Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Public services'

It is difficult to define the legal concept of public service. There are two ways to understand it. The first one is objective and tries to determine which activities and services should be guaranteed to all citizens with the aim of social cohesion. The second one is subjective and is based on the idea that public services are activities excluded from the market. This second conception emphasizes the problems arising from the relationship between the public and private sectors rather than the right of the citizenship to receive specific services. Within this general conceptual framework, this work shows the current debate which is not centered on which kinds of public services are to be provided but rather on how they have to be provided. The debate has a strong ideological content and defends the return to public management at the expense of private management, which is considered inefficient. This work analyzes the debate and introduces some objections to remunicipalization.
El concepto jurídico de servicio público es de difícil precisión. Existen dos concepciones de servicio público: una objetiva, preocupada por determinar qué actividades prestacionales deben ser garantizadas a todos los ciudadanos con el fin de lograr la cohesión social, y otra de carácter subjetivo, basada en la idea de que el servicio público es la actividad excluida del régimen de mercado, incidiendo sobre todo en los problemas de la relación entre sector público y sector privado más que en los derechos de los ciudadanos a obtener unas determinadas prestaciones. Dentro de este marco general conceptual, el presente trabajo pone de manifiesto como en la actualidad se ha abierto un debate de fuerte contenido ideológico en el que no se debate sobre qué servicios deben prestarse, sino sobre cómo deben prestarse los servicios públicos, defendiendo la recuperación de la gestión pública frente a una gestión privada que se califica de ineficiente. El trabajo analiza este debate y formula algunas objeciones a la tesis de la llamada «remunicipalización».

Despite widespread application of reform models and interventions by intergovernmental organisations, public administration in most developing countries is still characterised by weak institutions, patronage and institutionalised corruption. Cambodia is an illuminating example. After decades of reform Cambodia is still struggling to attain a public service that is loyal, motivated, professional and serviceoriented. The central objective of this thesis is to conduct a qualitative analysis of public service culture in Cambodia and to explore the impacts of culture on public service delivery. In doing so, the thesis offers a systematic framework to analyse three underlying elements of public service culture: the values, the ethics and the central motivations of public servants and officials. Within this thesis, public service values are defined in terms of orientation toward public and social responsibility. Public service ethics refer to the moral standards and conduct of public servants in performing their functions. Public service motivation refers to the willingness to join government employment, to serve public interests and to provide effective and efficient public services. To operationalise the framework, the thesis uses qualitative data from 45 in-depth interviews with personnel in the health and education departments. These two departments are widely considered to be the providers of the nation's core public services. Of the 45 interviews, 21 are with senior public managers and 24 are with service providing public servants. The thesis finds that many elements of the Khmer culture, particularly emphasis on respect and social hierarchy, kinship preference, and the Buddhist principles of harmony and conflict avoidance are generally not conducive to public sector reform and development. A culture emphasising excessive deference to authority often provides barriers to effective decentralisation, which would bring services closer to the people. Patronage networks often lead to weak public accountability. Harmony and conflict avoidance reinforce a culture of saving face within public organisations, which can further undermine performance-based bureaucratic practices and lead to the undermining of merit principles. In addition to its roles in shaping the characteristics and the operation of public institutions, the Khmer societal culture is also reflected in individual public servants' values, ethics and motivations. On values, public servants are mainly observed to be of grand character, having upward accountability to their political patrons but generally seen as having little accountability to the public they serve. In relation to the ethics of the public service, gratitude is found to be highly valued in society and often overdone with highly expensive gifts. Corruption is a way of life. And the central motivation to join the public service relates to the status attached to working for the government, which acts in effect to strengthen existing patronage networks and to divert public resources for private gain. The findings of the thesis are significant for both scholars and practitioners. The current body of literature on public service culture, particularly on Cambodia, is limited in three respects. First, little attention has been paid to the inter-relationship between societal culture, public service institutions, and the work of public servants. Second, the literature on culture lacks a systematic approach to understanding the characteristics and structure of a country's public administration regime, particularly the public service. Third, the literature has an underdeveloped use of empirical data. Public administration reforms in practice should be implemented with thorough consideration of the local needs and the socio-cultural challenges that stand in the way of development.

Current technology for locating and validating composite services are not sufficient due to the following reasons. • Current frameworks do not have the capacity to create complete service descriptions since they do not model all the functional aspects together (i.e. the purpose of a service, state transitions, data transformations). Those that deal with behavioural descriptions are unable to model the ordering constraints between concurrent interactions completely since they do not consider the time taken by interactions. Furthermore, there is no mechanism to assess the correctness of a functional description. • Existing semantic-based matching techniques cannot locate services that conform to global constraints. Semantic-based techniques use ontological relationships to perform mappings between the terms in service descriptions and user requests. Therefore, unlike techniques that perform either direct string matching or schema matching, semantic-based approaches can match descriptions created with different terminologies and achieve a higher recall. Global constraints relate to restrictions on values of two or more attributes of multiple constituent services. • Current techniques that generate and validate global communication models of composite services yield inaccurate results (i.e. detect phantom deadlocks or ignore actual deadlocks) since they either (i) do not support all types of interactions (i.e. only send and receive, not service and invoke) or (ii) do not consider the time taken by interactions. This thesis presents novel ideas to deal with the stated limitations. First, we propose two formalisms (WS-ALUE and WS-π-calculus) for creating functional and behavioural descriptions respectively. WS-ALUE extends the Description Logic language ALUE with some new predicates and models all the functional aspects together. WS-π-calculus extends π-calculus with Interval Time Logic (ITL) axioms. ITL axioms accurately model temporal relationships between concurrent interactions. A technique comparing a WS-π-calculus description of a service against its WS-ALUE description is introduced to detect any errors that are not equally reflected in both descriptions. We propose novel semantic-based matching techniques to locate composite services that conform to global constraints. These constraints are of two types: strictly dependent or independent. A constraint is of the former type if the values that should be assigned to all the remaining restricted attributes can be uniquely determined once a value is assigned to one. Any global constraint that is not strictly dependent is independent. A complete and correct technique that locates services that conform to strictly dependent constraints in polynomial time, is defined using a three-dimensional data cube. The proposed approach that deals with independent constraints is correct, but not complete, and is a heuristic approach. It incorporates user defined objective functions, greedy algorithms and domain rules to locate conforming services. We propose a new approach to generate global communication models (of composite services) that are free of deadlocks and synchronisation conflicts. This approach is an extension of a transitive temporal reasoning mechanism.

Une voie de modernisation du service public repose sur la creation de nouveaux produits porteurs d'une transformation de la relation a l'usager. A travers l'etude de quatre produits, la carte integrale a la r. A. T. P. , colissimo et chronopost a la poste et la carte kiwi a la s. N. C. F. , un modele d'analyse de cette transformation est propose. Il s'articule autour de quatre dimensions qui sont la personnalisation, la permanence, la complexification et l7enrichissement de la relation. Ces produits sont a l'origine d'un modele de service plus riche et constituent des leviers de changement dans les services publics qui les developpement. Cependant, ces produits provoquent dans les services publics des perturbations. Celles ci renvoient simultanement d'une part, a une crise des savoirs et d'autre part, a une crise de la mission de service public, le bien public contenu dans ces produits n'allant pas de soi. Pourdepasser ces crises, le service public doit alors devenir prospecteur, c'est a dire prendre en charge la redefinition de ses mission
A way to modernize public service is to creatre new products which change the relationship with the user. Through the study of four products, the "carte integrale" a la r. A. T. P. , "colissimo" and "chronopost" in the poste and the "carte kiwi" in the s. N. C. F. , a model of analysis of this change is suggested. It is based on four dimensions which are the personalization, the permanence, the complexification and the enrichment of the relationship with the user. These products generate a more developed pattern of service and are levers of change in the public services which offer them. However these products cause some disturbances in the public services, which may be ascribed on the one hand, to a crisis in corporate skills and on the other hand, to a self-questioning by public services of their missions : how far such products really translate the public services missions? to overcome these crises, the public service must become prospector: it assume responsibility for the definition of its missions

