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During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Swedish civil service underwent some extensive changes, such as the relocations of public sector jobs, initiated by the government in 2005. This thesis follows an ethnological tradition of focusing on employees’ perspectives as a way of exploring power relations and changes in society. In this study, I draw attention to the fears, joys, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of employees in the Swedish civil service at a time when their workplace was being relocated from one city to another. The study especially focuses on the fact that a decision to relocate initiates processes that change employee’s images of their work life and future. They become forced to rethink life and work and re-identify with professional positions. Such processes are described in this thesis as processes of professional identification. The aim of the study is to analyze professional identification among employees during the relocation of a government agency. It is based on four articles that highlight different aspects of the relocation and the conditions under which research was conducted. The overarching question that runs through the thesis is: what did processes of professional identification mean in relocation practice? I argue that such processes should be taken into account as pivotal to civil service practices such as relocation work. Such knowledge could also be used as a tool for thinking about work life change in a wider sense. Because relocations entail moving people’s entire lives, points of interest are formulated that tell stories of how social norms and rules are formed, maintained, and contested. The results in this thesis could also serve as a departure for discussing the localization of knowledge-intensive institutions. The case study builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2009 at a government agency that moved from the capital of Sweden to a smaller town in the north of Sweden. The ethnographic source material was analyzed using discourse analysis. The analysis centres on a discussion of how processes of professional identification became conditioned by social structures in terms of gender, age, and social class in relocation work. I furthermore discuss the ways in which images of geographies and emotions could be regarded as social categories that conditioned professional identities and had implications for how the move of the agency was organized and conducted, for example for the transferring of competency, travelling on business, and setting up new work practices.  The establishment of professional identity positions functioned to stabilize the social environment during the move - a time when many things at work seemed to be in turmoil. At the same time the positions worked to privilege some ways of professional identification and exclude others. Attention should be drawn to the ways in which agency staff became enmeshed in power structures, norms, ideals, images, and plans for the future that limited their actions in various ways. It is therefore important that the features of professional identification in this relocation process should be further discussed, not primarily as individual concerns of particular individuals, or even a particular agency or location, but as a vital issue of the greatest concern to the welfare state. / Decentralization of government agencies, work force mobility and rural development

Literature on entrepreneurship has been criticised on several grounds including a strong bias to examine masculine traits, being deeply rooted in the private sector, limited to economics, conceptualised as a specialist skill pertinent only to non-public entities, overly positivist, single causal and with a tendency to downplay the relevance of both the social and human sciences. The relatively few studies of female entrepreneurs in the public sector have been criticised on the grounds of privileging structure over agency and for ignoring new research perspectives. The literature calls for the generation of alternative viewpoints on entrepreneurship and specifically towards those that pay greater attention to the level of the individual within an institutional setting and that embraces like interaction with multiple sociological variables. To generate research outside these biases, a dynamic relational model consisting of four interactive variables (structure, agency, networks and context) was developed and then used to guide a case study on women entrepreneurs within a male dominated institution - the United Kingdom’s (UK) Armed Forces. A critical realist research methodology was used. Interviews were conducted with a stratified sample of 52 female, uniformed officers drawn from all three services (Navy, Army, Airforce). The findings revealed how women use structure, agency, networks and context to create the necessary leverage to bring about entrepreneurial institutional change based on individual goal realisation strategies. The originality of this research is threefold. Firstly, it examines female entrepreneurs in a male dominated public sector institution. Secondly, it uses a critical realist research methodology. Finally, the research develops a dynamic relational model that has wider utility. The overall net result of this research approach is to provide a richer understanding of the complex, multi-causal nature of public sector entrepreneurship that has the potential for far broader application.

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Thesis (M.M. (Public and Development Management))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Public and Development Management, 2015. / The South African government is having a problem when it comes to innovative leaders due to many contributing factors that constrain the managers within the public sector. The concept of the service delivery requires leaders that are innovative that will take the public sector to the next level. It is, therefore, essential that public employees, in particular managers, be innovative in order to manage public sector duties effectively. The leader is fundamental in planning, leading and controlling resources to ensure effective service delivery. Public Administration does not operate in isolation, but is exposed to environmental factors such as political, economy, social, technological, environmental and legal. These factors require that public officials, the leadership in particular, display a higher ability to analyse and scrutinise these factors because leadership has an influence on internal departmental operations. The intentions of the South African government by 2030 as stated on the National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP shows intentions that require leaders who will lead in a creative and innovative way as the issues that have to be tackled by 2030 are issues that are in a way concerned with service delivery. The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DOJ&CD) is one of the departments in South Africa that striving to be best performers in the public sector. However, there is a gap that needs to be identified into why it is not amongst the top performers within the public sector. The methodology used in this study takes the form of in depth interviews with questionnaire designed to identify and measure the leadership and innovation at the DOJ&CD. The study analyzed leadership and innovation, particularly the management leadership, by scrutinizing managers at the higher courts and regional office in Gauteng. Interviews with managers were used to determine the leadership and innovation of managers to lead the higher courts in Gauteng. The study showed that there is a need for the leaders within the public service to be innovative in their areas of responsibilities.

