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The purpose of this study is to present two heuristics for researchers to identify different types of boards in public sector organziations, and thus enable exchange of research findings and comparative research.

Based on existing knowledge, two typologies are presented. The first typology discerns four archetypes of boards, and the second typology distinguishes six board roles. The use of these typologies is briefly illustrated with findings on supervisory board in Dutch ZBOs.

Application of the two heuristics is possible and should preferably been done in combination as formal competencies and actual practices of boards do not always coincide. In the Dutch case, boards take on more than one role often exceeding their formal position. On the other hand, examples can be found where boards are overruled and stripped from their formal powers. Combining the two heuristics renders more comprehensive insight into what boards are and do.

The two heuristics show that there are different types of boards. Researchers can use these to carry out comparative research. Practitioners and policy makers can use them, for example, when designing appropriate governance structures in public sector organizations or applying international guidelines to specific types of boards and organizations.

By using the analysis of 30 years of publications in the journal International Journal of Public Sector Management, the purpose of this paper is to discover trends in publications, such as single vs joint authorship, topics and country of origin in authorship and readership.

Using secondary sources, such as Scopus and the Manuscript Central system, quantitative data are collected and then analysed with simple descriptive statistics.

Single authorship has gone down, while the number of articles has gone up. The authors still mainly come from English-speaking countries, as do the readers who cite the articles. The majority of publications still reports findings from qualitative, empirical research but on an increasing number of varying topics.

The findings give insight into the publication patterns in public management, indicating developments in the academic practices of the discipline.

From the early 1980s on the Dutch national government, just like many other western governments, implemented several administrative reforms to solve problems like fiscal deficits and decreased public legitimacy (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). Privatisation was one of the first reforms, but never became very popular in the Netherlands. Dutch politicians and civil servants preferred a ‘softer’ modernisation of the state, by separating policy and administration. This meant that the execution of public tasks and/or the implementation of policies were delegated to executive bodies at arms' length of the government. In some cases, existing societal, private or commercial organisations were charged with a particular task, but in most cases executive units from ministries were disaggregated and hived off. Modernisation of the state thus resulted in a strong increase in the number of executive agencies, of different legal types (OECD, 2002). I will refer to this trend as agencification (Pollitt & Talbot, 2004; Pollitt, Talbot, Caulfield, & Smullen, 2004).

The paper proposes that public sector organizations facing institutionalized reform pressure may not only integrate the reform into their operation when it fits but also pace the integration while undergoing organizational cultural transformations to fit with the reform. The newly cultivated cultural characteristics, nonetheless, need to be compatible externally with the ideational basis of the reform and internally with existing values and beliefs embodied by the organizations.

Building on a neo-institutionalist perspective, the paper develops a model which considers the possibilities and conditions that local cultural change in the reforming organizations may facilitate reform integration. To test the model's analytical potential, the paper analyzed reform responses of semi-autonomous agencies from Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden under the New Public Management (NPM) reform. Ordinary least square (OLS) regression models were performed on the survey data collected from agency heads (or representative) during the peak of the reform trend. Analyzing this sample of later adopters whose government generally enjoyed high degrees of capacity and autonomy provided a preliminary test to the model's potential.

Significant statistical relations were found between the adoption of operation-level NPM practices and the extent that an agency's cultural characteristics fit with both the ideational basis of NPM and the exiting value-belief mix the agency embodied. Agency characteristics of “proactive responsiveness” and “goal-oriented cooperation” were found significantly related to adoption of NPM practices, showing the possibility of cultivating local cultural changes in reforming organizations.

While compatible with neo-institutionalist emphasis on local continuity, the paper describes an alternative scenario of reform integration for public managers.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a review of the selected literature in ethical leadership synthesizing findings from 45 articles selected from journals on leadership, public administration, organizational behavior, psychology and ethics.

Four themes are addressed: the conceptualization of ethical leadership theories, the existence of popular measurement instruments for ethical leadership, findings on ethical leadership in the public sector and outcomes of ethical leadership in terms of benefits and negative consequences.

The definition by Brown et al. (2005) is the most frequently used definition, even though recent criticism states that this definition may be too narrow. Ethical leadership is usually measured by means of a survey; however, there are at least three different questionnaires in use. In the public sector, ethical leadership has been linked to both positive outcomes and negative consequences.

This paper only includes selected academic articles and does not include published books.

Based on our findings, the authors present recommendations for future research, among others into a broader conceptualization of ethical leadership and the use of mixed methods.

Multifaceted issues such as safety, social inclusion, poverty, mobility, rural development, city regeneration or labour market integration require integrated approaches in their steering. Governments are looking for instruments that can address the boundary-spanning nature of many social problems. In their quest to achieve valued social outcomes, they struggle with their new role, and the inadequacy of both market working and government-led central agency. After three decades of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms, the strengths and weaknesses of this philosophy have become widely apparent. Fragmentation is a prominent observation in many evaluations of the NPM approach. The fragmentation of both policy and implementation lead to unsatisfactory public outcomes and a heightened experience of a loss of control on the part of policymakers. Achieving valued and sustainable outcomes requires collaboration between government departments, private actors, non-profit organisations, and citizens and requires tools that integrate the lessons of NPM with the new necessities of coordinated public governance. The public administration literature has in recent years been concerned with the ‘what's next?’ question, and many alternatives to NPM have been proposed.

The chapter furnishes empirical evidence about the extent and profiles of autonomy of EU agencies, the modalities whereby they are steered and controlled, and the interactions they have in EU policy networks. It thus provides the bases for a more complete picture of the EU multi-level administration.

The research is a survey-based design. A questionnaire was administered between July 2009 and April 2010 to 30 EU agencies included in the study population. The questionnaire was sent to the executive director of all the agencies included in the study. Questions were closed-ended, either in the form of multiple choices – with one answer or with check-all-that-apply and an option for ‘other’ to be filled – or in scale format. The resulting data set included ratio, interval, ordinal, and nominal scales. The reference model employed for the investigation relies on the analytical model developed within the framework of the research project COST Action IS0651 CRIPO (Comparative Research into Current Trends in Public Sector Organization – see also ‘Acknowledgements’) for the study of public agencies in Europe (Verhoest, Van Thiel, Bouckaert, & Lægreid, 2012).

EU agencies display a rather low level of managerial, especially financial, autonomy; conversely, they enjoy relatively high policy autonomy. As to the way in which multiple ‘parent’ administration steer EU agencies, it emerges a composite picture, in which the crossroads of steering and control by the parent administrations and accountability by the agency lies in the executive director. In terms of interactions within policy networks, EU agencies interact in a significant way with the European Commission, with national-level agencies in the pertinent policy field, and with specific technical bodies where they are part of the configuration of the policy sector, whilst interactions with national ministries as well as with other EU agencies are rare. No single model can capture in full the overall features of EU agencies, although the ‘community level institution’ model seems to capture a number of the profiles of these agencies.

Both the literature on EU multi-level administration and research agendas in public management can benefit from inclusion of – and in-depth empirical knowledge about – EU agencies. The chapter provides important empirical evidence to these purposes.

EU agencies are actors in European public policy-making, albeit to a varied extent depending on the sector. The extent of autonomy and the way in which they are held to account are crucial aspects for an enhanced understanding of their influence on European public policy-making, as is their location in European policy networks.

Research presented in this chapter is the first systematic empirical investigation of EU agencies encompassing networking, steering and control and autonomy of EU agencies, based on primary data.