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Purpose – The chapter provides a review of the debates about the discipline of public administration and public management as art, craft, and science. Thus, the chapter includes a conceptualization of public administration and a discussion of public administration and public management research, scholarship, and practice. The review of the discipline includes a historical perspective and contemporary debates of public administration, new public management (NPM), public sector management, and governance in order to discuss the future trajectories and trends of the discipline.

Design/Methodology/Approach – A range of historical, seminal, and recently published scholarly works are reviewed and discussed, including also an analysis based on primary and secondary research of journal databases, conference proceedings, academic schools, and websites relevant to the discipline.

Findings – The study of government in various guises – whether public administration, public management, governance, public policy – will continue to develop, evolve, and fascinate scholars and practitioners. There will be a continued interest and study of the business of government with three possible trends: (1) a narrow focus on technocratic, managerial approaches in an attempt to provide solutions for more effective and efficient government; (2) a multidisciplinary approach to addressing complex social problems or “wicked policy” problems across narrow specialized interests for “greater principles” of society; and (3) methodological pluralism in the study of government, which may add to the depth or fragmentation of the discipline.

Research limitations/Implications – The research is limited to a review with some primary and secondary research. It provides scholars and practitioners with the conceptualization of public administration, public management and governance. The chapter provides a critical perspective of the state of research and scholarship with an argument that academics need to move beyond parochial debates within the discipline and provide practitioners with empirically based solutions to increasingly complex social and “wicked policy” problems.

Practical implications – This chapter provides scholars, students, and practitioners with (1) a conceptual understanding of public administration, public management, NPM and governance; (2) a historical and contemporary perspective of the discipline; and (3) a critical perspective of research and scholarship that will provide a debate on the state of discipline.

Originality/Value – The chapter is a synthesis and review of the discipline in terms of research and scholarship drawing upon international perspectives to provide a critical debate for scholars and practitioners.

The aim of this chapter is to study innovation in the public sector, to get a better understanding of what is considered as an innovation, to show how that can be measured and to define different types of observed innovations. The chapter addresses to study all significant changes and improvements made within 12 Luxembourg public organizations.

The first part is a literature review with presentation of the key definitions and concepts; it illustrates the themes related to innovation and its measurement in the public sector. The second part presents the methodology applied to 12 Luxembourg public administrations. I based my study on a follow-up interviews conducted in 2008 within certain public organizations, followed by a second phase of satisfaction surveys completed from the rest of the administrations in 2012. I analyzed the results and measured public services’ degree of innovation. I adopted the Australian case of conceptual framework and presented its application into the Luxembourgish context taking into account national problematic in the discussion section. Comments and feedback are directly extracted from the interviews are added in the conclusion.

After analyzing the self-assessment’s final reports of 12 Luxembourg public organizations, my team and I, grouped the areas to innovate in different categories in order to identify the origins of the most recurrent causes. These self-assessment reports have also highlighted the lack of outcome evaluation in public organizations.

This study will help public sector organizations to develop strategies to improve innovation capability. First by implementing the continuous improvement program and second by measuring the public sector innovation, it will help organizations to identify their strengths and weaknesses on various aspects of innovation.

Thailand continuously has had administrative reforms in spite of periods of military regime and democratic government. This chapter describes the leadership of administration reforms coming from issue experts and senior civil service officers described as a ‘jazz-banded’ leadership model of different actors. Political parties pick up reform packages consistent with their policy platforms, while the military looks for ready-to-deliver policy packages. The author discusses the example of education and health care reforms and the role of the Office of Public Sector Development Commission (OPDC). In Thailand, resistance usually occurred during the implantation stage rather than at the formulation stage. The chapter discusses that OPDC initiatives were implemented with bonuses of up to 12-month salary for some senior officers and department heads. In health care, success came from concerted efforts of health care experts who transcend their ideas from one generation to another and who kept convincing politicians running the Ministry of Public Health. However, in other instances, budget allocations may bump up against financial procedures that are detailed and tight due to anti-corruption practices. In education reforms, teachers were placed at different school districts that lacked commitment. In the decentralization of reforms, resistance comes from line ministries wanting to secure their authority, although local authorities are very active. Resistance often requires negotiation of many parties; rarely do politicians step in to overcome and assist.

