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The aim of this paper is to study the opportunities and challenges of the government workplace concepting process. Several Finnish government administrations have created nationwide workplace concepts for their network of agencies. These concepts give guidelines for designing workplaces for modern knowledge workers as well as service channels for the customers.

This paper discusses five Finnish government workplace concepts that include guidelines and recommendations for workplace design. The five workplace concept manuals were studied using content analysis. Additionally, seven interviews were conducted with participants involved in the concepting process.

The opportunities and challenges of the governmental workplace concepting process were studied using a six-step process framework. Each step has its own unique opportunities and challenges, which affect the outcome and the progress in implementing the concepts. Studying the opportunities and challenges helps to improve the concepting process and thus improve the potential for effectively implementing the concepts.

Creating office concepts in the public sector is at an immature phase both in Finland and in other countries. This paper helps take steps towards creating public offices that are cost efficient and at the same time support modern work activities. This allows governmental actors to rationalise and make the best possible use of their extensive stock of real estate.

Public offices have been little studied and office work in this context is also a less studied topic. The findings of this paper offer a novel way to look at government office concepts.

This study provides a history and an inventory and analysis of existing public sector accounting principles in India from the time of independence from the British in 1947 through the economic reforms of the nineties. It also analyses the factors that are affecting the current evolution in governmental accounting from an ineffective bureaucratic system to an informative decision making tool, utilizing Luder’s Contingency Model of Public Sector Accounting.

The Swedish central government has implemented a radical market‐oriented reform of its real estate management. Authorities are free to rent premises from private firms, and stateowned properties have been allocated to a number of entities that lease their properties to authorities on conditions similar to those on the open market. The background and experience from these reforms are described in this paper. Local authorities and county councils have also reformed their real estate management systems in the same direction, but not as radically. There were many unexpected problems with implementing these systems, related for example to difficulties in writing good contracts for special purpose buildings, conflicts about rent setting and differences in bargaining power between the property‐owning units and the tenants/authorities. The general view is, however, that the reform created necessary economic incentives for the authorities in the public sector to economise on premises, but that it is very important to think through the details and to adjust the system to changing circumstances. An example is that the introduction of school vouchers created problems for some systems of setting internal asset rents.

Governments in Australia, like those in other countries, have sought to increase small business participation in vocation education and training (VET). Given concerns about business sustainability and small businesses’ contribution to employment and economic performance, governments have sought VET responses that are commensurate with small business needs. However, given small business reluctance and resistance to participate in structured VET programs, the task of increasing participation remains a particularly difficult request; a “hard ask”. Taking an Australian perspective, it is proposed that achieving this goal will require changes to the orientation of VET provisions, enhanced support and facilitation instead of market‐based provisions. Furthermore, a broadening of both the pedagogy and definition of structured VET are probably needed to increase participation by small business.

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretically based analysis and evaluation of the Norwegian quality assurance scheme (QA1 and QA2) for major public projects (MPPs), drawing on a number of different perspectives from organization theory and decision‐making theory, but also from insight from two major public reform waves – new public management (NPM) and post‐NPM. The purpose is to analyze the scheme as a governance system, focusing on the way of organizing the decision system. Two illustrative cases are also analyzed where the QA system is used.

The theory used in the article is taken from decision‐making theory, including an economic‐rational, an instrumental‐structural and a garbage can perspective, but also from reform theory and studies. The quality assurance scheme in Norway is first outlined, followed by a presentation and application of decision‐making theory on the system, and then a discussion of the elements from reform waves in the system. Method is interviews and public documents. The paper is also based on a pilot study that the author has done together with a consulting firm, covering three MPPs and an ongoing analysis of 23 MPPs.

A structural‐instrumental perspective gives the best insight into the complex design of the QA system, which encompasses both centralizing elements with the potential to increase political control, and devolutionary elements, such as the use of private experts, while an economic‐rational perspective helps to explain the technical planning ideal. The garbage can perspective highlights complexity, potential ambiguity and the use of symbols. In a second step, the article shows that the QA system's approach to planning and the inclusion of external experts is very much inspired by NPM reform thinking, the QA1 part of the system, which anchors the system in the central political leadership and thus potentially increases political control, is a typical post‐NPM element. The two cases illustrate both how the political executive can use the QA system to increase control, that the consultants play a mainly supportive role and that MPP as about many other aspects than the one central for a QA system.

