International Journal of Public Sector Management最新文献

Purpose

This article aims to investigate teleworking in public institutions, specifically focussing on the perspectives of technical-administrative employees at a Brazilian federal educational institution.

Design/methodology/approach

The research methodology involved the use of guided semi-structured interviews with public servants. The analysis applied a prior set of categories derived from the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking, as well as the favourable and unfavourable aspects of the interaction between teleworking and family relationships.

Findings

The findings reveal a range of benefits associated with teleworking, primarily an improved quality of life for workers. However, the study also identified significant challenges, including excessive workload, social isolation and difficulties in separating personal and professional life, corroborating with previous studies.

Research limitations/implications

It is crucial to note that the majority of participants in the study have children or dependants, which could potentially influence their teleworking strategies and experiences. This demographic factor may play a significant role in how participants navigate their work-from-home routines and manage their responsibilities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Practical implications

Working from home presents two sides of the same coin according to the vision of those involved in this type of work. Public organisations should know in depth the challenges faced by their workers to prioritise planning that monitors their workforce and achieve success with teleworking.

Originality/value

The insights from this study provide valuable guidance for the development of evidence-based teleworking policies and practices in public educational institutions.

Purpose

This study explores the effect of language on service satisfaction among Finland-Swedes, a national minority language group in Finland, in the context of early childhood education. Models of public service satisfaction hold standard process and outcome related factors, such as availability and quality, as drivers of the satisfaction. However, although research has shown significant variation in satisfaction between different groups of citizens (race, ethnicity, age etc.), research has largely overlooked group specific factors as explanations for the satisfaction.

Design/methodology/approach

A randomized survey experiment with a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design analyzed the impacts of language, service accessibility, and quality on service satisfaction. The data was analyzed with ANOVA.

Findings

The results revealed that language significantly impacts Swedish speakers’ satisfaction, suggesting that for minority groups, language may override typical satisfaction determinants like quality and accessibility. Interestingly, special linguistic needs are relatively more pertinent in low-quality services than in higher-quality ones.

Originality/value

The study shows how group related factors of public service, in our case language, in an important factor explaining satisfaction with the service. The findings have implications for the literature on citizens’ satisfaction with public services with demographic and identity facets, especially in a typical Nordic welfare state.

Purpose

Contact tracing apps have emerged to collect data and mitigate the spread of infectious diseases. However, privacy and security concerns have caused individuals to hesitate to adopt these solutions. Our objective is to evaluate the role of the political environment, information privacy, security and users’ intentions to use contact tracing apps.

Design/methodology/approach

We scraped the digital app store and collected 399 relevant reviews and other data from 21 contact tracing apps in the USA. A semi-supervised machine learning model was developed to extract information on privacy and security aspects from the reviews.

Findings

Our findings show a positive connection between security controls and user adoption, as reflected in star ratings. Users residing in states with blue political environments tend to assign higher ratings to apps, especially when robust security controls are in place. These findings confirm the influence of the political environment on the adoption of contact tracing apps. In times of a pandemic, our findings suggest that users prioritize security over privacy concerns, emphasizing the critical role of strong security features in promoting app acceptance.

Originality/value

This paper emphasizes the political environment of the state offering the app intersects with concerns about security and privacy as well as the effectiveness of security and privacy measures, influencing the app’s ratings. Also, it shows the importance of understanding and addressing the role of the political environment when designing and promoting such public health tools, regardless of the specific disease or outbreak.

Purpose

The goal is to illuminate the requisites for the implementation of performance management reforms in a public bureaucracy.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper employs a configurational approach, qualitative comparative analysis, that identifies combinations of political and organizational conditions necessary and/or sufficient for success. The analysis applies the success factor identified in the literature in analyzing the experience of departments involved in a city-wide reform in Los Angeles. The analysis utilizes two rounds of survey data combined with case observations to evaluate the presence of these conditions. Cross-case comparisons employ Boolean logic to identify configurations associated with successful system implementation.

Findings

The analysis identifies several distinct configurations of conditions that appear in departments that implemented the reform. One emphasizes mayoral support, while others emphasize leadership in combination with other organizational capacities.

Practical implications

The analysis yields several insights for managers. First, no silver bullet such as strong leadership assures reform implementation. Second, there are multiple avenues to reform. An organization that lacks some prerequisites – such as leadership or metrics – may succeed in the presence of other features such as an innovative culture or external political support. Finally, the study provides a bracing council that even under favorable conditions, performance management reforms may fail to take root, for reasons that can be difficult to predict.

Originality/value

The paper highlights the importance of considering configurations of conditions rather than focusing on conditions independently. Also, it highlights the importance of equifinality, the notion that observed outcomes can have multiple causes, a perspective typically missing in correlational analyses.

Purpose

This study examines the intricate interplay of blockchain, public governance and the circular economy (CE), aiming to assess the potential of blockchain technology (BT) in addressing challenges associated with the adoption of CE principles, particularly in the public sector.

