Public Sector Management (Fifth Edition)

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "Public Sector Management (Fifth Edition)", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 8, pp. 640-641. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810899630

An understanding of public sector management is essential for anyone studying policy‐making, politics and management. It is of particular value for students thinking of work in fields like education and the health services, the police and local government and in government departments and agencies, as well as for employees already in them. The fifth edition of this well‐known textbook (the first appeared in 1990) will be welcomed by teachers and lecturers in the area. It has been revised so as to come up (unevenly at times) to date, although its effective cut‐off date is about 2005. Flynn teaches in the University of London.

Traditional understandings of the public sector involve equating it with education, health, police, housing, local and central government departments and the like. Relationships between central and local government, in particular, above all in terms of financial control and accountability, tend to emerge as central issues in any debate about the public sector. Its origins lie in the welfare state and since then various UK governments have introduced changes (and some would say played politics with policy‐making) to encourage fuller accountability and greater efficiency. Notions of public goods and services (and their externalities), of course, underpin any economic or financial analysis of the public sector. In more recent years, privatization and competition and more active market factors have taken a greater hold on the public sector, in forms like private finance initiatives, public private partnerships, outsourcing and provider‐purchaser contracts.

It is, then, an area where a lot is taking place and Flynn's new edition (like the earlier ones) is a reliable barometer of this. Two strong features of the book – in what is, after all, a highly competitive field – are the ways in which Flynn provides readers with helpful definitions and plain information (trends and taxation, the budget process, social policy‐making in housing and prisons, shifts towards greater customer service quality, the role and scope of audit and inspection and changes towards more inter‐agency collaboration), in the first place, and discussion and evaluation (is service quality satisfaction, do corporate models of audit fit the public sector, is competition ideology‐led, has contracting in the public sector really worked and does target‐setting necessarily make for improvement), in the second. Both are needed in a book like this, intended as it so explicitly is for training and education.

For library and information practitioners, such a book offers a relevant backdrop to the issues and changes taking place in public sector libraries, even though direct connections need to be made by the reader. Competitive tendering and outsourcing have become familiar features in the landscape both of information service and of others, in particular, health care services. The rhetoric of the customer‐citizens' requirements, preferences and expectations, and how best to meet them, tend to drive performance measurement and target‐setting along in an almost manic way. Part of the irony is that these have always been central features in public sector work, including library work, but, having become part of managerial rhetoric, they have taken on mantra proportions.

Another valuable feature of Flynn's book is the way he regularly refers to the implications for managers. He knows his audience will include such people who, more interested in learning what these implications are than in reading about mere theory and trends (little of this in the book, except for a rather theoretical excursion into bounded rationality in chapter ten). Indeed, the information Flynn provides on trends (supported by some useful data in the appendix) is itself quite useful, and symbolically is something that managers must not ignore day‐to‐day, however much they interest themselves in the more strategic vision‐setting.

Flynn's final comments – that performance is now embedded for good or for bad, that localism and central control continue to present a fascinating dynamic, and that the environment of control and competition will grow rather than diminish – are all timely. He stays objective about it all, even in discussing “failures”, and this could have been pepped up to make the book livelier. Clearly for the academic and college library, and another work where librarians will have to keep up with changing editions.