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Administrative System (administrative + system)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	20%

Selected Abstracts

Exercise of royal power in early medieval Europe: the case of Otto the Great 936,73

EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE, Issue 4 2009
David Bachrach
Current scholarly orthodoxy holds that the German kingdom under the Ottonians (c.919,1024) did not possess an administration, much less an administrative system that relied heavily upon the ,written word'. It is the contention of this essay that the exercise of royal power under Otto the Great (936,73) relied intrinsically on a substantial royal administrative system that made very considerable use of documents, particularly for the storage of crucial information about royal resources. The focus of this study is on Otto I's use of this written information to exercise royal power in the context of confiscating and requisitioning property from both laymen and ecclesiastical institutions. [source]

Reshaping the State: Administrative Reform and New Public Management in France

GOVERNANCE, Issue 4 2005
ALISTAIR COLE
This essay examines the administrative reform process in France since the late 1980s. The key reforms undertaken during this period have sought to delegate greater managerial autonomy to the ministerial field-service level. We undertook semistructured interviews with officials in the field services of three French ministries (Education, Agriculture, and Infrastructure) in the Champagne-Ardennes region, as well as with members of the wider policy communities. The capacity of the field services to adopt a proactive approach to management reform depended on five key variables: internal organizational dynamics; the attitude of the central services to mesolevel autonomy; the degree of institutional receptivity to change; the type of service delivery, and the extent of penetration in local networks. The Infrastructure Ministry was more receptive to management change than either Education or (especially) Agriculture, a receptivity that reflects the institutional diversity of the French administrative system, and that supports new institutionalist arguments. The essay rejects straightforward convergence to the New Policy Management norm. Changes in public management norms require either endogenous discursive shifts or else need to be interpreted in terms of domestic registers that are acceptable or understandable to those charged with implementing reform. [source]

Autonomisation of the Thai state: some observations

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2006
Bidhya Bowornwathana
Abstract This article argues that the recent global trend of creating autonomous or quasi-autonomous public arganisations must be understood within the particular context of the country under investigation. In the case of the Thai state, autonomisation should be seen as a transformation process from a unitary administrative system to multiple administrative systems. It is an escape from a very centralised form of government to a more decentralised one where government power is more dispersed among various public organisations. The nature of politics and administration determines the direction of the hybridisation processes of autonomisation in Thailand. The reform direction chosen by the prime minister and the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats are two key factors that dictate the direction of autonomisation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Savings from integrating administrative systems for social assistance programmes in Russia

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2003
L. Jerome Gallagher
Russian local governments now have primary responsibility for the administration of social assistance programmes thanks to a combination of decentralization of some responsibilities from higher levels of government and the transfer of certain administrative functions from state enterprises to municipalities. Over the past few years, there has also been a distinct shift to means-testing of social assistance. This article reports on the results of a pilot project undertaken to improve the efficiency of programme administration conducted in the city of Arzamas (pop. 110,000). The municipal administration promotes it as a programme to ease client burden and improve access to benefits. Specifically, the pilot introduced a unified application form for all the major social assistance programmes in the city and required, regardless of how many programmes are applied for, that applicants visit only one office and supply one set of documents verifying their eligibility for assistance. Benefit processing is also consolidated. Staff efficiency improvements are substantial: under the one-window system, 127 benefits are processed per month per staff member, while 85 benefits were processed per month per staff member under the old administrative system. Impressive time savings for clients were also observed: the statistically average client saves between 1.3 and 2.4 hours, depending on the degree to which a client was able to coordinate documentation collection and trips to the benefit agencies under the old system. The total potential time saved by clients as a result of the one-window reforms is between 4100 and 7600 person hours per month. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

L'expérience québécoise en matière de réforme administrative: la loi sur l'administration publique

CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION/ADMINISTRATION PUBLIQUE DU CANADA, Issue 1 2006
Louis Côté
Sommaire: Cet article porte sur l'expérience concrète de réforme administrative conduite dans la fonction publique québécoise depuis le printemps 2000. Afin de comprendre les raisons qui expliquent l'entrée relativement tardive et plutôt modeste du Québec dans la nouvelle vague de réformes administratives, nous presentons dans une première section l'arrière-plan historique de la réforme québécoise. Puis, prenant appui sur les résultats empiriques de deux recherches réalisées l'une en 2003 et l'autre en 2005, les trois sections suivantes examinent la façon dont la réforme québécoise a répondu aux principaux enjeux touchant les aspects conceptuel et stratégique d'une réforme. Nous traitons d'abord les enjeux suivants concernant la conception d'ensemble de la réforme: la prise en compte des spécificités de la gestion publique, l'application d'une approche différenciée en fonction des paramètres structuraux et le respect de la dynamique du système administratif national. Sont ensuite abordés les enjeux ayant trait à la mise en ,uvre de la réforme: l'engagement des acteurs, les modes d'intervention des organismes centraux et les ressources allouées. On examine enfin quelques enjeux reliés aux deux axes majeurs retenus par la réforme: le service aux citoyens et aux entreprises et la gestion par résultats. Abstract: This article looks at the concrete experience of the administrative reforms that have been conducted in the Quebec public service since spring 2000. In order to understand the reasons why Quebec was relatively late in joining the new wave of administrative reform, and rather modest in its participation when it did so, the first section of the article documents its historical background. The next three sections examine the way in which the Quebec reform has addressed the key issues related to the conceptual and strategic aspects of the reform process, based on the empirical results of two research studies, conducted in 2003 and 2005. Examined first are issues concerning the overall vision of reform: the taking into account of the specifics of public management, the application of a differentiated approach based on structural parameters, and the respect for the dynamics of the national administrative system. The article then looks at issues relating to reform implementation: the engagement of the players, the modes of intervention of the central agencies, and the resources allocated. Finally, the article examines some of the issues in connection with the two major themes targeted by the reform: services to citizens and businesses, and management by results. [source]

The Hidden Politics of Administrative Reform: Cutting French Civil Service Wages with a Low-Profile Instrument

GOVERNANCE, Issue 1 2007
PHILIPPE BEZES
The article addresses internal and hidden politics of changes in bureaucracies by focusing on the introduction and use of policy instruments as institutional change without radical or explicit shifts in administrative systems. Beneath public administrative reforms, it examines the use of "low-profile instruments" characterized by their technical and goal-oriented dimension but also by their low visibility to external actors due to the high complexity of their commensurating purpose and the automaticity of their use. The core case study of the paper offers a historical sociology of a technique for calculating the growth of the French civil service wage bill from the mid-1960s to the 2000s. The origins, uses, and institutionalisation of this method in the French context are explored to emphasize the important way of governing the bureaucracy at times of crisis through automatic, unobtrusive, incremental, and low-profile mechanisms. While insisting on the salience of techniques for calculating, measuring, classifying, and indexing in the contemporary art of government, it also suggests the need for observing and explaining "everyday forms of retrenchment" in bureaucracies. [source]

Autonomisation of the Thai state: some observations

Savings from integrating administrative systems for social assistance programmes in Russia

The Council for the Australian Federation: A New Structure of Australian Federalism

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2008
Anne Tiernan
In October 2006, state premiers and territory chief ministers gathered in Melbourne for the first meeting of the Council for the Australian Federation (CAF). This little-heralded event marked the beginning of the first formalised structure for state and territory only collaboration since Federation. This article describes the genesis and creation of this new structural response to ongoing state concerns about the trend to an increasingly centralised pattern of Commonwealth-state relations. It identifies the intended functions of the Council, which include: acting as a mechanism for coordinating approaches to negotiations with the Commonwealth; operating as a clearing house for policy ideas in Australia and internationally; harmonising regulatory frameworks; and developing improvements to service delivery in areas of state responsibility. Informed by interviews with key players involved with its establishment and documentary sources, this article assesses CAF's performance during its first 18 months of operation. It explores the hopes and aspirations of key CAF stakeholders, and some of the issues that have confronted the fledgling organisation. Personnel changes among the cohort of state and territory leaders, and the election of a federal Labor government in November 2007 have altered the dynamics of CAF. The article argues that CAF's emergence is an attempt by sub-national governments to develop new capacity and leverage to address the asymmetries that characterise contemporary Australian federalism. However, there are questions about CAF's future, particularly about state and territory governments' capacity to pursue collaborative agendas given the pace and scope of Kevin Rudd's ,new federalism' reforms and the demands it is placing on their policy and administrative systems. [source]