Managerialism in the Public Sector: Perspectives and Prospects

The purpose of this book is to offer insights into the complex and often unclear context of public sector management, providing a new theoretical and practical approach to the analysis and interpretation of these issues. The book is grounded in the awareness that the public sector has too often shown inefficiencies, despite the expensive measures taken, and from manifold perspectives such as the economic, social, organizational, and institutional ones, among others. It acknowledges the lack of behavioral, cultural, and context-oriented research in the field, thus proposing to innovate the debate and to expand the current understanding of which organizational features characterize modern public administrations, what factors influence the predominance of different models, with a special focus on the Italian setting, benefiting from a wholly comprehensive innovative methodological approach. The findings offer key implications for theory, practice, and policy-making, contending the importance of holistic approaches to the debate and abandoning pre-constituted schemes to put forth the relevance of behavioral models. It offers a key message: contextual-specific and cultural factors influencing individual behaviors are important and should better influence policy-making processes, towards "glocalization" in order to improve quality.