This important new study, by a leading scholar in the field, offers a fresh perspective on public management. In contrast to the widespread claim of the `modernization gurus' that a new era of global convergence is dawning in public management, it uses cultural theory to show why ideas about how to manage government are inherently plural and contradictory, and likely to remain so.

The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management

Business & Money

Hood, Christopher

Economics

Clarendon Press

Based on two years of unprecedented access to the inner workings of Whitehall, this book by a leading team of scholars examines the army of inspectors, auditors, grievance-chasers and other bodies devoted to oversight of public organisations while documenting their remarkable growth over the last two decades.

Regulation Inside Government: Waste-Watchers, Quality Police, and Sleaze-Busters

JAMES, Oliver

Scott, Colin

Travers, Tony

Jones/George

Criminal Law

Oxford University Press

This volume identifies and compares 'fiscal squeezes' (major efforts to cut public spending and/or raise taxes) in the UK over a century from 1900 to 2015. The authors examine how different the politics of fiscal squeeze and austerity is today from what it was a century ago, how (if at all) fiscal squeezes reshaped the state and the provision of public services, and how political credit and blame played out after austerity episodes. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, starting with reported financial outcomes from historical statistics and then going behind those numbers to explore the political choices and processes in play. This analysis identifies some patterns that have not been explained or even recognized in earlier works on retrenchment and austerity. For example, it identifies a long term shift from what it terms a 'surgery without anaesthetics' approach (deep but short-lived episodes of spending restraint or tax increases) in the earlier part of the period towards a 'boiling frogs' approach (episodes in which the pain is spread out over a longer period) in more recent decades. It also identifies a curious reduction of revenue-led squeezes in more recent decades, and a puzzle over why blame-avoidance logic only led to outsourcing painful decisions over squeeze in a minority of cases. Furthmore, the volume's distinctive distinctive approach to classifying types of fiscal squeezes and qualitatively assessing their intensity seeks to solve the puzzle as to why voter 'punishment' of governments that impose austerity policies seems to be so erratic.

A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics: 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain

Himaz, Rozana

The Way the Money Goes traces out what happened to the UK's fiscal constitution - the framework for planning and controlling public spending - under three different governments (Conservative, Labour, Conservative/Liberal Democrat) from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. The book tells the story of what happened under each government and combines narrative with vignettes that range from the funding of a new Treasury building to efforts to 'crowdsource' ideas for spending cuts. It also includes chapters devoted to different domains of spending control, namely capital spending, spending by subnational governments, running cost expenditure, fiscal forecasting, and the development of new accounting metrics. This book is based on over 120 in-depth interviews of civil servants and ministers who were involved in public spending over the period, as well as documents from the same timeframe. It explores how and why, despite much talk of change and reform in everything from parliamentary procedure to bureaucratic processes, many of the underlying features of the UK's fiscal constitution persisted, including arrangements for formula-funding of the different countries within the union designed as a temporary stopgap in the transition to devolution. To put UK developments into perspective, the book includes a discussion of how the UK system was rated in reports from international bodies over the period, which suggests that in such exercises the more 'political' parts of the fiscal constitution were rated differently from the more 'technocratic' parts. Given several volcanic-type political eruptions in the UK over recent years, the book concludes by exploring some different possible scenarios for the future of its fiscal constitution in the light of those and other possible eruptions to come.

The Way the Money Goes: The Fiscal Constitution and Public Spending in the UK

McLean, Iain

King, Maia

Piotrowska, Barbara Maria

The Government of Risk: Understanding Risk Regulation Regimes

Why does regulation vary so dramatically from one area to another? Why are vast sums spent on controlling some risks but not on others? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? In this work, Hood explores these crucial questions explored. It looks at a number of risk regulations' regimes, considers the respects in which they differ, and examines how these differences can be justified.

Baldwin, Robert

Rothstein, Henry

Administrative Law

Providing a novel, analytical perspective on executive government, this timely book examines recent public sector reform policies in a number of countries. The book exposes key dimensions of the relationship between public servants and the wider political system, examining both the formalized and the implicit understandings between the two.

