Public Management in Transition: The Orchestration of Potentiality

This textbook is the first to examine how new trends such as “radical innovation”, “co-creation” and “potentialization” challenge fundamental values in the public sector. The authors bridge traditional public management approaches that tend to exclude social and societal problems, with broader social theories apt to capture new dilemmas and challenges. The book shows how the effects of new forms of managerialism penetrate the state, local governments, welfare institutions as well as professional work and citizens’ rights. It facilitates a discussion about how basic values are put at stake with new reforms and managerial tools. The book is ideal for postgraduate students in the area of public policy and public management with an interest in managing and leading public administration units and welfare institutions.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Keeping the future open; The impossibility of governing society; From bureaucracy to potentialization; Welfare organisations as infinite potential; Searching for possibilities between disciplines and codes; From contract to partnership; The playful employee; Citizens as a resource; The potentiality state; Conclusion: Toward a Premiseless Management Philosophy.

About the Author :
Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen is Professor in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His publications include Managing intensity and play at work (2013), Hybrid forms of governance (2012), and Power at play (2009). Justine Grønbæk Pors is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on the history of the public sector and how current attempts to renew public service challenges professional work and subjectivities.

Review :
"A fantastic introduction to governance that brings together the concepts of innovation, organizational change and inter/intra-organizational collaboration, while considering the role of citizens within the delivery of public services." Marc Esteve, University College London "This is an insightful, mature textbook. Thanks to the international perspective adopted by the authors combined with the rootedness of the analysis and argumentation in the German sociology and the systemic management tradition, Public management in transition will make a much needed, original contribution to the current offering of textbooks in the area of public management." Martyna Sliwa University of Essex