Translations of new public management: a decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices

Potential for comparative public opinion research in public administration

The public administration and public services have always taken a marginal place in the political scientists’ behavioural research. Public administration students on the other hand tend to focus on political and administrative elites and institutions, and largely ignored citizens in comparative research. In this article we make a plea for international comparative research on citizens’ attitudes towards the public administration from an interdisciplinary perspective. Available international survey material is discussed, and main trends in empirical practice and theoretical approaches are outlined, especially those with a potential impact on public sector reform

Favouritism: exploring the 'uncontrolled' spaces of the leadership experience

In this paper, we argue that a focus on favouritism magnifies a central ethical ambiguity in leadership, both conceptually and in practice. The social process of favouritism can even go unnoticed, or misrecognised if it does not manifest in a form in which it can be either included or excluded from what is (collectively interpreted as) leadership. The leadership literature presents a tension between what is an embodied and relational account of the ethical, on the one hand, and a more dispassionate organisational ‘justice’ emphasis, on the other hand. We conducted 23 semi-structured interviews in eight consultancy companies, four multinationals and four internationals. There were ethical issues at play in the way interviewees thought about favouritism in leadership episodes. This emerged in the fact that they were concerned with visibility and conduct before engaging in favouritism. Our findings illustrate a bricolage of ethical justifications for favouritism, namely utilitarian, justice, and relational. Such findings suggest the ethical ambiguity that lies at the heart of leadership as a concept and a practice

The Role of Teachers' Expectations in the Association between Children's SES and Performance in Kindergarten: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

This study examines the role of teachers' expectations in the association between children's socio-economic background and achievement outcomes. Furthermore, the role of children's ethnicity in moderating this mediated relation is investigated. In the present study, 3,948 children from kindergarten are examined. Data are analysed by means of structural equation modeling. First, results show that teachers' expectations mediate the relation between children's SES and their later language and math achievement, after controlling for children's ethnicity, prior achievement and gender. This result indicates that teachers may exacerbate individual differences between children. Second, children's ethnicity moderates the mediation effect of teachers' expectations with respect to math outcomes. The role of teachers' expectations in mediating the relation between SES and math outcomes is stronger for majority children than for minority children

Strict enforcement or responsive regulation? How inspector–inspectee interaction and inspectors’ role identity shape decision making

In line with a general trend towards more responsive regulation, inspectors are expected to take inspectees’ needs and demands in account when making decisions. At the same time, inspection services increasingly apply instruments aimed at directing the inspectors’ actions. These contradictory signals can make the work of inspectors very difficult. By reviewing relevant literature, this chapter shows that not only inspectees’ behavior and characteristics, but also inspectors’ professional role identity, i.e. the way inspectors view their professional role, is critical to explain and predict decision making on the ground