The Politics of Public Service Bargains: Reward, Competency, Loyalty - and Blame

Politics & Social Sciences

Lodge, Martin

Politics & Government

Why does regulation vary so dramatically from one area to another? Why are vast sums spent on controlling some risks but not on others? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? In this work, Hood explores these crucial questions explored. It looks at a number of risk regulations' regimes, considers the respects in which they differ, and examines how these differences can be justified.

Paradoxes of Modernization: Unintended Consequences of Public Policy Reform

This book explores the unintended and unanticipated effects associated with 'modernization' projects and tackles the key question that they provoke - why do policy-makers persist in such enterprises in the face of evidence that they tend to fail? Paradoxes of Modernization first discusses what is meant by 'modernization' and 'unintended consequences', placing public policy reform within more general intellectual and social trends. It presents eight case study 'modernization' projects. Their architects promised faster trains, a more efficient and reactive health service, a more motivated public service, better performing local government, enhanced information for prospective US university students, reduced rates of child malnutrition in developing countries, and a free, open, safe, interconnected cyberspace for people to conduct their social and political life. Each case provides a neat story with a paradox that varies the modernization theme and tackles the question: why was the project pursued? The conclusion categorizes the cases in terms of their outcome, from success to disappointment, and suggests some strategies for a more balanced version of modernization for current and future policy-makers.

Margetts, Helen

6, Perri

Forging a Discipline analyses the growth of the academic discipline of politics and international relations at Oxford University over the last hundred years. This century marked the maturation and professionalization of social science disciplines such as political science, economics, and sociology in the world's leading universities. The Oxford story of teaching and research in politics provides one case study of this transformation, and the contributors aim to use its specifics better to understand this general process. In their introductory and concluding chapters the Editors argue that Oxford is a critical case to consider because several aspects of the university and its organization seem, at first glance, to militate against disciplinary development and growth. Oxford's institutional structure in which colleges enjoyed autonomy from the central university until quite recently, its proximity to the practice of government and politics through the supply of a steady stream of senior administrators, politicians and prime ministers, and its emphasis on undergraduate teaching through intensive small group tutorials all distinguish the development of teaching and research on politics in the university from such competitors as Manchester or the LSE as explained in one of the contributions. These themes inform the book's chapters in which the contributors examine the founding of the first dedicated position in political science in the university, the study of the British Constitution and the development of electoral studies, the introduction and consolidation of international relations into the Oxford social science curriculum in contrast to the way in which war studies emerged, the commitment to research and teaching in political theory, the careful harvesting of area studies, particularly of Latin America and Eastern Europe including Russia, and the distinctive role of Oxford's two social science graduate colleges, Nuffield and St Antony's, in fostering a graduate programme of study and research. What emerges from these historically researched and analytical accounts is the surprising capacity of members of the politics discipline at Oxford to forge a leading place for their scholarly perspectives and research in such core parts of the discipline as political theory, the study of comparative politics as a subject rather than as an area, ideas about order in international relations and the scientific study of elections in Britain and comparatively. That these achievements occurred in a university lacking the formal system of hierarchy and, until the last decade, departmentalization makes this volume a valuable addition to studies of the professionalization of social science research and teaching in modern universities.

Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford's Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective

King, Desmond

Peele, Gillian

Sociology

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hood, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hood, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hood, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management

Regulation Inside Government: Waste-Watchers, Quality Police, and Sleaze-Busters

The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management

A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics: 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain

The Way the Money Goes: The Fiscal Constitution and Public Spending in the UK

The Government of Risk: Understanding Risk Regulation Regimes

The Politics of Public Service Bargains: Reward, Competency, Loyalty - and Blame

The Government of Risk: Understanding Risk Regulation Regimes

Paradoxes of Modernization: Unintended Consequences of Public Policy Reform

Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford's Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective