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Compared with the worldwide reform trend of transcending new public management (NPM) during the past two decades, China's service-oriented government (SOG) reforms are a relatively different reform approach. After building an SOG was politically identified in 2004, China launched three rounds of SOG reforms in 2008, 2013 and 2018. The purpose of this article is to examine what is meant by China's SOG approach and analyze the reasons behind its emergence. In particular, it explores how this approach might be interpreted in NPM, and particularly post-NPM terms.

The main theoretical basis of the paper is three theoretical perspectives from organizational theory – the instrumental, cultural and myth perspectives, but more specifically, the concepts complexity and hybridity. The empirical examples are selected from the SOG reforms of 2008, 2013 and 2018. The data used are a combination of public documents and scholarly secondary literature.

This paper discusses the SOG approach in China as a response to the negative effects of NPM-related reforms and informed by the western post-NPM reforms. It contends that China's SOG is a complex and hybrid approach in which NPM and post-NPM elements coexist and their balance is different from the west.

Few authors have considered China's SOG approach in NPM and post-NPM terms. This paper contributes not only to a wider understanding of the ongoing SOG reform process in China, but also to the understanding of the relevance of public administration theories in a comparative perspective.

This study aims to assess whether patients [who receive community pharmacy services at locations where routine medication therapy management (MTM) care is reimbursed] who were adherent to their medications generated lower inpatient hospitalization expenses.

This is a retrospective, descriptive and cross-sectional study using administrative claims data drawn from 84 community pharmacies in North Dakota. The included patients were enrolled in a Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota insurance plan and were taking one or more of eight groups of medications (metformin, antidepressants, anti-asthmatics, ACEs/ARBs, beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics and statins) commonly prescribed to treat chronic conditions filled between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015. Community pharmacists used software that allowed the pharmacists to provide and bill for MTM services. Data from these sources were used to calculate medication adherence and inpatient costs.

Patients prescribed a beta blocker, a calcium channel blocker, and a diuretic or an anti-diabetic medication, and those who are fully adherent to their medications were associated with significantly lower inpatient hospitalization costs (as measured by insurance payments to hospitals) as compared to non-adherent patients. Patients who were fully adherent to their medications had no statistically significant differences in patient-specific costs compared to non-adherent patients.

Patients receiving services at a community pharmacy that offers MTM services and those who were adherent to their medication regimens generate lower health care expenses. Most of the savings come from lower hospitalization expenses, rather than patient-paid expenses.

This paper is a theoretical review of the logic of appropriateness. First, it defines what is meant by a logic of appropriateness in the work of March and Olsen and then discusses the dynamics of the logics of appropriateness and consequence. Second, it examines how the rules of appropriateness have developed and changed and discusses the advantages of using the logic of appropriateness. Third, it illustrates some applications of the logic of appropriateness by focusing on studies of public sector reforms and suggests how the logic of appropriateness might be used to understand the handling of COVID-19. Fourth, some of the critiques and elaborations of the logic of appropriateness are discussed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn and needs for future research indicated.

One of the insights gained from studying reforms in public organisations is that the political-administrative system is in a state of flux. Views of how to tackle problems and what the goals, solutions and consequences should be are changing when preconditions and constraints are changing. One important observation is that there is a mismatch between the way the public administration is organised in contemporary democracies and the wicked issues that the public sector organisations are set to handle. Big problems and tasks are seldom following organisational borders but are cutting across administrative levels, sectors and units, creating a lot of challenges for political and administrative leaders. Thus, there is a need for new steering mechanisms focusing on broad social outcomes to handle this challenge.

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.

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 paper aims to present a systematic conceptual analysis of the problem of organizational goal and to reduce the insights into it provided by the main conceptions taken in their development from one to another, to break out of the ruling paradigm and outline a new solution.

The study has been carried out from the historical and critical perspective.

The paper discovers the logic of the evolution the approaches to organizational goals have undergone and portrays it in a matrix form in the heart of which is the “zigzag effect”: each posterior stage returns to the essential elements rejected by those preceding it, and the last stage, being diametrically opposite to the first, is, at that, as well as the latter, akin to the intermediate stages. The opportunities afforded by the current paradigm have been exhausted and it seems to run to an impasse. Instead, the author suggests a new frame of orientation: organizational goals are closely interknit with personal, but not reducible to them and bear fundamentally transpersonal character, while the mechanism of involving the preferences of individuals and groups in goal-setting is based on the self-contained interests of the organization they pertain to.

The findings, conclusions and generalizations obtained can serve for a necessary ground to researchers getting deeper into the essence of what bonds organizational life and activity.

The material empowers practitioners to comprehend the difficulties of framing cohesive goal and find efficient ways to overcome them. It is of value also to the teachers seeking to present a more exact and elaborate view of teleological foundations of management and organization theory.

Both the conceptual analysis of the evolution of the approaches to organizational goals and the author’s exposition of its logic and vision of their nature are provided for the first time.

Quality is often defined as cognitive perceptual attributes or properties, and researchers often disagree about which terms should be appropriate in determining quality(Reeves & Bednar, 1994). Business research in marketing attaches value to the properties of quality (Zeithaml, 1988) and measures this in terms of ‘money’ and customer ‘expectations’. The idea of connecting quality to values through a persistent market – that is determining measurable accounts to products and properties – relies on the idea of an invisible hand controlling the market by competition (March, 1994; Smith, 1776/1976), and it assumes there is a reliable way to control quality and value. But discussions and debates arise when discussing the quality or value of abstract phenomena such as service.