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents an emerging architectural approach that is able to tackle challenges in the contemporary service-based economy, in which the global market revenues are shifting from the manufacture of traditional off-the-shelf products to the provision of diversified services that suffice for customers’ needs. In such a service-based economy, one can envisage an entirely “service-oriented” world, where a massive number of distributed services with different natures and capabilities are provided by various professionals around the world. Problems arise when business applications demand desirable services through different sources and providers that are appropriate for their own benefits and preferences. Therefore, it can be very challenging to design an SOA infrastructure that enables users to exploit this great level of service heterogeneity and quantity. One of the key issues in service-oriented architecture is to achieve efficient service discovery and loosely-coupled service distribution while maintaining a satisfactory degree of scalability, usability, and Web consistency. This thesis deals with SOA infrastructure-level design and implementation issues. It approaches this SOA infrastructure within the scope of Web services, which capture an important, and perhaps the best, ‘realisation’ of SOA. It investigates and formulates how public Web services distributed across the World Wide Web can be augmented by a software platform that enables scalable, user-centred,semantic-enabled, and integration-oriented service retrieval, selection, and matching. The primary goal of this thesis is thus to propose a conceptual framework of an enhanced SOA infrastructure with regard to service distribution and discovery.It also aims to design and implement a platform (PWSP), by means of which a large number of public Web services on the Web can be distributed based on service demands, retrieved based on service descriptions, selected based on service qualities, and matched based on service messages in a user-centred, scalable, and Web-consistent manner without augmenting existing Web services standards.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents an emerging architectural approach that is able to tackle challenges in the contemporary service-based economy, in which the global market revenues are shifting from the manufacture of traditional off-the-shelf products to the provision of diversified services that suffice for customers’ needs. In such a service-based economy, one can envisage an entirely “service-oriented” world, where a massive number of distributed services with different natures and capabilities are provided by various professionals around the world. Problems arise when business applications demand desirable services through different sources and providers that are appropriate for their own benefits and preferences. Therefore, it can be very challenging to design an SOA infrastructure that enables users to exploit this great level of service heterogeneity and quantity. One of the key issues in service-oriented architecture is to achieve efficient service discovery and loosely-coupled service distribution while maintaining a satisfactory degree of scalability, usability, and Web consistency. This thesis deals with SOA infrastructure-level design and implementation issues. It approaches this SOA infrastructure within the scope of Web services, which capture an important, and perhaps the best, ‘realisation’ of SOA. It investigates and formulates how public Web services distributed across the World Wide Web can be augmented by a software platform that enables scalable, user-centred,semantic-enabled, and integration-oriented service retrieval, selection, and matching. The primary goal of this thesis is thus to propose a conceptual framework of an enhanced SOA infrastructure with regard to service distribution and discovery.
It also aims to design and implement a platform (PWSP), by means of which a large number of public Web services on the Web can be distributed based on service demands, retrieved based on service descriptions, selected based on service qualities, and matched based on service messages in a user-centred, scalable, and Web-consistent manner without augmenting existing Web services standards.

Le service public est, en droit français, un concept central du droit de l’action publique dont les fondements théoriques et doctrinaux reposent sur la garantie de la solidarité sociale et sur la préservation d’un intérêt général holiste par l’action de l’État et des personnes publiques. Cependant, si le droit national connaît depuis plusieurs décennies une notion spécifique nommée l’ « obligation de service public », renvoyant à un moyen d’investiture d’un tiers partenaire de l’administration pour lagestion d’un service d’intérêt général, il faut savoir que se diffuse aujourd’hui une autre conception de cette notion. En effet, le droit de l’Union européenne connaît une notion spécifique et marchande nommée elle aussi, pour des raisons historiques et pratiques, l’ « obligation de service public ». Celle-ci se fonde sur une acception particulière de l’intérêt général dont l’origine dépend d’abord du désintérêt de l’opérateur économique pour la gestion d’une activité. Ainsi, l’obligation de service public participe principalement au maintien et au rétablissement de l’équilibre d’un marché concurrentiel que l’on estime garant de l’intérêt général et de la solidarité. Mais elle tend aussi, dans sa mise en oeuvre, à limiter au maximum les atteintes à la concurrence que l’intervention publique pourrait générer. C’est alors que, contrairement au service public, le régime de l’obligation de service public implique et impose peu à peu l’externalisation des activités d’intérêt général. Cette notion traduit en définitive une vision spécifique de la « commande publique » en se démarquant ainsi du modèle national de ladélégation de service public. Par le truchement de l’obligation de service public dans son acception européenne, les autorités publiques peuvent organiser le marché (elles le commandent) et elles peuvent aussi le solliciter et le dynamiser (elles lui commandent) afin que ce dernier garantisse, par son équilibre, l’existence et la fourniture de prestations. Cette obligation de service public impose d’ailleurs un ensemble de principes de gestion qui, bien que proches des grandes lois du service public français, tendent à instrumentaliser l’action de l’État au profit de l’équilibre et de la dynamique d’un marchédésormais européen. La généralisation et la diffusion de la notion européenne d’obligation de service public, notamment àtravers les conditions propres au financement du service public, bouleversent le cadre normatif et conceptuel relatif à l’action de l’État. Ce mouvement traduit un changement de paradigme marquant l’effacement de l’État interventionniste et la consécration de l’État ordonnateur
The « service public » is a key concept of French administrative law. It is based on the assumption that public entities are the initial guarantors of the public interest and solidarity. Today however, the « service public » was replaced by a specific notion that emerged from the law of the European Union and instead of being based on the ability of the State, it is based on the ability of the market. This concept is the «obligation de service public» (public service obligation) and it tends to regulate the role and intervention of the State in order to preserve the competition in the market. Through this change appears a new conception of the role of the State

This study used the 'delivery paradox' (Blaug et al. 2006, p.6) as a catalyst to examine customer satisfaction with the public services. The 'delivery paradox' exists where the rise in the level of delivery improvements does not elicit a corresponding rise in public satisfaction with services (ibid). Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory underpins the measurement of customer satisfaction. However, a review of the literature by MORl (2002) concluded that whilst expectations are known to be shaped by many factors, the role of expectations in affecting satisfaction ratings was confused and over-simplified. This study explored the factors .that influence public service customers' expectations, how expectations changed over time and what effect this had on satisfaction. The study used the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as a case study. The sample was drawn from users of Jobcentre Plus. The method used longitudinal interviews over a six-month period, to explore customers' experiences, expectations and satisfaction. Semi-structured telephone interviews with 20 DWP staff members were also carried out to examine how the DWP collects, collates and distributes information on customer satisfaction and complaints. The study does not support the Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory as the dominant model of measurement of customer satisfaction. Although expectations were an important factor, particularly in the initial stages of the relationship with Jobcentre Plus, in isolation they were not the main driver of satisfaction over time. Instead it was an interplay of expectations and orientation towards motherhood or employment that indicated the likelihood of a satisfactory outcome or not. Customers defined themselves in negative, collective terms but demanded a service that reflected individuality. Misinterpretation of service terms, such as 'personal' adviser contributed to dissatisfaction with the service. Personal advisers delivered a service based on negative, collective preconceptions of what the customer desired. The findings indicate redefining service terms in order to eliminate misinterpretation. Furthermore, moving from a traditional expectation based model of customer satisfaction to a process based one, established on negotiated and agreed inputs, outputs and outcomes, is recommended. Overall this work supports and contributes to the development of personalized services within public sector organizations.

This thesis provides an overall picture of global governance in public services (also referred to as global social governance). It maps global aspects of welfare change: governance mechanisms, social policies and service provision developed at the global level. As it maps the relocation of social services from national to global, the research discusses the consequences for traditional and new understandings of publicness. Publicness has been slow to make its way into global forms of social policy-making and service provision, even if social services have been historically considered public, and vital for the governing of social life. A new form of publicness, global publicness, therefore, rises as an alternative political frame for more effective governance frameworks to come forward. Developing global publicness, however, requires profound economic, legal, cultural and political changes. Because these changes will not happen overnight, a maturity approach is suggested, instead of a purely outcomes-based approach. In order to map global social governance and suggest a maturity approach, I draw from international law and materials, multi-disciplinary theory and three case studies. The case studies introduce and compare global social governance within the United Nations family, in global health and in the contested field of global education.

This thesis examines the changing nature of efficiency and tesponsiveness of Australian public services over the past century It will examine how over the past 100 years efficiency has been improved and assessed. It will also examine how, since the 1970s, efficiency has become synonymous with responsiveness. The main argument of this thesis is that the nature of efficiency and responsiveness has changed over the past century.. Reforms introduced fiom the 1970s where the rationale at the time was improved efficiency, were essentially designed to make the public service more accountable and thereby responsive to the political executive. The study will examine: 1. the measures governments employed to improve efficiency and assess their effectiveness; 2. how responsiveness became the corollary of efficiency; 3. the resultant changes assessment of government perfbrmance; and 4. the effect these changes had on the Westminster system in Australia. The thesis is in three parts. Part one deals with the nature of public service efficiency and responsiveness. It examines the literature surrounding the nature of the terms and provides a definition of each. Part two details and analyses how public service efficiency was measured and improved from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the 1970s. It will detail the rise and decline in public service boards and commissions and how they were used to initially limit patronage and then to act as monitoring agencies to ensure that public service input costs were as small as they could be 1i will also detail how other factors, such as the training and education of staff and computerisation had an increasing role in improving efficiency. The third part deals with the changes that have occurred since the 1970s. This will examine how responsiveness emerged as an issue and how it became an essential companion to efficiency when promoting bureaucratic change.. It will examine how the nomenclature of efficiency has been applied when the political executive seeks to ensure greater responsiveness from the public service. This third part will examine the main apparatus that were employed by the political executive to improve efficiency and responsiveness: progr am budgeting, corporate planthng, efficiency audits and contracts with senior staff. Finally, I will demonstrate the inability or unwillingness of many ministers and governments to detail policy objectives and their reluctance to evaluate the effectiveness of spending. This was accompanied by a greater reliance on senior employment contracts as the main lever to improve efficiency and responsiveness of the service.

This thesis examines the changing nature of efficiency and tesponsiveness of Australian public services over the past century It will examine how over the past 100 years efficiency has been improved and assessed. It will also examine how, since the 1970s, efficiency has become synonymous with responsiveness. The main argument of this thesis is that the nature of efficiency and responsiveness has changed over the past century.. Reforms introduced fiom the 1970s where the rationale at the time was improved efficiency, were essentially designed to make the public service more accountable and thereby responsive to the political executive. The study will examine: 1. the measures governments employed to improve efficiency and assess their effectiveness; 2. how responsiveness became the corollary of efficiency; 3. the resultant changes assessment of government perfbrmance; and 4. the effect these changes had on the Westminster system in Australia. The thesis is in three parts. Part one deals with the nature of public service efficiency and responsiveness. It examines the literature surrounding the nature of the terms and provides a definition of each. Part two details and analyses how public service efficiency was measured and improved from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the 1970s. It will detail the rise and decline in public service boards and commissions and how they were used to initially limit patronage and then to act as monitoring agencies to ensure that public service input costs were as small as they could be 1i will also detail how other factors, such as the training and education of staff and computerisation had an increasing role in improving efficiency. The third part deals with the changes that have occurred since the 1970s. This will examine how responsiveness emerged as an issue and how it became an essential companion to efficiency when promoting bureaucratic change.. It will examine how the nomenclature of efficiency has been applied when the political executive seeks to ensure greater responsiveness from the public service. This third part will examine the main apparatus that were employed by the political executive to improve efficiency and responsiveness: progr am budgeting, corporate planthng, efficiency audits and contracts with senior staff. Finally, I will demonstrate the inability or unwillingness of many ministers and governments to detail policy objectives and their reluctance to evaluate the effectiveness of spending. This was accompanied by a greater reliance on senior employment contracts as the main lever to improve efficiency and responsiveness of the service.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Griffith Business School
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Information technology facilitates a continuous change in how public services are organised and provided. Influenced by external and internal requirements, the changes are step-wise and non-linear, each step facilitating the next. Examples of requirements are related to supporting e-services, multi-channel provisioning, transparency, citizencentricity, mobility, and globalisation. Information infrastructures define the capabilities of a public agency for efficient service delivery, both internally and externally. Historically, information infrastructures have evolved over time and have drifted in use, leaving complex systems and use of systems at a national level. National government e-service infrastructures aim to support cross agency collaboration, provide access to shared components, and the reuse of previously defined functionality. Depending on its construction, an infrastructure as a platform for service provisioning can support or limit the development of an improved provisioning of services. There is a need for systems with mechanisms that support public services that evolve with the changing requirements of the environment. The objective of this PhD study is to contribute to the delivery of citizen-centric and demand driven services and to the establishment a hypothetical My Processes citizen’s portal. This portal will provide process-oriented multi-channel personalised interaction for all public services. Using a design science approach, this study is performed through the analysis of the existing knowledge base, the modelling of design artefacts, and case studies in the problem environment. The contributions of the study are: C1: A model describing the dynamics of e-government. C2: Future scenarios for citizen-centric and demand driven public services. C3: Requirements for an e-service infrastructure for public service provisioning. C4: A conceptual design for a national e-service infrastructure. C5: A conceptual e-service governance model. In addition to a general focus on process-oriented service provisioning throughout the research study, overviews of the current use of process models and the flexibility supported by process-aware information systems are also provided. The contributions are targeted towards system developers and researchers that are working with governance or development of e-government systems providing public services, and those that are working with holistic aspects of information infrastructure development.

En s’appuyant sur une réflexion théorique et une investigation empirique, cette thèse cherche à montrer que les Réseaux d’Innovation, surtout quand ils combinent les acteurs publics et privés, constituent à la fois un concept théorique important et une réalité économique croissante dans le secteur des services. Dans la partie théorique, nous développons un cadre conceptuel qui décrit le processus d’innovation des Réseaux d'Innovation Public-Privé dans le secteur des services (ServRIPP). L’innovation est produite à travers la mise en œuvre de mécanismes de coordination entre les quatre éléments suivants du cadre conceptuel : 1) l’inclusion des acteurs publics et privés, 2) le processus dynamique des interactions entre les réseaux d’acteurs, 3) l’existence des liens sociaux, et 4) un modèle dynamique des cycles de vie des réseaux d’innovation. Ce cadre conceptuel tient compte des différences entre ServRIPP et des types d’innovations qui leur sont associés. Dans la partie empirique, nous mobilisons tout d’abord le cas de Lyonbiopole afin d’analyser les processus d’innovation dans le cadre d’un ServRIPP de santé. Ensuite, nous utilisons les données françaises de la 4ème enquête communautaire sur l’innovation (CIS 4) pour tester l’effet des coopérations public-privé sur les performances d’innovation
Using both a theoretical discussion and an empirical illustration, this work shows that the INs, especially when they combine public and private service actors, are both a very important theoretical concept and a rising economic reality in service sectors. In the theoretical discussion, we develop a conceptual framework which describes the innovation process in the public-private innovation network in services (ServPPINs). The innovation is produced through the coordination mechanism between the four components of the framework: 1) the inclusion of public and private actors; 2) the dynamic process of interactions between network actors; 3) the existence of social relationships; 4) a network life cycle growth model. This conceptual framework considers the differences in the ServPPINs and their associated innovation output. In the empirical analysis, we employ Lyonbiopole as a case study to describe the innovation process under the conceptual framework of ServPPINs. Also, using French CIS 4 data, we test the effect of cooperation between public and private sectors (ServPPINs) on innovation output

We analyse in a Footloose Capital productive public services provided by a central government aiming at reducing regional disparities. Two countervailing effects occur - one upon productivity and another upon local demand - the relative strength of which depends upon the financing scheme. Only if the "rich" region contributes sufficiently to the financing of the public services in the "poor" region, the poor region will actually gain. In studying these questions we pay particular attention to the dynamic adjustment processes and to the role of trade freeness.
Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Vote-selling in Nigeria pervades and permeates the electoral space, where it has become the primary instrument of electoral fraud. Previous research has indicated a strong correlation between vote-buying and underinvestment and poor delivery of public services. There remains, however, a significant gap in the current literature regarding the nature of the relationship between vote-selling and the delivery of public services. The purpose of this study was to uncover voters' behaviors by investigating their common and lived experiences with respect to the provision of infrastructure, delivery of public services, and voting during elections. Using Bandura's theory of reciprocal determinism, the research explored the connection between environment and vote-selling. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 10 individuals who participated in the most recent elections in Akoko North West Local Government, Ondo State, Nigeria. The data were analyzed using Moustakas's transcendental phenomenological process. Key findings suggest a reciprocal relationship between vote-selling, and infrastructure and public services. The study findings also revealed that vote-sellers' feel justified because vote-selling is perceived as a product of disappointment, lack of trust and voters' apathy, willingness to accept their own share of 'national cake,' and poverty. These findings are consistent with Bandura's proposition that people create the society and equally react to environmental factors. This study contributes to the existing literature and may enhance social change initiatives by improving the understanding of the connection between the provision of infrastructure and the delivery of public services and vote-selling.

In recent times, public engagement has become an increasingly prominent feature of modern public service provision. Contemporary Public Engagement (CPE) has been characterized by the proliferation of new and innovative mechanisms with which to engage and involve the public in any process in which their input is either desired or legally required. This thesis takes a qualitative approach to exploring CPE within the context of local public services in Scotland, with the explicit aim of contribution to the development of conceptual understanding and theory. The design of this project was based on a case study of the Clackmannanshire Community Health Partnership (CHP). The key empirical instruments were semi-structured interviews, a focus group, analysis of key CHP documents and participant observation by the researcher at CHP Committee meetings. This study makes three main contributions to existing knowledge. They are: a Conceptual Framework for explaining CPE within Scottish local public service provision, a Conceptual Model which is based on the Conceptual Framework and presents it at a higher level of abstraction, and the generation of substantive theory rooted in the case study data. The thesis makes two main recommendations. The first is that further comparative research should be undertaken in order to further develop and confirm the validity of Conceptual Model and substantive theory. The second is that meta-analysis should be undertaken to assist in the development of the proposed formal theory of Public Sector Reform.

