Given the complex and interdependent nature of the policy challenges that governments face, many practitioners and scholars emphasize the need for “integrated policies” in order for agencies to reach their goals (Tosun & Lang 2017). However, effectively integrating policies provides a great challenge in itself and the actual performance of such policies often disappoints. One of the main challenges scholars identify is that the structures through which policies are formulated and delivered often remain highly specialized, organized around particular policy domains and according lines of (formal and financial) accountability (Agranoff & McGuire 2013). There is considerable tension between the horizontal systems of policy integration that many advocate for, and the vertical bureaucratic systems upon which they are layered in practice.

This article zooms in on the individual civil servants that are caught in between. Starting from the assumption that pursuing policy integration is worthwhile, the authors argue that the task of actually integrating different policies or policy domains is something that needs to be enacted by individual civil servants. However, fulfilling such a boundary spanning/policy integration role is extremely challenging. It requires cognitive (e.g., content expertise), social (e.g., organizational awareness), and emotional (e.g., self-confidence) competencies for which not every civil servant will be equally equipped. As a result, the promises of integrated policies often do not translate to effective service delivery, failing to achieve public value for citizens with multidimensional problems.

The present article asks two main research questions: (1) what challenges do individual civil servants face when tasked with integrating their respective policy domains to adjacent ones; (2), given these challenges, how can we help civil servants to become better or more competent boundary spanners, as to improve the performance of integrated policies? To study these questions, this article relies on qualitative case studies and works together with policy advisors and civil servants from twenty different municipalities [in the domain of illiteracy] to develop interventions that enhance local civil servants’ collaborative competencies.

By following these civil servants over a course of ten months, and tracking the goal achievement of the integrated policies over time, the authors show that what civil servants do greatly matters for the degree to which policy integration comes off the ground. This makes them both the key to success and the greatest weakness for effectively integrating policy. In addition, the interventions the authors develop with practice, demonstrate that individual officials can indeed be equipped to become better policy integrators or boundary-spanners. Besides better performing individuals, the analysis shows that these behavioral outcomes also lead to higher performance at the policy-level.

Considerable research efforts have been made to explore governmental reactions and distinct coping strategies to the Covid-19 pandemic at different state levels. They underline the importance of sub-national authorities in crisis management. Still, the measurement of administrative performance at the local level remains difficult. Due to limited data availability, there are hardly any objective proxies that enable comparative analyses. That is why we propose to measure local crisis management performance via news media reporting. News media played a crucial role during the health crisis: they informed about risks and containment policies, offered assessments of crisis responses, and influenced politicians’ and public administrations’ processes and decisions. Using semi-automated quantitative text analyses, we develop a measurement instrument that captures reported administrative performance. We then apply it to articles from local news outlets in Germany during the first two years of the pandemic and validate the media performance measure by comparing it to self-reported evaluations of local crisis managers in German districts. This approach enables us to approximate local crisis management performance, making it available for further comparative evaluations.

This paper explores impacts of trust-reforms on organizational outcomes in professional services in public sector organizations. Governments and public sector organizations in the Nordic countries have been active but pragmatic public management reformers for a long time (Brunsson & Olson, 1993; Greve et al., 2020). The Nordic countries are commonly regarded as well-functioning societies on many dimensions, including having effective public sectors (Fukuyama, 2014). The many public management reforms involving organizational-oriented as well as user-oriented management tools may have contributed to the well-functioning societies and the effective public sector organizations. Norway, for example, has been above average active in implementing organizational-oriented as well as user-oriented management tools, for example management by objectives and user surveys (George et al, 2019). Research show that top executive public managers in many European countries regard many public management tools as having positive impacts (Hammerschmid et al., 2019). At the same time, the many public management reforms over many decades may have resulted in a fragmented public sector and in many public sector organizations with layers of management tools and practices that are not well coordinated. Moreover, some political sentiments are tilted in favor of some types of management models and in disfavor of other types of management models in public management reforms. Neo-liberal and conservative regimes often favor privatization, contracting out, user choice, and performance appraisals and social democratic regimes often favor strategic planning, management by objectives, and total quality management. Changes in political regimes may therefore results in public management policies to adjust and sometimes reverse earlier reforms. Hence, much previous public management reform activity may be a driver for still more reforms.

A current trend of public management reforms in the Scandinavian countries revolves around de-bureaucratization, trust, and collaborative governance (Torfing & Bentzen, 2020; Bentzen, 2022a). There are now several studies that indicate promising results from trust-reforms in the Scandinavian countries (Bentzen, 2019, 2022b; Elmersjö & Sundin, 2021; Klemsdal & Kjekshus, 2021; Vallentin & Thygesen, 2017). Most of these studies are, however, case studies of processes and there a few large-N studies and studies of organizational outcomes.

In this paper we conduct a large-N study with survey data on how employees in home care and primary and secondary education services perceived changes from a municipal trust-reform and how these changes relate to leadership practices and organizational outcomes. Specifically, we studied the City of Oslo, which implemented a trust-reform in 2017, and we conducted our survey in 2021. We developed a path model with changes from the trust-reform as exogenous variable, transformational leadership (Jensen et al., 2019) as mediating variable, and organizational citizenship behavior (Lee & Allen, 2002) and organizational performance (Van de Ven & Ferry, 1980) as dependent variables. The model is estimated with structural equation modelling (CB-SEM or PLS-PM).

Preliminary analyses indicate positive and significant relationships between all the latent variables, indicating that introducing more trust-based management may impact transformational leadership, organizational citizenship behavior, and organizational unit performance positively. The paper contributes to the performance management literature and the literature on the management of professional services as well as to public management reform theory.

References

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Monitoring is often studied in relation to the norms and values of New Public Management and, more specifically, in relation to quantitative performance measurements. Alternative monitoring strategies have received less scientific and empirical attention, while the need for such a broader theoretical and methodological perspective is growing. Public sector organisations seek alternative ways to monitor the increasing dynamic complexity surrounding their policy execution and service provision. We provide such a broader perspective by linking monitoring strategies to the norms and values of three governance paradigms: Classic Public Administration, New Public Management, and New Public Governance. This results in the conceptualisation of three strategies, rule-based, result-based and deliberation-based monitoring, by making the purposes (e.g. steering, accountability, learning), useful knowledge (rational or subjective), data preferences (numerical, mixed-method or narratives) and the content-wise focus (e.g. policy input, process, output or outcomes) of each strategy explicit.

These three monitoring strategies were tested in Dutch municipal youth care. This policy field has recently undergone a significant transformation, and monitoring is perceived as an essential management tool in this process. We have gathered data about the Dutch municipalities' locally developed monitoring strategies through an online survey with open-ended and closed-ended questions. The data illustrate a preference for hybrid monitoring approaches, based on characteristics of rule-based and result-based monitoring strategies, while also acknowledging the need to integrate more elements from deliberation-based monitoring. Overall, this paper advances our knowledge of existing monitoring theory and practice by illustrating the different meanings that it can have depending on the characteristics of governance paradigms.