The aim of this text is to critically analyse which discursive power dynamics have been o fimportance in the evolution of the modern preschool. What are the underlying motives that led to the systematisation that has become so prevalent in our profession, and what changes has this led to in the preschool organization over time? From the 1990’s there has been a shift in the discourse concerning general welfare in Sweden, of which preschools are a part. With the introduction of New Public Management concepts such as quality, systematisation and competitiveness have become a part of the vocabulary in preschools. The introduction of these concepts has been instrumental in the creation of growt hand higher quality through a market-based approach and through systematic quality assurance. I wish to show through this text that this has largely been counterproductive. This shift in the discourse has not only created a new conceptual starting point but it also led to a differentiation in the roles associated with preschools as a workplace where the preschool teachers are given more and more responsibilities while the childcare workers are being made more invisible both in legislature and the curriculum. There has been an elevation in status for preschool teachers, however at the expense of both the organization and the childcare workerprofession. With the introduction of market orientation in Swedish education we are today expected to act according to a competitive approach where we are vying with others to attract custodians to our preschool. This has in turn led to a general view of custodians as customers. However, with the usage of the word customer there is an expectation of adaptability in orderto maintain our competitiveness in relation to the wishes of the customer. In this text I thereby discuss if this is an applicable terminology in the context of preschools and whether we are able to maintain the purpose of our profession when confronted with custodians as customers. This essay also discusses the importance of resisting and reclaiming the discourse occurring in preschools. We are constantly being influenced in our approach of ourselves through the societal view of our profession and I wish to show how we through trust, a sense of community and peer learning could create a scientific foundation for our continued work. We should create our own legitimacy and professional identity. It is through this communal identity and approach that we can resist and reclaim the preschool discourse.

Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / Local authorities, if well managed, are a key public sector institution indispensable for effective and efficient service delivery which in turn is critical towards meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at local level. In public sector administration since the 1990s, the Bretton Woods Institutions and allies encourage developing countries to adopt New Public Management (NPM) to improve public sector performance, including more effective service delivery. This thesis interrogates the adequacy of New Public Management (NPM) in service delivery using the Mutare City Council in Zimbabwe as a case analysis. The thesis answers the fundamental question of why internationally recommended NPM falls short in promoting good governance and effective service delivery in Zimbabwe in general, and the city of Mutare in specific. At the heart of this thesis is the crisis of service delivery in Mutare, and the practical failure of NPM as an antidote, against the background of a complex socio-political context and economic depression. This thesis is informed by the theory of governance, as augmented – and also contradicted – by NPM as implemented by Mutare City Council. To gather empirical data, this research employed the qualitative research methodology. A qualitative methodology entailed in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The researcher interviewed the mayor and ten councilors from Mutare City Council, two community opinion leaders, two public administration scholars, and leaders of three residents’ associations and two other civil society groups. The researcher also used participant observation by attending one full council meeting and a council budget consultation meeting organised by Mutare City Council. In essence, it emerged consistently in this research that Mutare City Council is marred by institutional, administrative and operational challenges which impede implementation of NPM. Implementation failures include corruption and meagre political will. There were also problems, however, in applying NPM in the Zimbabwe context, which especially in Mutare led to policy inconsistencies. There was a lack of sufficient monetary and human resources due to the economic crisis plaguing the country, and the council’s institutional capacity shortfalls. There was also an intrinsic disharmony between NPM and local socio-political processes, including the political contestation between the opposition-led local council and the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (Zanu PF)-led central government. The result was a fractional, patchy, piecemeal roll-out of NPM. The net effect of NPM’s failure, exacerbated by a dire socio-political and economic crisis has been a municipal service-delivery crisis characterised by irregular refuse collection, poor housing, poor sewer reticulation, erratic health provision, poor roads, acute shortage of street lighting and local traffic lights, acute shortage of burial spaces, acute shortage of recreational spaces, and an informal traders’ crisis. This thesis concludes that implementation of NPM would have to result from much stronger political will, in order to achieve more effective service delivery in Zimbabwe at large and Mutare specifically. There is a need to stimulate political will towards improved implementation of NPM, in its holistic sense, and not as a piecemeal process. This should be accompanied by dislodging the petty version of party politics that have debilitated the running of Mutare City Council. There should be platforms for meaningful citizen engagement and participation in local governance processes. In addition, NPM should be buttressed with a comprehensive policy and legislative framework that adds to its authenticity and legitimacy. There should be adequate financing. All these could reinforce Mutare City Council’s holistic implementation of NPM reforms. Such measures will nurture and inculcate a culture of transparency, accountability, rule of law, and efficiency in service delivery as well as public administration and urban governance at large.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-108).

