The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost. Often overlooked in this narrative is how far actually existing neoliberalism strayed from the original designs of public choice theorists and neoliberal ideologues. By examining the history of the Thatcher government's public sector reforms, we demonstrate how neoliberal plans for marketisation ran aground, forcing neoliberal governments to turn to an approach of Managed Competition that owed more to practices of postwar planning born in Cold War US than neoliberal theory. Rather than impose a market-like transformation of the public sector, Managed Competition systematically empowered top managers and turned governance into a managerial process; two developments that ran directly against core precepts of neoliberalism. The history of these early failures and adjustments provides vital insights into the politics of managerial governance in the neoliberal era.

This article illustrates how the term “social innovation” is used in the public policy domain in Hong Kong in relation to the new public management (NPM) reform of the social service sector, which originated in the early 2000s. Through document reviews and interviews, the role that social innovation policy has played in instigating changes in the contemporary social service field in the post-NPM era is identified. This includes facilitating emergence of “new” forms of social entrepreneurial activities to fill unmet social needs, empowering new actors in entering the social service sector, and reinforcing the government’s position in the NPM reform. Adopting historical institutionalism as the analytical framework, multiple path-dependent characteristics arising from the historical legacies of the incumbent social service environment – such as the longstanding partnership between the state and non-profits – are highlighted. These historical factors have weakened the efficacy of the policy efforts aimed at enacting institutional change. Overall, this article demonstrates how historical context matters in the emergence and framing of social innovation policy. It contributes to the theorisation of the role of social innovation in social service sector development in East Asia.

Employees of the public employment services (PES) are street-level bureaucrats who shape activation policy on the ground. This paper examines how PES staff use enhanced discretion in an innovation project carried out by the German Federal Employment Agency. Applying a bottom-up perspective, we reconstruct PES employees’ logic of action and the dilemmas they face in improving counselling and placement services. According to our findings, placement staff use enhanced discretion to promote more individualised support and an adequate matching of jobseekers and employers. The use of discretion is framed by organisational norms and reward mechanisms and by the current labour market situation. Our analyses are based on qualitative interviews and group discussions with placement staff.

This article asks why the Russian government has developed new avenues for public participation in policymaking and delivery and assesses the extent to which these avenues introduce pluralism into these processes. Drawing on 50 interviews with individuals and citizens’ groups involved in either public consultative bodies or socially oriented NGOs, the article demonstrates the government’s desire to harness the knowledge and abilities of citizens and civic groups in place of state departments perceived to be bureaucratic and inefficient, while controlling and curtailing their participation. Arguing that these countervailing tendencies can be conceptualized as limited pluralism, a category elaborated by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, we show that citizens and civic groups are able to influence policy outcomes to varying extents using these mechanisms.

This paper explores how new regulatory technologies and front-line decision-makers reshape one another. Drawing on a recent qualitative study of caseworker decision-making in the Ontario Works program, it demonstrates the dialectical relationship between new case management software and caseworkers. While new technologies may attempt to deskill and decentre front-line decision-makers, transforming them into data entry clerks, caseworkers learn how to expertly translate and input client data to produce decisions that more closely match their interpretation of clients’ needs and welfare laws. The ways in which workers “manipulate the system” to produce a particular decision, though common knowledge among their colleagues, are black boxed to program managers, auditors, and benefits recipients.

This review explores contributions by science policy studies and the sociology of science to our understanding of the impact of governance on research content. Contributions are subsumed under two perspectives, namely an “impact of”—perspective that searches for effects of specific governance arrangements and an “impact on”—perspective that asks what factors contribute to the construction of research content and includes governance among them. Our review shows that little is known so far about the impact of governance on knowledge content. A research agenda does not necessarily need to include additional empirical phenomena but must address the macro-micro-macro link inherent to the question in its full complexity, and systematically exploit comparative approaches in order to establish causality. This requires interdisciplinary collaboration between science policy studies, the sociology of science, and bibliometrics, which all can contribute to the necessary analytical toolbox.

Robyn is a UK-qualified social worker who has a deeply held passion for, and some 30 years of experience working with disenfranchised and/or vulnerable people and children and young people in care. She has a strong interest in social pedagogy and residential childcare both operationally and strategically. Since 1995, she has been in a variety of management positions and has developed and delivered training, conferences, workshops and consultancy on children's social work and social care for the statutory, voluntary and independent sectors. Her work has aimed at improving both the experiences and outcomes for children and young people in or on the edge of care and raising the profile of those affected by, and working within, the social work and social care sectors.

Although governments worldwide are increasingly choosing to deliver services through organisations with greater autonomy than traditional bureaus, the implicit assumption that such agencification contributes to long-run efficiency remains largely untested. Agencification gives agency managers more autonomy and access to incentive mechanisms that lead to greater efficiency if they are not offset by inefficiencies resulting from managerial discretion. We test the hypothesis that agencification improves efficiency by examining the longer-run performance of 13 agencies in the province of Québec, Canada over approximately 10 years. We find that these agencies experienced long-term productivity gains, but that these gains reached a plateau over the time period studied. In addition, we describe changes in several measures of performance. A survey of the managers of these agencies indicates that they perceive agencification as having a substantive impact, but worry about the sustainability of autonomy and their capacity to show continued gains in measured performance over time.

In order to shorten queues to healthcare, the Swedish government has introduced a yearly “queue billion” that is paid out to the county councils in proportion to how successful they are in reducing queues. However, only the queues for first visits are covered. Evidence has accumulated that queues for return visits have become longer. This affects the chronically and severely ill. Swedish physicians, and the Swedish Medical Association, have strongly criticized the queue billion and have claimed that it conflicts with medical ethics. Instead they demand that their professional judgments on priority setting and medical urgency be respected. This discussion provides an interesting illustration of some of the limitations of new public management and also more generally of the complicated relationships between medical ethics and public policy.

Blame avoidance has often been claimed to be an important rationale behind changes in the organisation of the public sector, but very few studies have examined whether and how public attribution of responsibility is actually affected by such reforms. For instance, how do changes in the formal allocation of authority affect public attribution of blame when things go wrong? Is the effect immediate or delayed? To advance our understanding of such questions, this paper presents an analysis of blame and credit attribution in more than 1,200 newspaper articles about health-care-related issues in Norway before and after the major Norwegian hospital reform from 2002. The central empirical finding of the article is that central state-level authorities in Norway were attributed less blame in media coverage of health-care problems after the reform than before the reform. The shift is delayed, but substantial and robust to various modifications in model estimations.