either as an emotional reaction or as a personality trait with certain employees. Based on these assumptions it is considered legitimate to disregard employee objections. Personnel were invited to the managerial decision making process, but this functioned rather as therapy than as a channel for actual employee influence. Findings are problematic, because they challenge the ethics of the public official in modern democracies and hinder attempts at whistle-blowing. A framework distinguishing between four interpretations of resistance and corresponding decision making strategies is suggested. The framework can be used to understand and discuss different interpretations of resistance and choices pertaining to employee influence in the decision making process. It also highlights important differences as concerns how resistance tends to be understood in change management theory, as compared to how it must be understood in order to allow whistle-blowing in public sector reform.

This paper is the introduction article to the special issue on EU-driven public sector reforms. European Union (EU) governance has dramatically changed since the outburst of the financial, economic and fiscal crises in 2007–2008. The dramatically changed circumstances have led to heightened EU influence in the field of the organization of the public sector of Member States, leading to major reforms of the public sector of Member States under conditions of radical fiscal consolidation. We call these 'EU-driven public sector reforms'. The Greek, Hungarian, Irish and Italian cases of reform of the public sector in recent years, accounted for in this special issue, are different instances, with diverse outcomes, of this phenomenon. This article reviews the theoretical perspectives that can be employed for the study of EU-driven public sector reforms – these include notably the policy of conditionality; Europeanization; and a combination of learning, leadership and multiple streams theories – and the evidence about the features, doctrinal contents and effects of such reforms arising from the four case studies in the special issue.

In these times of dramatic social, economic and political change, governments around the world are questioning their roles and responsibilities in the public sector. There is a trend away from traditional public sector model and that of market ideology, but there does not yet exist a universally accepted alternative. Brendan Nolan offers a comparative analysis of public administration in several OECD countries (the UK, USA, Australia, and Scandinavia) and explores possible future directions

Have the underlying ideas behind New Public Management (NPM) been forgotten ? This book investigates whether this idea is reflected in the real world of public administration or if it is mere wishful thinking. The investigations in this volume comprise studies of not only European countries, but also major Asian, African and Latin-American countries, that is, countries of which much less is known regarding the developments in Public Administration reform.It provides the reader with a remarkable overview of what is actually happening in countries all over the world. More importantly, the c