The performance of public sector institutions has always been contentious – this is as old as the system of government itself and its provision of collective goods, irrespective of whether they are tangible or intangible. In the context of South Africa, with its ever-increasing political competitiveness, this chapter assesses political leadership and the African philosophy of Ubuntu or humanism in improving public sector performance management in the country. It does so by addressing certain distinct questions: What is the state of public sector performance and leadership in South Africa? What have scholars contributed in linking public sector performance, and the politics and public administration dichotomy? Are the Batho Pele principles, underpinned by Ubuntu, a worthy notion on which to pillar African political leadership? By adopting an interpretivist, qualitative research design, the study reflects on the essence of a public administration that is effective in delivering political goods and managing the performance of bureaucracies and the political leadership therein. This chapter argues that the performance of public administrations remains a “wicked” problem in South Africa as political populism is on the rise in the country. However, the argument is made that with “good” political leadership – which naturally and effectively encompasses the philosophy of Ubuntu and which understands and mobilizes statecraft – great strides can be made beyond the current rhetoric.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the profile of public administration concerning its capacity to authoritatively assign values to a society, and in particular to the political system in Mexico. Many of the recent transformations in the Mexican public administration have occurred in a context in which a democratic opening of the political system has been the main trait of public life. This is the main light under which these changes in Mexico's federal public administration in recent years should be read.

The article explores the structural features of both the government and the federal public administration in Mexico. In particular, the transformation of the administrative apparatus not only in quantitative but also in qualitative terms is explained as a result of a change in the balance between the public and private sectors in recent decades, as well as the experience of the Professional Career Service and its impact on public officials in Mexico. We examine the links of the bureaucracy with political parties and civil society, as well as the political relationships within the public administration itself. We also describe accountability within the federal public administration. We explore recent reform and change processes in Mexico's administrative apparatus. Finally, some considerations are given to the opportunities and challenges facing the contemporary Mexican public administration as a result of having huge problems and at the same time partial solutions.

The discussion about public sector performance is still present today, despite the profound research that has already tried to address this subject. Furthermore, theory links negative effects on organizational performance with increased levels of organizational complexity. However, literature thus far did not succeed to put forward a successful theory that explains why and how public organizations became increasingly complex. To answer this question, we argue that increased organizational complexity can be explained by viewing public organizations as the hybrid result of different institutional logics, which are shaped by various management views. However, former research mainly concentrated on the separate study of management views such as traditional public management (TPM), NPM, and post-NPM. Although appealing, research that approaches hybridity from this perspective is fairly limited.

We conducted a literature review in which we studied 80 articles about traditional public management, NPM, and post-NPM.

We found that these management views essentially differ on the base of three fault lines, depending on the level of the organizational culture. These fault lines, according to the management view, together result in nine dimensions. By combing dimensions of the different management views, we argue that a public organization becomes hybrid. Furthermore, in line with findings of contingency theory, we explain the level of hybridity might depend on the level of tight coupling for a given organization. Finally, we developed propositions that explain hybridity as the result of isomorphic forces, organizational change, and organizational resistance to change and that link hybridization with processes of selective coupling.

The value of this chapter lies in its real-life applicability.

Scholars have pointed out the need for improvement and refinement in public management research, also depending on the role of public administration for sustainable development. Because government organizations employ a substantial portion of the workforce, management practices in the public sector are critical areas for designing, implementing and delivering policies that can achieve the goals set forth in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. For these purposes, and in implementation of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) programme, Italy recently launched an ambitious National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) which includes, among other things, upskilling goals for staff employed, following the modernization process that has involved the Italian public sector in the last decades, with the Decree n. 150/2009. Aiming both to understand the extent of the application of the reform and to answer some basic questions (why, what and how) concerning Individual Performance Appraisal Systems (IPAS), we conducted a content analysis on the 220 documents already produced by the Italian Ministries. The study has been conducted in two different steps of the reform process and provides solid evidence of the reforms' effects on designing and implementing individual performance systems. The analyzed documents reveal no longer-term vision in implementing the IPAS that involves some critical performance management utilities such as training, development, fair pay and deployment of employees, raising new questions about a sustainable approach to the individual performance management process even in public organizations.