Laurence J. O’Toole, a research professor in public administration and policy, and Kenneth J. Meier of Texas A&M University, have released Public Management: Organizations, Governance and Performance.
The book presents a formal theory of public management and performance that is both clear and amenable to testing; provides the clearest evidence to date of the extent to which management influences public program performance; and brings together data from many different kinds of public organizations, enabling greater generalizability to other policy and management settings.
The book looks at the effectiveness of public managers as they seek to influence how public organizations deliver policy results and how much management is related to the performance of public programs.
The fate of public policies in today’s world lies in the hands of public organizations, which in turn are often intertwined with others in latticed patterns of governance. Collectively, these organizations are expected to generate performance in terms of policy outputs and outcomes.
In this book, the researchers investigate the effectiveness of management in the public sector. First, they develop a systematic theory on how effective public managers are in shaping policy results. The rest of the book then tests this theory against a range of evidence, including a data set of 1,000 public organizations.