Performance policies propose to enhance the quality of services provided to vulnerable citizens. However, the ability to accomplish this goal is largely unsubstantiated. In the field of education, the No Child Left Behind Act outlined performance policy guidelines that held educators accountable for disadvantaged students outcomes and provided students with the option to seek the serves of alternative providers through a student transfer provision. This dissertation assesses the quality of states’ NCLB provisions that targeted minority and vulnerable student performance as well as utilization of the NCLB transfer provision allowing students to exit underperforming schools. It indicates that teachers’ union strength, minority student population, and past performance impacted the development of vulnerable student accountability provisions. The use of the transfer provision was limited by the strength of the accountability system implemented. As a result, the transfer provision is being poorly utilized and the states have negatively affected the educational opportunities of marginalized populations.

This examine illustrates the section heads' and caregiving staffs' perceptions of the influence of New Public Management (NPM) in public retirement homes in Malmö. A central theme is to investigate if the main features of New Public Management are noticeable and if that's the case, are the consequences an advantage or disadvantage? The main features of New Public Management in this examine are: decentralization, competition, internal market, cost- conscious, management by objectives with a focus on results and costumer focus.To reach answers to the questions above, a quantitative and a qualitative approach has been chosen. The study is based on 41 questionnaires with enrolled nurses/nurse's assistants and four semi-structured interviews with section heads of retirement homes. Four different retirement homes have been participated in this study. To understand the material, two different theories have been chosen; the new- institutional theory and the organization- political theory. These theories are clearly influenced by each other in that term that they are illustrating different perspectives of the phenomena Management bureaucracy. Further, this phenomenon can also be related to New Public Management.The material shows the section heads' of the retirement homes and the caregiving staffs' experience if the main features of New Public Management are implemented in the organization and secondly, which advantages and disadvantages those have occurred. The professionals have different opinions regarding if NPM are noticeable and if the consequences are an advantage or disadvantage. The reached conclusion in this examine is however that New Public Management is visible in the retirement homes of the public sector in Malmö and this is mainly seen as an advantage.

Tourism is a fragmented industry with multiple stakeholders and often occurs in an area with unique characteristics. Therefore, in order to ensure that management and development strategies are suitable and sustainable for the area and its stakeholders, collaboration and involvement have been identified as essential aspects. In order to increase and maintain collaboration and involvement, it is vital first to understand the stakeholders’ situation. Then it is important to understand challenges and opportunities for developing collaboration and involvement so that coherent strategies can be implemented amongst the stakeholders and lead to increased effort towards sustainability. This study used written and semi-structured interviews to examine the tourism business situation in Vadstena, Sweden. The principles and philosophy of Trust-Based Public Management were used to provide an overview of the collected dataset and link it to the amount of trust currently present within the tourism businesses in Vadstena. The result showed that not all of the participating tourism businesses are collaborating with each other or the municipality, which is the primary developer and manager of Vadstena. The result of this study showed that not all tourism businesses collaborate nor trust Vadstena municipality. Therefore, the study concluded that there is a need to involve tourism businesses more in the development and management strategies. The study also concluded that there is a need to implement common goals, especially for sustainable development in Vadstena, Sweden.

Ideas matter. Thus, approaching peacebuilding efforts from an ideational perspective can contribute to a deeper understanding of their meanings and legacies. Traditionally, the liberal peace paradigm has been prevalent in peacebuilding, translating into programs, projects, actions, and agreements that model liberal norms, values, and practices. Among these sets of ideas, it is possible to identify beliefs about New Public Management (NPM), which affect how instruments like peace agreements are designed and codified. However, this relationship has not been thoroughly explored in the peacebuilding and public management literature, although both strive to achieve efficient and effective governance and peace. In response to this gap, this thesis examines, through text analysis, the degree to which the normative and bureaucratic legacies of NPM are present in the design of a comprehensive peace agreement. This required the selection of an empirical case that could deepen the understanding of what kind of public management NPM ideas are embedded and to what extent, hence the selection of the Colombian Peace Agreement, an example of the golden standard in comprehensive arrangements. The study systematically reviewed and codified the text of the agreement –578 provisions or stipulations– based on the presence and specificity of NPM-related doc-trines. The findings show the pervasiveness of bureaucratic legacies associated with strategic planning, performance audit of provisions, decentralisation, and the appointment of managers and high-level bodies to administer the implementation. However, ideas associated with financial control, competition and flexibilization of the public sector, were less relevant. The analysis also identified other ideas, which expand on the civilian input in the main bureaucratic doctrines. Thus, it provides a new insight to understanding peace in bureaucratic terms as the strategic expansion of institutional infrastructure with strong oversight mechanisms within peace agreements. This calls for a more careful review of the bureaucratic legacies and understandings present in peacebuilding efforts and how they could relate to other sets of ideas already reviewed in the literature, which could lead to further research shaping our understanding of peace through time and across contexts.