There are very few studies of QA systems for MPPs that are using decision‐making theory and reform theory in this way. Many MPP studies are of a technical and economic character, while the study described in this paper very much digs into the political considerations build into such systems and their balancing towards other concerns and interests. Designing QA system will, accordingly, be much more a political issue and not a technical and economical one.

The bankruptcy of Enron Corp. has evolved into a scandal of enormous proportions involving allegations of fraud, corruption and unethical practices on the part of Enron’s corporate executives, members of its board of directors, external auditors, and high government officials in the USA. No doubt there will be many articles written about various aspects of the Enron scandal. The focus of this paper is on the relationships between Enron’s business model and the deregulatory phase of the American economy during the 1980s and 1990s. It is the argument of this paper that deregulation in the US electricity and natural gas industries fostered the creation of the Enron business model, and that this model was unsustainable, resulting in the demise of Enron Corp. Furthermore, while Enron can be viewed as an example of capitalistic excess, the paper reveals how the Enron business model developed as an American form of a public private partnership, similar to the types of public private partnerships that have been created in recent years in the UK. Investigating Enron as a public private partnership may help us to better understand the role of public private partnerships in contemporary capitalism and shed some light on the advisability of deregulatory schemes and the unintended consequences that can result from such schemes.

This essay explores the norms of civic duty, based on the legal, ethical, and practical interpretations of democratic citizenship. The authors find that interpretations of civic duty are dynamic and touch on a fundamental political question: What is the proper balance between elected officials and the professional civil service in a liberal democracy? They conclude that the norms of civic duty are political interpretations concerning an institutional struggle over governance as much as they are matters of law, ethics, and best practice. Successive interpretations of civic provide an opportunity for the renewal of citizenship while channeling political conflict into liberal democracy’s established institutions

The purpose of this paper is to examine the governance and policy-making challenges in the context of “wicked problems” based on the case of pandemic influenza.

The case study research is based on an analysis of official documentation and interviews with policy elites at multiple levels of UK governance.

Results of this study show that policy actors regard risk communication, the dynamics of international public policy and UK territorial governance as the main governance challenges in the management of influenza at a macro-level. The paper also serves to identify that although contingencies management for epidemiological issues require technical and scientific considerations to feature in governance arrangements, equally there are key “wicked problems” in the context public policy that pervade the health security sector.

The study indicates the need to build in resources at a national level to plan for policy coordination challenges in areas that might at first be seen as devoid of political machinations (such as technical areas of public policy that might be underpinned by epidemiological processes). The identification of the major governance challenges that emerge from the pandemic influenza case study is a springboard for a research agenda in relation to the analysis of the parallels and paradoxes of governance challenges for health security across EU member states.

This paper provides a novel interrogation of the pandemic influenza case study in the context of UK governance and public policy by providing a strategic policy lens from perspective of elites.

Governments are employing modern information and communication technologies to serve society better. Raising the effectiveness and quality of government services is not only a matter of new technologies; it also involves clear vision and objectives as well as a sound business strategy. Information systems need to support internal work within a government’s boundaries, serve customers through digital interfaces and leverage digital relationships among social partners. To implement such systems, preparatory work is required in both organization and technology. A new public information management philosophy underlies this significant revamping of the value propositions made to customers. The ongoing enrichment of the Greek Ministry’s of Finance e‐services follows an ICDT‐like business logic. A key factor of all these advances is the re‐orientation of information systems for customer‐centric service.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of private investor's fair preference on the governmental compensation mechanism based on the uncertainty of income for the public-private-partnership (PPP) project.

Based on the governmental dilemma for the compensation of PPP project, a generalized compensation contract is designed by the combination of compensation before the event and compensation after the event. Then the private investor's claimed concession profit is taken as its fair reference point according to the idea of the BO model, and its fair utility function is established by improving the FS model. Thus the master-slave counter measure game is applied to conduct the behavior modeling for the governmental compensation contract design.

By analyzing the model given in this paper, some conclusions are obtained. First, the governmental optimal compensation contract is fair incentive for the private investor. Second, the private fair preference is not intuitively positive or negative related to the social efficiency of compensation. Only under some given conditions, the correlation will show the consistent effect. Third, the private fair behavior’s impact on the efficiency of compensation will become lower and lower as the social cost of compensation reduces. Fourth, the governmental effective compensation scheme should be carried out based on the different comparison scene of the private claimed portfolio profit and the expected revenue for the project.

This study analyzes the effects of private investor's fair preference on the validity of governmental generalized compensation contract of the PPP project for the first time; and the governmental generalized compensation contract designed in this study is a pioneering and exploratory attempt.