Community pharmacists are increasingly providing public health services in response to government policies. Published literature regarding the views of the general public related to pharmacy public health services, although important in ensuring uptake of these services, was limited. This study series aim to explore the general public's perspective on how to maximise the appropriate utilisation of community pharmacy services for improving public health. A large study comprising four sequential phases was designed and conducted in Sefton borough. Initially, to gather background information, focus group discussions (FGDs) and semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the general public and key stakeholders. The second phase involved the development and testing of a questionnaire extracted from the qualitative findings and a literature review. The questionnaire focused upon seven pharmacy public health services related to cardiovascular risks as well as views on factors influencing pharmacy use and advertising/promotion techniques. Geodemographic concepts, widely recognised in public health, were also included to identify potential benefits to pharmacy practice research. Next, a large scale survey was administered among the general public using eight survey modes, to additionally evaluate the range of methods available/for gathering public views. Finally, survey findings were evaluated by representatives of survey respondents using a FGD. Results indicated that, although stakeholders considered that community pharmacy can make an extensive contribution in supporting public health, pharmacy public health services are used at a relatively low level by the general public and awareness of services is also low. Survey respondents indicated a willingness to use services in the future. Important factors influencing pharmacy use include loyalty, location and convenient accessibility. Appropriate promotional campaigns are a key facilitator to help raise the public's awareness. The findings will help the profession to increase uptake of pharmacy public health services. The variety of survey modes used proved beneficial in obtaining diverse population demographics, with street survey being the optimal technique, however, the potential for social desirability bias must be considered with this and other interviewer-assisted approaches. MOSAIC™ as a geodemographic tool is potentially useful in helping to target services for specific groups and is recommended for use in further research.

Les influences brahmanique et bouddhique ont contribué à la construction de la notion de service public au Cambodge. Depuis 1993, le pays a commencé à se reconstruire. L'Etat cherche à redéfinir sa mission dans un pays s'ouvrant au libéralisme économique. Les services sont dévolus à la responsabilité de nombreux nouveaux acteurs non étatiques. La diversification et la multiplication des organismes privés investis d'une mission de service public se réalisent sans véritable contrôle de la part des personnes publiques. Elles risquent d'accentuer une fracture sociale déjà perceptible. Les services publics administratifs sont plus importants que les services publics économiques. Pour les services publics d'Etat, les moyens institutionnels existent, mais il manque les moyens financiers. Pour le service public local, une réforme profonde appuyée par une volonté ferme du gouvernement se fait attendre. De nombreux organismes privés chargés de missions de service public ne sont pas encore soumis à des règles statutaires. Les règles applicables à la délégation de service public sont également insuffisantes. Les réformes engagées par l'Etat cambodgien depuis la fin des années 90 ont créé un mouvement de restructuration des activités de service public. Elles concernent plus la gestion et l'organisation des organismes qui assurent le service que le régime juridique de l'activité elle-même. Les lois du service public ne sont pas identifiées. L'effet de la libéralisation de l'économie est négatif pour de nombreuses activités de service public. Certains services publics administratifs, auparavant gratuits, sont devenus payants. Les administrés défavorisés en subissent le plus les conséquences
The influences of Brahmanism and Boudhism have contributed to the construction of the concept of the public service in Cambodia. Since 1993, the country began its reconstruction. The State has tried to design its mission in a country marching towards a liberalized economy. The public services are devolved to numerous non-state actors. The public agencies do not take suffisant controle on the diversification and the increase in the number of private actors invested with the mission of public service. This might accentuate an already-perceptible social fracture. The administrative public services are larger than the economic public services. For the State’s public service, there are suffisant institutions, but it lacks material and financial means. For the local public service, there needs to be an indepth réform backed up by a firm political will. Numerous private actors in charge of public services are not yet subjet to statutory regulations. The rules on delegation of public services are also insuffisant. The reform engaged by the government of Cambodia since the end of the 90’s has actionned a mouvement of restructuring of the public services. It affected the management and the organization of the actors invested with the public service mission more than the legal framwork of the activities themselves. The laws governing the substance of the public service can not be identified. The economic liberalization is negative for a variety of public service activities. Some administrative public service, previously provided free of charge, have become costly. It is the underpriviledged persons who first suffer the consequences

En France, depuis les années 1990, la polarité traditionnelle service public / fonction publique est mise en cause par des mesures de privatisation et d'externalisation des services publics d'une part, et par la contractualisation et la « managérialisation » de la fonction publique d'autre part. Ces tendances s'observent également en Chine dans la construction d'un système de services publics à partir des années 1990, et dans l'instauration d'une fonction publique décidée à la fin des années 1980 et entérinée par la loi du 27 avril 2005 « sur les agents publics ». Malgré les divergencespolitiques et culturelles entre les deux pays, on constate non seulement un même mouvement de recul de l'administration publique dans la gestion des services publics, mais aussi l'influence croissante du droit privé sur le droit de la fonction publique. Le droit public, en tant qu'il régit traditionnellement le service public et la fonction publique, est dès lors mis en question tant au niveau de son périmètre qu'au niveau de sa substance. À mesure que la relation entre service publicet fonction publique se distend, la corrélation entre les finalités de l'État et les structures administratives devient moins évidente. Dans ce contexte, la comparaison des droits français et chinois éclaire les transformations en cours du droit public
In France, since the 1990s, the traditional polarity public service / civil service is questioned by privatization and public services outsourcing on the one hand, and by contracting and "managerialization" of civil service on the other hand. These trends are also observed in China in the construction of a public services system from 1990s, and in the establishment of a civil service decided in the late 1980s and endorsed by the Law of 27 April 2005 on Public Servants. In spite of the political and cultural differences between the two countries, there is a converging movement : the public administration steps back from the public services management, while the private law grows its influence on the civil service law. Public law, as it traditionally governs the public service and the civil service, is therefore challenged both in its scope and in its substance. As the relationship between public services and civil service distends, the correlation between the purposes of state and the administrative structures is less obvious. In this context, the comparison of French and Chinese laws illuminates the ongoing transformations of public law

This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter one is a systematic review of the qualitative literature examining the experiences of clinicians working in mental health services with forensic service users (FSU). Following systematic searches and a process of quality assessment, a total of 14 articles were included and their findings were systematically compared. Staff members experienced both positive and negative emotional responses to their work, there are conflicting aspects to their role and additional challenges within the organisational context. Implications for clinical practice and further research are discussed. Chapter two uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to consider the experiences of FSUs diagnosed with Personality Disorder (PD) in Forensic Services and the meaning given to recovery within their accounts. The findings discuss the disempowered position of FSU participants and suggest that feeling safe within relationships in their environment is important for those with this diagnosis. There was evidence in their accounts of attempts to establish new identities but there also appeared to be multiple barriers to this. Chapter three offers a reflective account of the researcher’s experience of carrying out this study. It demonstrates the reflexive strategies used that allowed the competing subjective roles alongside that of ‘researcher’, to be examined and their influence on the research process explored.

L’objectif de notre thèse était d’analyser l’état de départ puis l’évolution de la législation marocaine dans le domaine de la gestion déléguée du service public. L'appel au secteur privé dans le cadre de partenariats public-privés pour la gestion des services de distribution d’eau, d’électricité, d’assainissement liquide a été initié au Maroc dès 1997 et pris souvent la forme juridique de la "gestion déléguée" via la loi 54-05 de 2006. Nous examinerons dans cette thèse le cas de la France comme exemple pionnier en Europe, et celui d’un pays arabo-africain, le Maroc. L’étude de ces deux expériences permet d’avoir une vision comparative de la problématique de la gestion déléguée.Dans le cas français, il s’agit de voir les fondements d’un système devenu un modèle exporté. En prenant en compte dans le cas marocain d’abord ce qu’était le service public dans la tradition marocaine et islamique, puis ce qu’elle est devenue lors du protectorat français et enfin, en analysant ce que fut l’étape de la propriété publique lors de la décolonisation puis l’impact du « modèle français de gestion déléguée ». En étudiant ce modèle né d’abord assez spontanément au Maroc en l’absence de cadre juridique cohérent, puis son adaptation progressive mais néanmoins accélérée. Nous avons étudié l’évolution du droit et de son esprit au Maroc et les défis qui s’imposent désormais au législateur face aux exigences d’une société jeune, exigeante et consciente des formes que prend l’évolution de l’économie et du droit dans le monde entier. Ce qui impose aujourd’hui une nouvelle transformation de la législation marocaine devant prendre en compte la nécessité de former de nouveaux équilibres juridiques
The objective of our thesis was to analyse the initial state and then the evolution of the Moroccan legislation in the field of delegated public service management. The call made to the private sector within the framework of public-private partnerships for the management of water supply, electricity and liquid sanitation services was initiated in Morocco in 1997 and often took the legal form of "delegated management" via the Law 54-05 of 2006. In this thesis, we will examine the case of France as a pioneering example in Europe, and the one of an Arab-African country, Morocco. The study of these two experiments provides a comparative view of the problem of delegated management.In the French case, it is a question of observing the foundations of a system that has become an exported model. By taking into account in the Moroccan case first what public service was in the Moroccan and Islamic tradition, then what it became during the French protectorate and finally, by analysing what was the stage of public ownership during decolonisation and then the impact of the "French model of delegated management". By studying this model, which was first born quite spontaneously in Morocco in the absence of a coherent legal framework, and then its gradual but nevertheless accelerated adaptation. We studied the evolution of the law and its spirit in Morocco and the challenges that legislators now face in meeting the requirements of a young, demanding and conscious society aware of the forms that the evolution of the economy and law is taking throughout the world. What now requires a new transformation of the Moroccan legislation that must take into account the need to form new legal check and balances

