New Perspectives on Public Services: Place and Technology - Tapa blanda

I have lost count of the number of books and articles about public management that begin with a shopping list of (usually exaggerated) socio-economic, technological, and other changes that are supposedly driving change. Yet there is usually then a complete void, a chasm, between these lists and the analysis of public policy and organizational change that follows. Christopher Pollitt continues, in this book, a journey to fill the gap to analyse precisely how social and technological changes shape, and are shaped by, government actions. Through analysis of concrete cases, and focussing here on the relationship between place and technology, Pollitt teases out the actual links in the chains of recursive causality that literally shape government-context interactions. Highly recommended to those who prefer to see the goods and not just the shopping list! (Professor Colin R. Talbot, Professor of Public Policy and Management, Manchester Business School)

Pollitt demonstrates brilliantly that once one brings space back in, our understanding of government alters in significant ways. In highlighting government's role as a "placemaker" and the technologies available to it New Perspectives on Public Services shows the close relationship between a range of phenomena and processes usually considered in isolation. With this book and his earlier volume Time, Policy, Management Pollitt pioneers a truly multidimensional approach to the study of government and public management. (Ed Page, Sidney and Beatrice Webb Professor of Public Policy at the London School of Economics)

Unusual approaches and novel analyses are by definition scarce in the social sciences. Christopher Pollitt's new book is a gladly-seen exception (Professor Michiel de Vries, Radboud University Nijmegen)

Despite their immense importance for many aspects of public service management, the specific features of places have been largely ignored in recent public management literature. Technologies have received much more attention, but mainly within the specific field of e-government. In this book Christopher Pollitt puts together a powerful and engagingly-written case for paying much more attention both to place and to technological change, and the interactions between them.

The book synthesizes theories and concepts from a range of disciplines and focuses them on the many ways in which public services shape places, and places shape public services. Using extensive and varied original empirical material, it examines the role that new technologies have played in these interactions. This theme is traced through internationally comparative studies of central government agencies, hospitals, population registration, and the police. It raises questions about the longer term effects of the increasingly 'virtual' relations between the citizen and government and opens up a new perspective on the organization of our most basic and vital public services.