Design/methodology/approach

Focused on public governance, the research employs in-depth interviews with Finnish policymakers actively engaged in CE initiatives. Qualitative analysis is applied to derive insights and patterns from the gathered data, providing a nuanced understanding of blockchain’s transformative role.

Findings

The study uncovers key dimensions for leveraging blockchain in the CE within the public sector. Notable findings include the significance of contextual transparency, the use of incentivization as a regulatory tool, the role of standardization through strategic autonomy and the importance of public engagement and participation.

Originality/value

This research contributes a unique framework that illuminates the transformative potential of blockchain within the CE, emphasizing its relevance to public governance. The identified dimensions offer practical insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to navigate the complexities of circular transitions in the public sector.

Purpose

This study explores how public sector risk management (RM) is implemented in 6 Brazilian state governments, given the existence of contextual factors in the settings.

Design/methodology/approach

The cases were selected following a methodological protocol, resulting in the collection of 12 interviews with government policymakers (GPMs), supplemented with legislation and website content. All collected data were analysed through the qualitative content analysis method under the multi-case study methodology.

Findings

Empirical evidence shows that the settings strive to operationalise public sector RM by using implementation strategies. These strategies are developed by the GPMs and represent the consequence of the influence of three perceived contextual factors: weak sup-port from some public top managers, a pre-existent innovation-oriented culture, and risk types. Moreover, developing the maturity of RM implementation was observed as being difficult given the weak support from public top managers.

Practical implications

This study suggests that RM is not always easily implemented in the public context. Therefore, this article provides some tips that help mitigating this problem by involving actions that stimulate a deeper engagement of public top managers and that bring RM to a more strategic place in the governments.

Originality/value

This article explores RM in the public sector at the government level, demonstrating that strategies can be developed by GPMs to address contextual factors that can make the implementation of RM difficult, as indicated in the study.

Purpose

This article investigates different terms and concepts of paradox dimensions in Public Administration because these terms are often used interchangeably. The aim is to reveal the theoretically based macro-level concepts and establish a common ground for a shared dialogue about managing paradoxes in the field.

Design/methodology/approach

This article uses a complementary review approach. First, a systematic literature review is executed to identify the macro-level paradox concepts and to capture their theoretical common ground. Second, the problematizing literature review aims to reflect Public Administration literature with literature from outside the field, mainly from Organization Studies and General Management.

Findings

For the most part, the macro-level paradox concepts in Public Administration are used to illustrate the context or situation of another research topic, rather than as standalone theories to be conceptually or empirically explored. In 63 out of 589 articles, we found a theoretical definition of the mentioned macro-level paradox concept. This definition refers mainly to the sources of paradoxical situations and focuses less on the decisions and reactions thereto. Based on the review findings, an analytical model for the management of paradoxical situations in the public sector is provided and applied, followed by recommendations for further research.

Originality/value

This article aims to combine the macro-level paradox concepts in Public Administration with the insights of Paradox Theory and reveals that paradoxes could be a core topic in the field. Scholars in Public Administration could approach paradoxical situations from their own perspective while simultaneously strengthening the field’s identity by encouraging multiperspectivity.

Purpose

This paper contributes to the field of public services’ performance measurement systems by proposing a benchmarking-based methodology that improves the effective use of big and open data in analyzing and evaluating efficiency, for supporting internal decision-making processes of public entities.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed methodology uses data envelopment analysis in combination with a multivariate outlier detection algorithm—local outlier factor—to ensure the proper exploitation of the data available for efficiency evaluation in the presence of the multidimensional datasets with anomalous values that often characterize big and open data. An empirical implementation of the proposed methodology was conducted on waste management services provided in Italy.

Findings

The paper addresses the problem of misleading targets for entities that are erroneously deemed inefficient when applying data envelopment analysis to real-life datasets containing outliers. The proposed approach makes big and open data useful in evaluating relative efficiency, and it supports the development of performance-based strategies and policies by public entities from a data-driven public sector perspective.

Originality/value

Few empirical studies have explored how to make the use of big and open data more feasible for performance measurement systems in the public sector, addressing the challenges related to data quality and the need for analytical tools readily usable from a managerial perspective, given the poor diffusion of technical skills in public organizations. The paper fills this research gap by proposing a methodology that allows for exploiting the opportunities offered by big and open data for supporting internal decision-making processes within the public services context.

Purpose

The aim of this study was to map and scope a body of literature on the interplay between public value management (PVM) and digital transformation (DT), clarify the concept of PVM in DT, and identify knowledge gaps by using a scoping review methodology.

Design/methodology/approach

A scoping review was conducted, drawing on the framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and Levac et al. (2010). A total of 54 publications on the interplay between PVM and DT were selected for the final analysis from the Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions databases.

Findings

We found that PVM in DT is a relatively unexplored topic and that additional research is needed to focus on the role of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, especially in the context of local and regional governments. We also found that researchers have a limited conceptual understanding of PVM and DT.

Originality/value

This article makes two main contributions. First, although PVM and DT have contributed to public value research, our findings show a need for more systematic knowledge of these complementary but distinct approaches. Second, this study provides a valuable addition to the developing body of research using the scoping review methodology in PAM literature.