Best Paper Symposia: UK and Swedish perspectives on topical studies in public management

Citation

Barton, H. (2011), "Best Paper Symposia: UK and Swedish perspectives on topical studies in public management", International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 24 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpsm.2011.04224baa.001

Best Paper Symposia: UK and Swedish perspectives on topical studies in public management

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Public Sector Management, Volume 24, Issue 2

About the Guest Editor

Harry BartonHead of the Division of Human Resource Management and Chair of the Research Policy Directorate within Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University. His research interests are in the areas of police performance management, operational research within public sector organisations and the role of human resource management professionals through a cross-cultural management perspective.

Context

The economic outlook for both the UK and to a lesser extent, Sweden will remain “challenging” for the foreseeable future. Within this context the delivery of public services and the associated cost to the public purse maintain the highest priorities for both Governments. As a consequence politicians of all persuasions and the general population both expect and demand greater transparency and accountability for the delivery of such services.

The providers of all publicly funded activities in both the UK and Sweden are therefore under intensive scrutiny to develop strategies that enable them to develop and deliver a sustainable level of service that is “affordable” within an era of significant reductions in central government expenditure. The challenge therefore for managers within and across all the public services is to adopt a flexible and innovative approach to service delivery that anticipates future demand within the constraints of a reduction in public funding.

Given this context it is interesting to reflect that over the past three decades both countries have been subject to significant changes in the way that they have constructed and administered public policy. In Sweden after a deep economic crisis in the early 1990s, it gradually restored its public finances (partly by implementing a cap on spending) and introduced a restrictive monetary policy. These measures created macroeconomic stability which provided the foundation for its success in recent years. At the same time, extensive deregulation and regulatory reform have resulted in an increase in productivity with the private sector (Bengtsson et al., 2006) although such improvements are not as apparent within the public services to a large extent due to the unavailability of robust audit data.

This is in contrast to the UK where for over 30 years “value for money” audits either conducted by the Audit Commission or National Audit Office have been a permanent feature of the internal and external audit processes within all public sector organisations. This top down approach to monitoring the performance of public sector organisations has had its critics and the UK Government’s decision to close down the Audit Commission in 2012 suggests some decoupling away from central to a more localised accountability,

Such differences in approach and focus, however does not alter the fact that public organisations in both the UK and Sweden are in transformational mode. As such the rate of change and the adaptability of the workforce to react to increased challenges in terms of productivity provide exciting opportunities for researchers to undertake investigations across a wide diversity of public sector organisations who are in the midst of such change. Against this backdrop this special issue draws together a selection of papers that were delivered at a joint UK/Swedish Symposia that sought to encourage debate and offer a number of perspectives on topical areas of public management within either the UK or Sweden. The papers chosen for publication reflect a diversity of approach and characterise the broad remit inherent within the topic of “international public sector management.

The papers

The role of performance audits provides the basis of Grönlund, Svardsten and Ohman’s contribution to this special issue. Their paper looks at the introduction of (new) performance audits across the public sector in Sweden following the establishment of the Swedish National Audit Office (SNAO) in July 2003 which resulted from the merger of the Riksrevisionsverket (RRV) and the Parliamentary Auditors (PA) (Bringselius, 2010). The purpose of the paper is to add to the literature through firstly developing a classification scheme of different types of value for money (vfm) audits and compliance audit; and secondly, to classify the performance audits carried out by SNAO during its first six years as an independent state audit organisation reporting to the Swedish parliament. One interesting conclusion is that though the SNAO shows a broad spectrum of audit types, the three traditional types (economy, efficiency and effectiveness audits) are not prominent. This is in contrast to the predominance of this type of performance management-oriented audit which has traditionally dominated the UK sector.

The second contribution provides a Swedish perspective on the future role of the Swedish military. The study focuses on management control and communication within the Swedish Armed Force (SAF) and is set against a backdrop of a requirement to realise a cost reduction of 30 per cent over the next three years. This paper by Almqvist, Catasús and Skoog looks “towards the next generation of public management” presents an empirical case that seeks to identify the “sense breaking” activities within organisations (SAF) that are present in rapidly changing environments. This notion of rapid change and cost reduction is an underlying theme not only within Sweden, but also in the UK.

The new UK coalition (Conservative/ Liberal Democrats) government announced in October 2010, the results of its highly controversial spending review setting broad limits of public spending to 2014-15. With total cuts of £67 billion and spreading across all government departments the impact is therefore far reaching and will have implications for the future of all public services into the twenty-first century.

Given this proposition Barton and Barton look at the “future for UK policing” In terms of the UK police service this will see a reduction of 14 per cent over the next four years (HM Treasury, 2010) which will clearly has significant implications on the strategic and operational delivery of policing services. Specifically the paper articulates a need for the reform of police organizational structure with a greater focus on performance management and people management initiatives as a mechanism for delivering change. There is also a specific focus on highlighting the benefits that new business improvement methodologies (Flanagan, 2008; Berry, 2009) could have on improving productivity within the police. Specifically the adoption of a “lean thinking” approach is advocated as a potential management principle for focusing on more cost effective ways of utilizing future police resources.

This focus on reducing the UK public debt has broader manifestations than simply impacting on high expenditure central government department’s which in the case of the UK police service is the Home Office. Other less well known areas of government such as The Office of the Third Sector (OTS) in the Cabinet Office will be affected. This will have consequences for the Jones and Liddle paper on the “Implementation of the UK central government’s policy agenda for third sector engagement”. As a background the Office of the Third Sector is responsible for increasing public service delivery by the sector, enabling volunteering and charitable giving, promoting social enterprise and supporting the legal and regulatory framework for the sector.

Against this backdrop Jones and Liddle report on the findings gathered from a series of workshops and other data collection on public sector commissioning of third sector delivery, and highlight some tensions and emerging issues in this policy field. The practical realization of the research is that it will feed into future design and development of training programmes for public and third sector officers.

Harry Barton