Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty
Mohit Bhattacharya/
Editor(s): Bidyut Chakrabarty / Mohit Bhattacharya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 383
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195673271
Description
The idea and practice of administrative reform involves the twin concepts of change and innovation. Across the world, advances in the theory and working of high-performance organizations envisage not only changes within the system but also modifications in their function in relation to the environment. This reader brings together cutting-edge essays on how administrative change and innovation transform and improve organizational structure and function.
The volume discusses recent trends in administrative reforms in India with the adoption of the New Economic Policy in the early 1990s. Underlining the processes of devolution and deconcentration of power, it points out the importance of citizen participation in public affairs, emphasizing accountability in democratic politics.
The reader highlights the importance of good governance, participative development, and debureaucratization in an ever-changing scenario. It calls upon the need to use scientific and modern management techniques to upgrade administrative capability. Also emphasized are the significance of effective government machinery against corruption, incompetence, and red tape as also constant evaluation and monitoring.
Besides focusing on classical texts on the subject, the essays dwell on the interest of various stakeholders in development; the impact of their evolution on government innovation; and linkages between globalization and administrative reform.
The volume further explores administrative reforms in developed countries like the US and UK, and in socialist countries like China and Vietnam. In addition, the reader surveys the functioning of the lower level bureaucracy, and the role of semi-and non-governmental organizations that do much of government's work. This reader will be useful to scholars and students of public administration, political scientists, bureaucrats and administrative trainers.
Contents
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION/BIDYUT CHAKRABARTY AND MOHIT BHATTACHARYA
I. Theories and Perspectives:
1. The study of administration/Woodrow Wilson.
2. Administrative reform : from original naivety to contemporary complexity/Mohit Bhattacharya.
3. IT and good governance/Jagdish C. Kapur.
4. Government innovation around the world/Elaine C. Kamarck.
II. Administrative reforms in the developed world:
5. Creating crises and avoiding blame: the politics of public service reform and the new public management in Britain and the United States/Daniel Cohn.
III. Administrative reforms in the socialist world:
6. Challenges and opportunities: reform of China's Public Administration in the new era/Wu Wen Wu.
7. Public administration reform in Vietnam: Problems and prospects/Martin Painter.
IV. Administrative reforms in India:
8. Jawaharlal Nehru and administrative reconstruction: a mere imitation of the past or a creative response?/Bidyut Chakrabarty.
9. Administrative reform in India: policy prescriptions and outcomes/Kuldeep Mathur.
10. Public management reforms/Dolly Arora.
11. Civil service reform in independent India: an overview/Gireesh Pradhan.
12. Action plan for an effective and responsive government.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX