For the People: Can We Fix Public Service?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The stakes have seldom been higher for public service. Security concerns are surging to the foreground. New or neglected economic and social problems demand fresh thinking and deft action. Technology-driven improvements in the business sector raise citizens' expectations for performance. Government's capacity to deliver, meanwhile, too often falls short. The perception of government as bureaucratic and inflexible -- and the blunt reality of uncompetitive salaries -- can make talented people hesitate to take on public jobs. Many civic-minded young Americans opt reluctantly for business careers or turn to the nonprofit sector as a more appealing setting for doing good. Yet as John Adams advised his son, "public business must be done by someone." In our day, as Adams's, the urgency and complexity of much public business call for the talents of the very best. In this wide-ranging book, scholars from the Visions of Governance in the Twenty-First Century program at Harvard University examine what is broken in public service and how it can be fixed. Three interrelated long-term trends are changing the context of government in this century: "marketization," globalization, and the information revolution. These forces are acting to diffuse a degree of power, responsibility, and even legitimacy away from central governments.

Public service in the era of distributed governance depends less on traditional aptitudes for direct administration and more on a subtler, sophisticated set of analytical and managerial skills. Those who labor for the people still need to discern public value through policy analysis and work the organizational machinery of government. But they must also be able to orchestrate the operations of far-flung networks involving a range of actors in different sectors. The authors argue that we are witnessing not the end of public service, but its evolution. While the evidence and arguments presented in this book make it hard to deny that many aspects of public service are strained, bent, or even broken, they also offer grounds for optimism that public service can be refurbished and reshaped to fit today's shifting challenges.

SYNOPSIS

The stakes have seldom been higher for public service. In the United States and elsewhere security concerns�after years of quiescence�are surging to the foreground. New or neglected economic and social problems demand fresh thinking and deft action. Technology-driven improvements in the business sector raise citizens� expectations for government performance. Yet government�s capacity to deliver falls far short of the challenges facing public service. Young stars increasingly shun government careers, not just in the United States but even in nations with deep traditions of elite public service. Organizations at every level of government have trouble attracting and retaining top talent. Personnel reforms often stall, or fall far short of expectations.

In this new book a team of Harvard scholars examines what�s broken about public service and the prospects for fixing it. The book�s three sections probe the defects of the public-service status quo, craft criteria that define success in reshaping public service, and assess specific prescriptions for reform. Chapter topics include the evolving definition of public leadership, the misunderstood facts of comparative pay in business and government, the special public-service challenges of developing countries, the prevalence of �in-and-outers� in top Federal posts, the history (and possible futures) of education for public service, and �moral competence� as a key component of the public servant�s skill set. An overview by the editors situates public service at the heart of twenty first century governance challenges, and ventures the cautious conclusion that �we are witnessing not the end of public service, but its evolution.