No description available.

Denna studie syftar till att utforska fenomenet tillitsbaserad styrning inom den offentliga sektorn. Detta med avseende på vilka konkreta styrmodeller som utgör den tillitsbaserade styrningens styrverktyg, samt huruvida detta fenomen inkluderar några andra relevanta aspekter relaterade till styrning. Avsikterna bakom den tillitsbaserade styrningen handlar mycket om att åtgärda sådana negativa bieffekter som den New Public Management-inspirerade styrningen, med sin betoning på mål- och resultatstyrning, ansetts medföra. Dessa bieffekter handlar till stor del om att ökade krav på rapportering och kontroll medfört en administrativ börda, som inneburit att den offentliga sektorns medarbetare tvingats lägga mycket av sin tid på administrativa sysslor. Med hjälp av den tillitsbaserade styrningen, och dess betoning på tillit, ömsesidighet och medborgarfokus, har regeringen därför haft för avsikt att reformera styrningen av den offentliga sektorn. Samtidigt som den tillitsbaserade styrningens avsikter är goda, kan det anses finnas en osäkerhet kring vilka styrmodeller som egentligen utgör dess styrverktyg. I uppsatsen genomförs därför en kvalitativ dokumentstudie av idé- och idealtypsanalytiskt slag, i vilken relevanta dokument från regeringens Tillitsdelegation analyseras. Detta med stöd av styrningsteori som utgår från New Public Management och fyra idealtypiska styrdoktriner, som anses relevanta för den svenska kontexten. Studiens resultat visar att mål- och resultatstyrningen har en central roll som styrmodell även inom den tillitsbaserade styrningen, men i en modifierad form där målen är mer övergripande, långsiktiga och kvalitativa. Den tillitsbaserade styrningen innebär också en ökad betoning på nätverksstyrning och brukarstyrning, samt en strävan efter balans mellan värdena tillit och kontroll. / The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of trust-based governance in the public sector. This regarding which governance models constitute the governance tools of trust-based governance, and whether this phenomenon includes any other relevant aspects related to governance. The intentions behind trust-based governance are largely about addressing negative side effects of the kind of governance that has been inspired by New Public Management, with its emphasis on management by objective. These side effects are largely due to the fact that increased requirements for reporting and documentation entailed an administrative burden, which has meant that public sector employees have been forced to spend a lot of time on administrative tasks. With the help of trust-based governance, and its emphasis on trust, reciprocity and civic focus, the Government has therefore intended to reform the governance of the public sector. Although trust-based governance has good intentions, it can be considered that there is uncertainty about which governance models actually constitute its governance tools. In the essay, a qualitative document study of an idea and ideal type analytical kind is therefore carried out, in which relevant documents from the Government´s Delegation of Trust-Based Governance are analyzed. This is supported by governance theory based on New Public Management and four ideal typical governance doctrines, which are considered relevant to the Swedish context. The results of the study show that that management by objective has a central role as a governance model also in trust-based governance, but in a modified form where the goals are more overall, long-term and qualitative. Trust-based governance also means an increased emphasis on network governance and user governance, as well as an effort to balance the values of trust and control.

ln 1998, the Florida state legislature mandated the privatization of child welfare services. The decision to contract child welfare services to non-profit organizations was done as an effort to attain lower costs, effectiveness, and quality in service delivery. The 1998 initiative came to be known as "Community-Based Care" and was based on the idea that local communities would have incentives to be more accountable for children than the state. The federal government requires that safety be the paramount goal for all children in the child welfare system. The purpose of this study was to assess if Community-Based Care was indeed effective in this principal objective with the use of the researcher's own developed definition of "safety" and three safety performance measures relative to her definition taken from the Florida Department of Children and Families online performance dashboard application. This research focused on the Community-Based Care initiative in district 7 (Orange, Osceola, Seminole, and Brevard counties) and drew attention to the question, are district 7 's children safer now since the privatization of child welfare services? From a public management perspective, this study showed that privatized child welfare services are both capable and incapable of keeping children safe due to various factors. The findings from this study are important as they can give national, regional, and local public managers a significant and unique view on privatized child welfare services along with associated benefits and shortcomings in ensuring children's safety.