Organisations are constantly striving to maximise shareholder wealth by improving effectiveness and efficiency of operations. There has been an emerging trend since the early 1980‟s to outsource functions which were considered non-core. These trends have now moved into the internal audit sphere, a function which was previously maintained in-house. With the outsourcing of Internal Audit Functions issues such as independence and the value adding approach of internal audit are brought into question. This paper explores similarities and differences between public sector internal auditing and its counterpart in the private sector in South Africa. Using survey data collected from a purposive mix of 72 organisations in the South African private and public sector, the degree of internal audit outsourcing, the rationales behind their outsourcing decisions, the types of internal audit services providers, the perceived status of in-house and the perception of Independence of outsourced Internal Audit Functions were investigated. Results from statistical analysis suggest that there was no significant difference in the consideration of outsourcing of Internal Audit Function by sector. The private sector was significantly more likely to consider internal audit a core activity when compared to the public sector while the public sector were more uncertain. No significant differences were observed between sectors with regards to interaction with external auditors in terms of coordination of areas of audit coverage and work schedule. Private companies were significantly more likely to have longer hours provided by interval service providers relative to outside providers when compared to the public sector. The biggest difference appears to be that private companies chose a big 4 accounting firm more often than in the government sector. Conversely the government sector had a higher frequency of choosing smaller accounting firms and specialised internal audit providers when compared to the private sector. The value of this research study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by means of bridging the gap between the theory and practice from a developing economy xvi and emerging market perspective, by highlighting the different perspectives of Internal Audit practice. Challenges that face this developing economy that are of particular interest when considering the sourcing arrangements of the Internal Audit Function, are events (political, social and economical) that have occurred in South Africa during the past 15 years. The public sector element is unique to other studies that were undertaken in South Africa.

The thesis explores narratives constructed by participants about an organization’s identities. I examine how identity-relevant statements were deployed as exercises in power, serving to legitimize and promote their authors. Framed within an interpretive paradigm, the research adopts reflexive approaches to consider participants’ understandings. I draw on organizational identity theory and empirical studies to explore the multiplicity and conflicting nature of identity in organizations. Literatures on organizational narratives, storytelling and power are also considered. The ethnography is set in a public sector organization in which I worked: the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA). Its role was to deliver the Government’s reforms to private pension provision in the UK; the reforms came into force in October 2012. The narrative data constructing the research were collected through semi-structured interviews with 60 members of the organization, transcripts of organizational events and a diary I recorded for a year. These data are augmented by a series of vignettes that weave in accounts of my experiences while working for and researching PADA. The analysis of narrative data is constructed in three chapters, each of which explores identity-relevant narratives from different perspectives. The first analysis chapter examines narrative data through five concepts: reflexivity, voice, plurivocity, temporality and fictionality. The second analyses identity narratives in two organizational events and the third explores my understandings of the organization’s identities from an autoethnographic perspective. The discussion chapter provides three readings that interpret the data through different lenses: narrative and storytelling, organizational identity and autoethnographic erspectives. I then make concluding remarks, including ideas for future research and the contribution of my research to the study of organizational identity. The primary contribution of the ethnography is to scholarship at the intersection of identity and power in organizations and specifically how identity-relevant narratives are deployed as exercises in power by participants. There are also contributions to narrative research methods, including the value of researching identity ethnographically. Additionally, I suggest practical contributions to literature on understanding issues of culture and sense-making in public bodies and how employees from different sector backgrounds (public and private) interact within a public sector context to deliver government reforms.

Over the past 20 years, governments in many countries around the world have sought to implement governance mechanisms to measure and assess the performance of public service organisations. As a consequence, public service organisations, especially those considered as poorly-performing organisations, have been subjected to unprecedented pressure to improve their performance and sustain performance improvement as a continuous process. However, efforts of public managers to improve the performance of their organisations have been undertaken without “comprehensive theories and rigorous evidence on this issue” (Boyne, 2006: 366). This thesis takes up the challenge of providing robust evidence on the factors associated with the performance improvement of public organisations. We propose that the notion of organisational capabilities offers a promising way to meet this challenge. From this standpoint, this research sought to identify the organisational capabilities whose development and use explain a public service organisation’s ability to improve its performance and sustain good performance in the long run. The empirical analysis was conducted in a population of hospital trusts in England. We firstly applied longitudinal and comparative case studies method into two acute hospitals trusts: one case of a successful performance improvement and one case of less-successful performance improvement. The purpose was to examine how the development (or lack of) a set of capabilities over time accounted for the differences in the performance outcome and trajectory of the two cases. Our findings identified the following capabilities as advantageous for achieving a sustained performance: collective leadership; action-oriented culture; effective clinical-managerial relationship; supportive external context; performance / finance control capability; coordination capability of the key delivery process; sensing capability and learning capability. We then employed quantitative method over the population of acute hospital trusts in England to explore the relationship between complementarities of capabilities and performance. The results demonstrated that only when in combination does the presence of the capabilities yield positive and significant association with performance. In other words, the presence of the whole system of the capabilities increases the trusts’ performance, while partial presence of a set of capabilities is either not significantly associated with, or even detrimental to, the trusts’ performance.

As the public sector continues to face competitive challenges from the general public, the need for better service delivery and increased productivity has become extremely important. The increased need for optimum service delivery in public sector institutions like the Ministry for Home Affairs has had significant impact on its operations. However, little is known about the challenges faced by the Ministry for Home Affairs regarding the causes of the inefficiency. A range of organizational factors can affect the nature, effectiveness, excellence and novelty of service provision to members of the public.