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In providing a fine-grained analysis of public service management, the purpose of this paper is to make an important contribution to furthering research in service management, a body of literature that has tended to regard public services as homogenous or to neglect the context altogether.

Integrating public management and service management literatures, the past and present of public service management are discussed. Future directions for the field are outlined drawing on a service-dominant approach that has the potential to transform public services. Invited commentaries augment the review.

The review presents the Public Service Network Framework to capture the public value network in its abstraction and conceptualizes how value is created in public services. The study identifies current shortcomings in the field and offers a series of directions for future research where service management theory can contribute greatly.

The review encourages service management research to examine the dynamic, diverse, and complex nature of public services and to recognize the importance of this context. The review calls for an interdisciplinary public service management community to develop, and to assist public managers in leveraging service logic.

The review positions service research in the public sector, makes explicit the role of complex networks in value creation, argues for wider engagement with public service management, and offers future research directions to advance public service management research.

In the United Kingdom under the New Labour government from 1997 to 2010, there was a shift of power away from local towards central government, leading to a situation in which the role of public service organisations could appear to be mainly implementing priorities set by central government and complying with national standards, enforced through the setting of targets and the use of performance management frameworks. The key performance management systems, and the standards within them, became increasingly focused on outcomes, defined as the results that services produce that have an impact on the lives of service users and citizens – the benefits of the service rather than the volume or quality of the outputs (Willis & Bovaird, 2011).

There are a number of contesting theories about the failure of public‐sector policies for workforce training in post‐Fordist manufacturing industries, in a period of increasing marketisation of government training policy. This paper attempts to test the applicability of these theories in two major manufacturing companies in one locality in South Birmingham, building on previous work with these companies in the context of a localities research programme.

This article sets out the main conclusions of a research project into how UK local authorities are managing within limited resources (MLR). Frameworks are developed to aid authorities to plan their approaches to MLR and to situate what they have already done and what they plan to do within a wider portfolio of tactics and strategies. An evaluation is made of how well local government is learning its way through to getting “more from less” and of what local authority support agencies need to do to help authorities to accelerate their learning. Finally, the authors argue that existing learning systems like benchmarking and quality management, while developing rapidly in local government, need further, significant refinement if the costs and benefits of resource management strategies are to be systematically evaluated.

In December 1999, the UK Civil Service Management Board in Whitehall agreed upon a reform program focusing on six themes, all connected with improved managerial processes internal to the civil service and intended to complement the more externally oriented Modernising Government agenda set out in a white paper earlier that year. The purpose was to achieve major changes in the way in which the civil service was run – “step change” rather than continuous improvement. In May 2002, the Cabinet Office commissioned a research project to provide an evaluation of the Civil Service Reform program through four case studies. This chapter draws upon the findings of that study to discuss the extent to which cultural differences affected the outcomes of this ambitious reform program. In addition, it draws upon a set of interviews in 2005 which updated the findings of the research. The chapter suggests that four very different types of culture had important impacts on the way in which the case study organizations went about the process of addressing the Cabinet Office reform program, namely national cultures which differed greatly between the case studies, although they were all UK-based organizations; organizational cultures which differed greatly within each of the case study organizations; occupational cultures which crossed the four case studies, but usually with significant differences in each context; and sectoral cultures which in several cases provided particular barriers to change. The chapter shows how these different dimensions of culture were interwoven in the change programs of the four cases and explores the extent to which their progress on the reform agenda was affected by their particular cultural mix. It suggests that some “cultural stances” within these overall cultures were more difficult to change than others, so that reforms had to be re-activated on several occasions and through a variety of mechanisms. Finally, the chapter illustrates how, in the case study organizations which were most successful, a deliberate strategy was adopted by top management of highlighting the clashing internal cultures, in order to challenge the traditional positions of internal and external stakeholders, in spite of the risks involved.

Discusses the utilization of an instrument – SERVQUAL – as a means of assessing patient satisfaction with service quality. Patients treated (174) for a variety of health problems in a number of departments completed the SERVQUAL questionnaire. There is a dearth of knowledge in this important field and the authors note that the results indicate the need for improvement in service quality as identified by the study population.

This study aims to propose a new research agenda for the theories of “organizational learning” and the “learning organization” in relation to the public sector. The research agenda can be used by researchers to make explicit accounts of how and where the results from their studies advance the current state-of-the-art in the intersection between public sector and organizational learning and/or the learning organization.

A combined systematic and bibliometric review methodology is applied based on the research that has been published in the past three decades.

Through an analysis of 238 journal publications obtained from the Scopus database, the authors determine the leading authors, countries, highly cited papers and take the stock of current literature. Similarly, by analyzing papers published between 2010 and 2020, the authors identify current tendencies and emerging themes of organizational learning and learning organization in the public sector and offer avenues for future research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is potentially the first, fully refereed study published reporting on a bibliometric and a systematic review of organizational learning and learning organization in the public sector.