Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Reorganizers of the state in Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden during the 1980s tried to separate policy-making from the production of welfare and other services by introducing market disciplines and competition. Fiscal bureaucrats, afraid of rising fiscal deficits and public debt, sought to control what they saw as rent-seeking behavior and agent abuse of principals in the public sector They argued these changes would reduce incentives for collective rent-seeking behavior and prevent shirking. Fiscal bureaucrats thus sought to control future behavior in the public sector by changing the incentive structures workers and agency managers faced. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Although certainly not mainstream to the study of public administration, administrative history in the United States has quite a tradition. In this article, the development of the study of the history of American government is traced in five phases and discussed against the background of political and social change in society. The various studies are evaluated in terms of the themes, the nature, and the approach. Combining the “history as history” and the “history as advocacy” approaches would clarify why administrative history ought to be a standard element in our research and teaching. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Many public services are produced by professional workers who deal with cases and clients on the basis of professional knowledge and skills. As groups of workers, they acquired autonomies to structure professional knowledge and skills and to regulate case treatment. During the previous years, professional work has changed. Most often, the “new public management” is seen as the main driver: Service provision is said to be managerialized to make services more efficient and effective. This article rejects this simple explanation and argues that public professional work is affected by much more than managerial reform. It presents an analytical framework for tracing broader societal forces that reconfigure professional work. Professionals are not merely managed and measured; professional work in public services might be (a) reorganized, (b) restratified, and (c) relocated. Increasingly fragmented and dependent professional fields might have to seek new forms of control and new understandings of public professionalism are required. </jats:p>