Cette recherche est une étude de cas qui examine la relation et les attributs entre les différentes entités impliquées dans le processus d’appel d’offre publique au gouvernement du Québec. Il se concentre spécifiquement sur les services professionnels informatiques qui constituent une catégorie de dépenses élevées dans les marchés publics. En utilisant le résultat de plusieurs entretiens avec des société informatique, notre recherche nous a permis de proposer un modèle d'interaction entre les différentes entités de l'écosystème d’appel d'offres publique qui peut être utilisé pour avoir une vue holistique de l'environnement et également comme un tremplin pour des études plus approfondie de la discipline.
This paper is a case study that examines the relationship and attributes between the different entities involved in Québec’s Government public procurement process. It is focused specifically on the IT professional services which is a high spending category in public procurement. Using result from multiple interview with IT firm, our finding allowed us to propose an entity interaction model for the call for tender ecosystem that can be used to have an holistic view of the environment and also as a stepping stone for further study of the field.

A prestação privada de serviços públicos constitui atividade essencial do Estado contemporâneo. O objeto deste trabalho é o exame das formas de prestação privada de serviços públicos no Brasil. De início, analisa como pressuposto para o desenvolvimento do tema central a atividade administrativa estatal prestada nos três níveis da Federação (União, Estados, Distrito Federal e Municípios), na qual se insere a atividade administrativa material de prestação de serviço público. A seguir, analisa a evolução e as motivações da passagem da execução do serviço público, de início apenas feita pelo próprio Poder Público, para os particulares. O exame dos fundamentos constitucionais do serviço público, plantados na Constituição de 1988, aplicáveis aos três níveis de poder federativo e o estudo das formas de delegação de serviço público aos particulares previstas nos artigos 175, 223 e nos incisos XI e XII do artigo 21 da Constituição Federal completam a análise. O tema central do estudo é tratado em seguida, que cuida especificamente das formas de serviço público que permitem sua prestação por particulares e que são admitidas no ordenamento jurídico brasileiro. Demonstrado que a delegação de serviços públicos para a iniciativa privada, consoante determina a Constituição de 1988, se realiza sob três formas, a concessão, a permissão e a autorização, o trabalho se debruça inicialmente no exame da concessão de serviços públicos rotulada de tradicional. Por se tratar da primeira das fórmulas de execução privada de serviços públicos, detém-se o texto no estudo dos vários aspectos que envolvem essa modalidade de prestação de serviços públicos, aspectos que vão servir de parâmetro para a análise das demais espécies de delegação de serviços públicos aos particulares. Assim, após um breve histórico dos antecedentes da concessão de serviços públicos, examina, além de outros pontos, o significado da expressão e sua natureza jurídica, a exigibilidade de licitação e as formas de extinção da relação decorrente da concessão. As características da concessão são desenvolvidas sob a ótica tríplice do que se denomina de \"participantes\" ou \"atores\" na relação de concessão: a Administração Pública, o concessionário e o usuário e, a partir delas, busca extrair uma conceituação da concessão de serviços públicos adequada aos objetivos do trabalho. Nesse tópico, ponto relevante do tema é o que diz respeito ao exame das espécies de concessão admitidas pela doutrina e pelo ordenamento jurídico brasileiro: a concessão patrocinada, ou as parcerias público-privadas e a concessão administrativa, os consórcios público-privados e a franquia. As outras modalidades constitucionais de delegação de serviços públicos, a permissão e a autorização, constituem tema de estudo dos tópicos seguintes. Considera na análise dessas modalidades, particularmente no que diz respeito à autorização, a problemática apontada pela doutrina contemporânea quanto à sua inserção, dentre as formas de delegação de serviços públicos e a sua efetiva aplicabilidade na estrutura administrativa dos três níveis da Federação brasileira.
Providing public services is an essential duty of the modern state. The purpose of this study is to analyse the manners in which the private sector in Brazil provide public services. First it analyses as a precondition to develop the central theme, the state\'s administrative activities throughout Brazil\'s three constitutional levels (the union, states, federal district and the cities) in which the public services are provided. Then it analyses how public services have developed since they were first offered by the State, to their transformation in being offered by the private sector. There then follows a study of artides 175, 223 and 21(XI) and (XII) of Brazil\'s Constitution of 1988, which provide the grounds for the offering of public services throughout the levels of the federation. It closes with a study of how public services are delegated to the private sector. After it analyses the central theme of this study; the different types of public services that Brazilian law states may be delegated to the private sector. The study explains that under the 1988 Constitution, public services may be delegated to the private sector using three different forms: concessions; permissions, and authorisations. The text first examines the traditional method of delegating public service: the granting of concessions. The study then analyses the different forms of concession, which will act as a parameter for the other types of delegation. After a brief history of public service concessions, the study examines the legal meaning of \"concession\" under Brazilian law, the need for a public tender and how concessions are terminated. The characteristics of the concession are developed using three perspectives from what are called \"participants\" or \"actors\" in the concession relationship: the government, the concessionaire and the user of the services. The study then attempts to define a concept of a public services concession that ties in with the purposes of this study. In this context, the study then considers legal scholarship and the Brazilian legal system: sponsored concessions, or the public-private partnership (PPPs) the administrative concessions, the public-private joint venture and franchises. The study progresses to an analysis of the other types of delegated public services - the permissions and authorisations. In analysing these types of delegation - and especially the authorisation - the problem arising from modern legal scholarship is considered in the context of its relation with the other types of delegations of public services, and how it actually applies throughout the three constitutional levels.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1991.
Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2940. Abstract precedes thesis as [2] preliminary leaves. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-100).

This thesis analyses the development of telecommunications universal service in relation to people with disabilities and national policy making in Australia from 1975 to the end of 1997. The history of public policy development in telecommunications universal service obligations is analysed to gain an understanding of how different political, scientific, social symbolic and material contexts have influenced policy. It is argued that social symbolic and material contexts mutually constitute telecommunications policy. Social symbolic influences, such as charity and 'rights' discourses of disability, have framed telecommunications policy toward people with disabilities. Material contexts, including changing technological, economic and legislative environments, have created favourable conditions for either charity or 'rights' models of disability, and have dominated related policy arenas at various times. The study demonstrates that policy arenas influenced by certain discourses, may also lead to changes within the material environments. The influence of community interest groups is also analysed to investigate their effect on telecommunications policy. Associated with interest group influence on telecommunications policy is a joint consultative process initiated by Telstra and consumer groups in 1988. The value of the consultative process to people with disabilities is evaluated. A key focus of this study is the consideration given by policy makers to the interests of people with a disability in the continuing debate on access and equity issues in relation to telecommunications services for all Australians. A turning-point in telecommunications policy for people with disabilities occurred in 1995, when various people with a disability made a successful complaint against Telstra to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). The outcome forced a major change of policy in telecommunications service delivery and benefited many who have disabilities. The HREOC inquiry is a useful case study which indicates the significance of the mutually constitutive effect on policy stemming from the dynamic interaction of social symbolic environments and material conditions. The research revealed that policy in this area may be described as a pluralist, non-linear process. Government and Telstra policy makers have found telecommunications policy a problematic area to reconcile with universal service obligations.

