Book review essay of:Monika Krause (2014). The Good Project. Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason; Silke Roth (2015). The Paradoxes of Aid Work: Passionate Professionals; Rene Fox (2014). Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Medecins Sans Frontières.

In this book review essay three books on humanitarian aid are discussed:Monika Krause. 2014. The Good Project. Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)Silke Roth. 2015. The Paradoxes of Aid Work: Passionate Professionals (Abingdon: Routledge)Rene Fox. 2014. Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Medecins Sans Frontières (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press)<br/

Managing 'mixedness': Understanding the effects of public sector reform in human service organisations

Our government is confronted with many unintended effects of policy programs. In order to address these problems, a large number of public sector reforms have been implemented over the past decades. These reforms formed a reaction to implementation problems rather than to problems in relation to policy content: more and more, policy makers seem to have recognised that not so much the provisions that were offered, but the process of policy implementation generated its own effects and was an important source of problems. At times, high expectations existed as concerns the effects of policy sector reforms. Time and again, however, reform outcomes did not live up to expectations. How come? These reforms were mostly aimed at human service provision: the softer sectors of the public sphere in which interaction between citizens (in their role as clients) and the state takes place, as in the field of education, the police, public assistance, health care, etc. Human service provision is of a fundamentally mixed nature: general regulations are applied to individual clients. In day-to-day business, implementation problems are the result of inherent dilemmas in human service provision. We argue that these reforms do not live up to expectations, because they cannot fully cope with the dilemmas that originate from the fundamentally mixed nature of human service provision. In this paper we make a start with combining insights from implementation theory with research on public sector reform. We argue that this link has been missing so far in discussions on public management and public sector reform. The inherent ‘mixedness’ in human service provision needs to be acknowledged in order to better understand the effects of public sector reform in organisations that provide ‘human services’ . This paper is structured as follows. First, we build an argument as to why human service organisations have a inherent ‘mixed’ nature. We discuss three levels on which this ‘mixedness’ is observable: on the level of the organisational environment, the level of the organisational structure and on the level of individual service provision. Second, we briefly discuss the rise and characteristics of reform trajectories in the Dutch public sector. We link the ideas and features of these reform strategies to the unique nature of human service provision in order to explain why these kinds of reform do not result in their expected outcomes.Session 4: Public Managemen

Civil Society Organizations:The Site of Legitimizing the Common Good. A literature review

The concept of legitimacy—i.e., being regarded as “lawful, admissible, and justified” (Edwards in NGO rights and responsibilities: a new deal for global governance, The Foreign Policy Center, London, 2000)—is pivotal within civil society research. Recently, the concept has applied to wider notions concerning the civil sphere and civic action. The introductory article of this special issue aims to provide an overview of conceptualizations of legitimacy within civil society research and to point at new avenues for future research. We depart from Suddaby et al.’s (Acad Manag Ann 11(1):451–478, 2017) configurations of legitimacy within management literature: as property, perception, and process. While these configurations are also reflected in civil society literature, with legitimacy as property being prominent, they do not capture the full scope of civil society literature on legitimacy, given its multidisciplinary nature, its inclusion of multiple levels of analysis, and the presence of complementary conceptualizations of legitimacy. We posit that the legitimacy-as-relations-in-processes perspective is valuable for advancing research in civil society organizations

Evaluator perceptions of NGO performance in disasters:Meeting multiple institutional demands in humanitarian aid projects

Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005-11. The reports are compared using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands