Public Sector Organizations

"Mouritzen and Opstrup's book is a most welcome addition to the subject of the management of academic performance. It is certainly well-worth reading and considering.„—Bruno S. Frey, Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Basel and Research Director CREMA - Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, Switzerland
“Performance Management at Universities could not possibly be more timely. With universities and university faculty throughout the world being pressed to give more evidence and more precise indicators about their productivity, this thoughtful contribution provides a much needed and unusually thoughtful analysis of the possibilities and pitfalls found in current approaches to university performance evaluation. Given policy-makers’ and politicians’ calls for evidence-based management and evaluation, let us hope that policy-makers heed their own rhetoric and act on the evidence provided here. The authors show that performance measures, while sometimes beneficial, are subject to gaming and manipulation and that more precision does not necessarily equate with better performance, but rather altered performance. This superb book should be read by anyone interested higher education evaluation as well as by those who are subjected to it."—Barry Bozeman, Regents' Professor, Arizona Centennial Professor of Technology Policy and Public Management, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, USA
„In Performance Management at Universities, Mouritzen and Opstrup definitively answer the question: What are the effects of national university performance-based funding schemes that use bibliometric indicators? As these schemes have proliferated, the question has become urgent. The authors marshal comprehensive data on the Danish university system to sift through the many predictions commonly made by academics newly subject to these systems to identify what actually happened to Danish research as the system took hold.“
—Diana Hicks, Professor, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and first author on the Leiden Manifesto on research metrics
This book gives an account of what can happen when performance management is introduced at universities. How do scholars – for better or worse – respond to a system which counts the number of articles and books? Many myths exist about scholar’s reactions: They cheat, slice their production to the least publishable unit, become more risk averse and will go for the low-hanging fruits; in short, they develop a “taste for publication” at the cost of a “taste of science”. Systematic knowledge about the consequences of such systems for the motivation, behavior and productivity of university scholars is in short supply. The book is a major contribution to remedy this situation.

This book provides a research-based analysis of public sector reforms in Pakistan. It offers a broad overview of reforms at different levels of government – including federal, provincial and local – and examines decentralization and devolution reforms in various policy sectors. It also reflects on market-oriented reforms and the steps taken to involve the private sector to build a better-governed public sector, and explores new trends in the public sector in the areas of digitalisation and disaster management. Bringing together young researchers, academics, and practitioners, the book sets a new milestone in the movement towards context-specific reform studies in both academia and the professional practice of public administration, particularly in South Asia.

This volume examines fundamental questions about the public value of public decisions. More specifically, it seeks to assess whether all public decisions create public value, if it is possible to know what value for the public as a whole a government decision will create, and how government officials can justify their decisions in terms of public value. Leading experts bring a diverse array of perspectives on the normative, epistemological, and processual challenges to identifying, describing, measuring, and evaluating the public value claims that public officials often articulate in defending their decisions, and the results that citizens often seek. The book will appeal to scholars and students of public policy and public administration.