Notre etude a pour ambition de rechercher les elements d'un critere de suppression des services publics sans pretendre constituer un + traite de suppression des services publics. Nous abordons cette recherche de critere a travers la definition les justifications et les limites de la suppression des services publics. La suppression d'un service public signifie soit la disparition de l'activite de ce service du monde reel, soit la perte de son caractere de service public en devenant une activite privee ordinaire. Elle est differente de la privatisation et de l'amenagement d'un service public. S'agissant des justifications de la suppression, nous citons d'abord l'interet general puisque le rapprochement de l'interet financier de l'administration et de l'interet general ainsi que le recul de l'emprise de l'etat sur l'interet general au benefice de l'initiative privee envisagent une telle suppression. Ensuite, le principe de mutabilite des services publics est utilise par les autorites publiques comme instrument pour supprimer certains services publics toutefois, la liberte du commerce et de l'industrie ne constitue qu'une justification derisoire a l'heure actuelle. Mais l'application du droit d la concurrence aux services publics sous l'influence notamment du droit communautaire pourrait nous amener prochainement vers une eventuelle justification partielle. Quant aux limites a la suppression, la constitution, tant en interdisant la suppression des services publics constitutionnels qu'en delimitant la suppression des autres services publics, merite d'etre mentionnee premierement en second lieu, les droits de l'usager des services publics constituent theoriquement une limite a une telle suppression. Cependant en pratique ce premier possede peu de moyens juridiques pour s'opposer a cette suppression enfin, l'amenagement du territoire forme une limite partielle a la suppression en question, en ne contournant celle-ci que dans les zones defavorisees
In france, the withdrawal of public services has never been adequately examined, even though admittedly public service is one of the most studied areas of french public law. This study aims to identify a suitable criteria for the withdrawal of public services while defining, justifying and setting limits to such withdrawls. The discontinuation of a public service can mean either the absolute cessation of a service or the loss of its public characteristics through becoming a private activity. However, it is different to the privitization or modification of a public service. Justifying the withdrawal of a public service involves firstly looking at public interest, since the parallels between the financial interest of the administration and the public interest, as well as the decline of state domination due to private sector initiatives affect this withdrawal of public services. In addition, the principle of adaptability is used by the public authorities as reason for cutbacks to certain public services. Nowadays, the freedom of trade and industry is an insufficient basis for such cutbacks. However, application of the law of competition to public services under the influence of european community law could possibly lead us closer to a better justification. When fixing the boundaries to any cutbacks we must first study the constitution as a limiting factor. Also user's rights constitute a limit to cutbacks but, in practice they have insufficient legal means to oppose them. On the other hand, state planning laws form a partial restriction by limiting cutbacks to public services concerning disadvantaged areas. In conclusion we consider that a criteria for the withdrawal of public services can be established in french public law bearing in mind these key elements

In this research study the experience of the management services function as an aid to administrative reform in the Sudan is examined. Particular attention is paid to the establishment of the departmental management services units (DMSUs), as institutional in-built organs for administrative reform in the public service. The focus of the study is on the problems which confronted the DMSU programme. Interviews with a number of high-ranking personnel such as the former President Ga'afar Mohamad Nimeiri, the former Ministers of Public Service and Administrative Reform and some Under-Secretaries, all formed an important part of the procedure to trace the development of the management services function in the Sudan. They also provided the opportunity to highlight important issues and problems associated with the subject Comparative material on the experience of other countries showed that successful implementation of management services function can not be achieved in neglect of social, cultural and other environmental considerations. The effectiveness and optimum utilisation of the DMSUs must be affected by such considerations. The general finding of the study is that the DMSU programme has had a rather uneasy development. It did not achieve the objectives which were envisaged. Recommendations for the revival and successful implementation of the DMSU programme are set out in chapter 5.This study consists of five chapters. Chapter one is divided into two parts. One part is about administrative reform: the concept, definitions and approaches; and die second part briefly covers, the wider structure of administrative reform in die Sudan. Chapter two is about the experience of management services function in the Sudan. Chapter three is about the management services training courses and training of the management services officers locally and abroad. Chapter four covers analysis of the problems confronted in the management services in Sudan, and chapter five consists of the conclusion and recommendations.

A follow-up study to the 1995 ASLm Public Libraries Review was conducted. Forty telephone interviews with frequent public library users and 6 focus groups with professional and paraprofessional library staff were carried out across three of the original nine ASLm participant public library authorities. This two-stage data collection strategy was designed drawing on previous research ranging from services marketing to psychology. Focusing particularly on a finding from the ASLIB research, which identified a mismatch in future expectations of the service between library users and professional library staff, the research examines the relationship between user expectations and perceptions of the public library service. The emphasis is placed not on what expectations and perceptions of the library service are, but rather how they are formed, what influences them and how they interact. The research found that the library experience impacts significantly on the perceptions and expectations that are created of the service. The "snapshot" that a user forms during the service experience is crucial to the perception created and the subsequent expectation held. Similarly, internal and external factors ranging from family influence to the media, impact upon the way an individual experiences the library. The personal nature of the library experience and the relationship formed with library staff was identified as influencing user perceptions of the service, with library staff having the potential to create and inform user service expectations. Confusion among library users and library staff in terms of their service perceptions and expectations was also noted with evidence to suggest that this was compounded by societal and technological changes.

La présente thèse de doctorat est une étude empirique des liens existant entre les choix organisationels et leur performance relative dans le service public de l'eau en France. En premier lieu, les choix organisationnels ayant une incidence sur la performance, l'objet de ce travail est de comprendre les motivations de la délégation des services publics au secteur privé et d'analyser le lien causal qui existe entre les modes de gestion et la performance. Dans un second temps, la présente thèse étudie l'efficience technique et allocative des services publics de l'eau en France ainsi que le lien éventuel entre les inefficiences constatées et les choix organisationnels réalisés par les municipalités. Fondée sur les théories de l'organisation de la firme et de la régulation des services publics, cette thèse de doctorat contribue au débat sur la performance relative du secteur public et du secteur privé et à l'amélioration des services publics.

Cette thèse a pour objet de répondre à la question suivante : un choix de service public est-il compatible avec un choix d’ordre financier, car faisant intervenir des critères financiers, parmi lesquels celui de rentabilité financière ? Elle se situe dans un contexte de profondes mutations du secteur public. Prenant comme cadre théorique le New Public Management, constatant une appropriation par le droit administratif des notions d’intérêt financier et de rentabilité, cette recherche exploratoire se poursuit par des entretiens auprès d’élus et d’administratifs de 26 communes. Elle montre un poids des critères financiers proche de celui des critères de service public et un net intérêt porté à un outil de calcul de rentabilité financière, répondant là positivement à la question. Elle démontre également que les administratifs jouent un véritable rôle d’experts financiers. Enfin elle laisse entrevoir qu’élus et administratifs pourraient exercer un micro-pouvoir sur les spécialistes français du management public et les personnalités politiques, adhérant plutôt à l’idée d’incompatibilité d’un choix de service public et de la notion de rentabilité financière
This thesis has for object to answer the following question : is a choice of public utility compatible with a choice of financial order, because bringing in financial criteria, among which that of financial profitability ? It takes place in a context of deep changes of the public sector. Taking as theoretical frame the New Public Management, noticing an appropriation by the administrative law of the notions of financial interest and profitability, this exploratory research goes on by interviews with elected representatives and administration staff of 26 municipalities. It shows a weight of the financial criteria close to that of the criteria of public utility and a clear interest for a tool of financial profitability calculation, answering positively the question. It also demonstrates that the administration staff play a real role of financial experts. Finally it lets glimpse that elected representatives and administration staff could exercise a micro-power on the French specialists of public management and the political personalities, subscribing rather to the idea of incompatibility of a choice of public utility and the notion of financial profitability

Contracts play a key role in many business to business relationships. Service organisations are no exception. Despite a growing interest of services and how services are managed, research on how to use contracts to manage services has been surprisingly sparse in service research. The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to a deeper understanding of using contracts to manage services in business-to-business relationships. Contract theories together with concepts from service research are used to enrich and understand how contracts are used to manage services and thus make contributions to service research. The thesis will give an empirically grounded understanding of managing services through contracts. The thesis consists of six separate papers, all based on data gathered from contractual relationships between contractors and service providers. The results are based on studies of authentic contracts which are not the case in most previous studies. The methods used for gathering and analysing data involve case studies, content analysis of authentic contracts, interviews and document studies of the public transport sector in Sweden which is an empirically rich area for studying contracts. The three main contributions of this dissertation are; firstly, an extended understanding of how contracts are used to manage the prerequisites for service quality for the parties involved. It was found that the concept service quality is brought forward on three interdependent managerial levels; from a detailed operational level, to a systemic oriented strategic level, and also a visionary rhetorical level each specifying the prerequisite for the services. To manage the prerequisites, the contracts rely on three identified means; laws and regulations, standards and measurements and economical incentives. Secondly, the detailed contents and rigidity of the contracts bring forward an inflexible and asymmetric relationship, where the parties are restricted in their activities. Here the contracts become a substitute for trust and commitment instead of supporting the development of trust and commitment. Finally, the thesis deepen the understanding of the role of contracts in governing services, from being a static abbreviator to a dyadic market based relationship, to becoming a dynamic tool for developing and sustaining a value creating and value driven collaborative network.

Abstract This thesis focuses on integrating multipurpose public displays with online social networking services. Modern public displays are capable of much more than the early digital billboards used for promoting brand awareness in urban areas. Currently, smaller, interactive displays are proliferating and starting to offer a variety of services for their users. A network of such displays is located in the northern City of Oulu, Finland, for example, where it is used by the general public. As such, it forms a realistic test bed for studying novel public display services in an authentic urban setting. This thesis examines how to leverage online social networking services in creating services for interactive public displays. A key difference to most related research is that the displays simultaneously offer multiple services to their users. The thesis first provides general purpose software components, which together allow creating services that take advantage of online social networking services. These include a distributed user interface framework, a login mechanism for displays that relies on the developed framework, and a social networking service API for public displays, relying on the login mechanism. Then, the thesis presents a number of prototype services that use the developed components. The services are discussed in the contexts of user generated content, public displays for enabling communication between users, and the role of smart phones in enabling these services. The key findings of this thesis illustrate how consuming and producing user generated content directly on public displays provide compelling use cases. Also, while leveraging online social networking services can be useful in supporting casual communication between users, the anonymity of public display users is likely to cause problems in official communications. Mobile phones are found as suitable for enabling the integration of social networking services and public displays by de-anonymizing the users. However, we are still far from a situation in which mobile phones are a natural part of the interface between humans and public displays, and more research and development towards this vision are needed
Tiivistelmä Tämä väitöskirja keskittyy monikäyttöisten julkisten näyttöjen ja yhteisöpalvelujen yhdistämiseen. Uudenaikaiset julkiset näytöt kykenevät paljon muuhunkin kuin ensimmäiset suuret mainostaulut joilla mainostettiin suuria tavaramerkkejä. Pienemmät, interaktiiviset näytöt yleistyvät ja alkavat tarjoamaan uudenlaisia palveluita. Yksi verkko tällaisia näyttöjä sijaitsee Oulussa, Suomessa, missä se on yhteisön käytössä. Se muodostaa aidon ja totuudenmukaisen testialustan julkisten näyttöjen palveluille aidossa kaupunkiympäristössä. Tämä väitöskirja tutkii Internetin yhteisöpalveluiden käyttämistä interaktiivisten julkisten näyttöjen palveluiden luomisessa. Yksi työn tärkeimmistä eroista olemassaolevaan kirjallisuuten on se, että käytetyt näytöt tarjoavat yhtäaikaa useita palveluita. Väitöskirja esittelee ensin yleiskäyttöisiä ohjelmistokomponentteja, joiden avulla voidaan luoda näytöille palveluita, jotka käyttävät hyväkseen Internetin yhteisöpalveluita. Nämä ovat hajautettu käyttöliittymäratkaisu, sisäänkirjautumismekanismi, mikä rakentuu kehitetyn käyttöliittymäratkaisun varaan sekä yhteisöpalvelurajapinta, mikä taas rakentuu sisäänkirjautumismekanismin varaan. Seuraavaksi väitöskirja esittelee prototyyppipalveluita, mitkä rakentuvat mainittujen komponenttien varaan. Nämä palvelut analysoidaan eri viitekehyksissä: käyttäjien luoma sisältö, julkisten näyttöjen mahdollistama kommunikaatio eri käyttäjien välillä sekä älypuhelinten rooli näiden palveluiden luomisessa. Väitöskirjan löydökset havainnollistavat, kuinka käyttäjien luoma sisältö sekä sen tuottaminen suoraan julkisella näytöllä ovat mieleisiä käyttötapoja. Lisäksi, vaikka yhteisöpalvelujen hyödyntäminen julkisilla näytöillä voikin tukea arkipäiväistä kommunikaatiota käyttäjien välillä, käytön anonymiteetti voi kuitenkin aiheuttaa ongelmia virallisemmassa kommunikaatiossa. Matkapuhelimet todetaan sopiviksi yhteisöpalvelujen ja julkisten näyttöjen yhdistämisessä etenkin käyttäjien tunnistamistuen vuoksi. Olemme kuitenkin vielä kaukana tilanteesta, missä matkapuhelimet ovat osa luonnollista käyttöliittymää ihmisten ja julkisten näyttöjen välillä, ja lisää tutkimusta on tehtävä tämän vision suuntaan

This thesis comprises three essays examining the roles of markets and intrinsic motivation in public organisations. Chapter 1 examines the impact of establishing Independent Sector Treatment Centres in the English National Health Service (NHS) during the 2000s on the performance of neighbouring NHS (public) hospitals. It finds that NHS hospitals that had an ISTC placed nearby became more efficient (measured using pre-surgical length of stay for orthopaedic surgery), but also received sicker patients on average, as ISTCs avoided treating the sickest patients. Average cost per patient at ISTC-exposed NHS hospitals increased, suggesting that any efficiency gains were swamped by the negative effect on costs of worsened patient casemix. Chapter 2 examines the 2006 introduction of patient choice of hospital for elective surgery within the English NHS, using Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) of health gain from surgery as a measure of hospital quality. The hospital competition brought about by this reform appears to have led to lower varicose vein surgery quality, but no change in groin hernia surgery quality. For orthopaedic surgery quality, the evidence in support of a negative effect of competition outweighs the evidence to the contrary. We explain these findings by explicitly modelling the hospital as a multi-product firm. Chapter 3 examines the rationale for the 2011 Busan Declaration, which states that foreign aid should be given in line with the priorities of recipients, by constructing a model of the interaction between donors and charitable entrepreneurs, where occupational choice is endogenous, donors can choose whether to give, and donors and entrepreneurs are paired in a stable matching. We show that mission conflict in the charitable sector can arise when mission preferences and income earnings ability in the private sector are correlated, and examine policy options to encourage the charitable sector to give greater weight to recipients’ objectives.

Australian historical scholarship has traditionally neglected public employment services as an area of research. However, in recent years as the State has repositioned itself in the labour market the role of public employment services has become a popular area of debate. While contemporary scholars have contributed to these debates, their historical counterparts have been slower to follow suit. In overcoming this neglect, this thesis provides an historical examination of one of the earliest forms of state intervention into the Australian labour market: public employment services. This study examined the establishment and operations of public employment services in NSW from 1887 until 1942, when they were transferred across to the Federal Department of Labour and National Service, to comply with Commonwealth Wartime legislation. Within the Australian contemporary scholarship, public employment services have been conceptualised according to three dominant economic traditions: neo-classical economics, Keynesian economics and the writings of W.H. Beveridge. However, these traditions are predicated on inherent assumptions and predetermined outcomes, all of which fail to identify the origins and development of public employment services in Australia. Neo-classical economists have been the most critical arguing that the public provision of employments services is both inefficient and ineffective. Within the historical literature, Institutional economists in the United States have been influential in identifying the socio-economic factors that led to the development of the public employment services: asymmetrical labour market information and fraudulent acts perpetrated by private employment registries, all of which distorted the functioning of the labour market. By adopting the institutional economic approach, this thesis found that it was these socio-economic concerns that led to the introduction of the public employment service in NSW. This thesis disputes the claims of the neo-classical economists that the public employment services were both inefficient and ineffective, instead it argues that the public employment service played a pivotal role in the development of the NSW economy performing the role of labour market intermediary: channelling information and bringing together those wishing to buy and sell labour; while safeguarding those vulnerable in the labour market: the unemployed.

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Local provision of public services has the positive effect of increasing the efficiency because each locality has its idiosyncrasies that determine a particular demand for public services. This dissertation addresses different aspects of the local demand for public goods and services and their relationship with political incentives. The text is divided in three essays. The first essay aims to test the existence of yardstick competition in education spending using panel data from Brazilian municipalities. The essay estimates two-regime spatial Durbin models with time and spatial fixed effects using maximum likelihood, where the regimes represent different electoral and educational accountability institutional settings. First, it is investigated whether the lame duck incumbents tend to engage in less strategic interaction as a result of the impossibility of reelection, which lowers the incentives for them to signal their type (good or bad) to the voters by mimicking their neighbors’ expenditures. Additionally, it is evaluated whether the lack of electorate support faced by the minority governments causes the incumbents to mimic the neighbors’ spending to a greater extent to increase their odds of reelection. Next, the essay estimates the effects of the institutional change introduced by the disclosure on April 2007 of the Basic Education Development Index (known as IDEB) and its goals on the strategic interaction at the municipality level. This institutional change potentially increased the incentives for incumbents to follow the national best practices in an attempt to signal their type to voters, thus reducing the importance of local information spillover. The same model is also tested using school inputs that are believed to improve students’ performance in place of education spending. The results show evidence for yardstick competition in education spending. Spatial auto-correlation is lower among the lame ducks and higher among the incumbents with minority support (a smaller vote margin). In addition, the institutional change introduced by the IDEB reduced the spatial interaction in education spending and input-setting, thus diminishing the importance of local information spillover. The second essay investigates the role played by the geographic distance between the poor and non-poor in the local demand for income redistribution. In particular, the study provides an empirical test of the geographically limited altruism model proposed in Pauly (1973), incorporating the possibility of participation costs associated with the provision of transfers (Van de Wale, 1998). First, the discussion is motivated by allowing for an “iceberg cost” of participation in the programs for the poor individuals in Pauly’s original model. Next, using data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and a panel of municipalities based on the viii National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2001 to 2007, all the distance-related explanatory variables indicate that an increased proximity between poor and non-poor is associated with better targeting of the programs (demand for redistribution). For instance, a 1- hour increase in the time spent commuting by the poor reduces the targeting by 3.158 percentage points. This result is similar to that of Ashworth, Heyndels and Smolders (2002) but is definitely not due to the program leakages. To empirically disentangle participation costs and spatially restricted altruism effects, an additional test is conducted using unique panel data based on the 2004 and 2006 PNAD, which assess the number of benefits and the average benefit value received by beneficiaries. The estimates suggest that both cost and altruism play important roles in targeting determination in Brazil, and thus, in the determination of the demand for redistribution. Lastly, the results indicate that ‘size matters’; i.e., the budget for redistribution has a positive impact on targeting. The third essay aims to empirically test the validity of the median voter model for the Brazilian case. Information on municipalities are obtained from the Population Census and the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court for the year 2000. First, the median voter demand for local public services is estimated. The bundles of services offered by reelection candidates are identified as the expenditures realized during incumbents’ first term in office. The assumption of perfect information of candidates concerning the median demand is relaxed and a weaker hypothesis, of rational expectation, is imposed. Thus, incumbents make mistakes about the median demand that are referred to as misperception errors. Thus, at a given point in time, incumbents can provide a bundle (given by the amount of expenditures per capita) that differs from median voter’s demand for public services by a multiplicative error term, which is included in the residuals of the demand equation. Next, it is estimated the impact of the module of this misperception error on the electoral performance of incumbents using a selection models. The result suggests that the median voter model is valid for the case of Brazilian municipalities.
A provisão local de serviços públicos tem o efeito positivo de aumentar a eficiência, pois cada localidade tem as suas idiossincrasias que determinam uma demanda distinta por serviços públicos. Esta dissertação aborda diferentes aspectos da demanda local por bens e serviços públicos e sua relação com incentivos políticos O texto está dividido em três ensaios. O primeiro ensaio visa testar a existência de yardstick competition nos gastos em educação utilizando um painel de municípios brasileiros. O ensaio estima modelos espaciais de Durbin com dois regimes e efeitos fixos espaciais e temporais por meio de máxima verossimilhança, onde os regimes representam diferentes cenários institucionais de accountability eleitoral e educacional. Primeiro, é investigado se os prefeitos de segundo mandato tendem a interagir menos com os vizinhos como resultado da impossibilidade de reeleição, que reduz os incentivos para sinalizarem seus tipos (bons ou ruins) para os eleitores por meio da reprodução dos gastos de seus vizinhos. Além disso, é avaliado se prefeitos sem apoio político da maioria da câmara dos vereadores (que pode indicar uma falta de apoio dos eleitores) buscam reproduzir os gastos dos vizinhos em maior medida, a fim de aumentarem suas chances de reeleição. Em seguida, o ensaio calcula os efeitos da mudança institucional introduzida pela divulgação do Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica (IDEB) e de suas metas em abril de 2007 sobre a interação estratégica entre governos locais. Esta mudança institucional possivelmente aumentou os incentivos para os prefeitos seguirem as melhores práticas nacionais, na tentativa de sinalizarem aos eleitores que são competentes, reduzindo assim a importância de transbordamentos de informação local. O mesmo modelo é também testado usando insumos escolares que se acreditam aumentarem o desempenho dos alunos no lugar de gastos com educação. Os resultados mostram evidências de yardstick competition nos gastos em educação. A autocorrelação espacial é menor entre os prefeitos em segundo mandato e maior entre os prefeitos com o apoio da minoria (i.e., com uma margem menor de votos). Além disso, a mudança institucional introduzida pelo IDEB reduziu a interação espacial nos gastos educação e na definição dos insumos escolares, diminuindo assim a importância de transbordamentos de informação local. O segundo ensaio investiga o papel desempenhado pela distância geográfica entre os pobres e não pobres na determinação da demanda local por redistribuição de renda. Em particular, o estudo fornece um teste empírico do modelo de altruísmo delimitado geograficamente proposto em Pauly (1973), incorporando ainda a possibilidade de custos de x participação associados à provisão de transferências (Van de Wale, 1998). Primeiramente, a discussão é motivada permitindo que o modelo original Pauly incorpore um "custo iceberg" de participação nos programas para as pessoas pobres. Foram utilizados dados seccionais do Censo Demográfico de 2000 e um painel de municípios com base na Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD) de 2001 a 2007. Todas as variáveis explicativas que constituem medidas de distância indicam que uma maior proximidade entre pobres e não pobres está associada a uma melhor cobertura dos programas (demanda por redistribuição). Por exemplo, um aumento de 1 hora no tempo gasto em deslocamento casa-trabalho pelos pobres reduz a cobertura em 3,158 pontos percentuais. Este resultado é semelhante ao de Ashworth, Heyndels e Smolders (2002), mas definitivamente não se deve à existência de vazamentos nos programas. Para diferenciar empiricamente os efeitos resultantes de custos de participação daqueles devido ao altruísmo geograficamente delimitado, um teste adicional é realizado com dados em painel obtidos junto as PNAD de 2004 e de 2006, que avaliam o número de benefícios e o valor do benefício médio recebido pelos beneficiários. As estimativas sugerem que tanto o custo quanto o altruísmo desempenham papéis importantes na determinação da cobertura/focalização de programas sociais no Brasil e, portanto, na determinação da demanda por transferências. Os resultados indicam também que o tamanho do orçamento para a redistribuição tem um impacto positivo na cobertura dos programas. O terceiro ensaio tem como objetivo testar empiricamente a validade do modelo do eleitor mediano para o caso brasileiro. As informações municipais são provenientes do Censo Demográfico e do Tribunal Supremo Eleitoral para o ano de 2000. Primeiramente, a demanda do eleitor mediano para os serviços públicos locais é estimada. As cestas ofertadas pelos candidatos à reeleição são identificadas como os gastos realizados durante o primeiro mandato. A suposição de informação perfeita dos candidatos sobre a demanda mediana é relaxada e uma hipótese mais fraca, de expectativas racionais, é imposta. Assim, os representantes podem se enganar quanto à demanda mediana ao que se denominou “erros de percepção”. Assim, em um determinado ponto no tempo, os representantes podem fornecer uma cesta (dada pelas despesas per capita), que difere por um termo de erro multiplicativo da demanda do eleitor mediano por serviços públicos, o qual está incluído nos resíduos da equação de demanda. Em seguida, calcula-se o impacto do módulo deste “erro de percepção” sobre o desempenho eleitoral dos prefeitos utilizando modelos de seleção. O resultado sugere que o modelo do eleitor mediano é válido para o caso dos municípios brasileiros.

Networked arrangements have moved from the periphery to the centre of public policy making and now occupy a position alongside of government as key mechanisms for social and organisational integration. Despite the current prominence of networked arrangements, little is known about how networks are actually formed and what explains their structure, operation and management strategies. Moreover, despite the pivotal position as the architects, administrators and facilitators of the network reform process, the role of central agencies of government in networked environments has yet to be fully determined. The purpose of this thesis was to examine the variation in networked arrangements and its effect on design and management and, in doing so, uncover the emergent role of central agencies of government. Using a mixed research design of case study and network analysis, this thesis 'unpacked' three exemplars of cross-sector networked arrangements within the Queensland human services arena. The research produced a number of findings. First, it provided empirical evidence to support the previously largely descriptive proposition that networked arrangements are differentiated. Second, through the synthesis of two parallel integration literatures, a framework to guide the design of networked arrangements was produced. Third, it identified a set of network management strategies and demonstrated that these horizontally oriented strategies were different to those currently utilised within government. Finally, the research developed a set of general and specific roles to guide central agencies' operation within the current networked environment.