PUBLIC MANAGEMENT 2026
Lecture 1: Introduction
This first lecture sets the stage for the whole course. It does two things: it explains how the course works practically, and it introduces the empirical scope of
public management (the what, who and so what). The big idea you should walk away with is that "public" is not a black-and-white label, and that public
management can be studied at different levels.
1. Practical organization of 2. Empirical scope: what, who, so what?
the course Now that the practicalities are clear, we move to the substance. Public management is
Before diving into content, a few things fundamentally about managing public organizations that aim to create public value. To
to keep in mind about how the course is understand this, we first need to define what "public" actually means.
built.
• Main skeleton: the book MPOW 2.1 What is a "public" organization?
(George, 2021). You don't need There are two competing ways to answer this question: the core approach and the
to buy it. dimensional approach
• Add-ons: academic articles on
UFORA + guest lectures. 1) The core approach: public vs private as a dichotomy
• Articles: you must know the The core approach uses legal ownership as the dividing line: an organization is either
content, but not the research government-owned (public) or privately owned (private).
designs (this is not a methodology
course).
• Exam: written, closed book, 100%
of the grade. Everything
covered in class, readings or
guest lectures is fair game.
Illustration: WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) WADA shows why the core approach is too simple. It looks
public (serves a public goal, non-profit, partly publicly funded, talks directly with governments like the White
House), but also private (board members got kicked out, makes independent decisions). Conclusion: WADA
is more public than private, but not 100% either.
Illustration: Universities Same story. Universities have both private income (student fees) and public income
The two approaches are not rivals
(subsidies), and are governed by partly politically appointed boards. They sit somewhere in between.
but complementary.
- Use the core approach for a broad- 2) The dimensional approach: publicness as a scale
brush view ("does it matter that the Because the dichotomy doesn't fit reality, the dimensional approach treats "publicness"
org is public?") as a continuum.
- Use the dimensional approach for the —> An organization is more or less public depending on how much external political
fine-grained view ("which dimensions authority influences it.
of publicness then matter?"). Key idea: you can compare org’s on different dimensions of
publicness, like:
2.2 Who are public managers? • Resources (where does the funding come from?)
Once we know what a public organization is, the • Goals/agenda (who sets the mission?)
next question is: who actually manages them? • Communication (with whom does the org interact?)
But watch out: measurement is harder here, you risk comparing apples w
Public management is a broad concept. oranges.
Examples: Mark Rutte (head of NATO), Petra
De Sutter (rector UGent), Sofie Dutordoir (head No single mold (Hammerschmid et al., 2016) A study of 6,701 top EU public
of NMBS), Sergio Buitens (police chief). managers shows huge diversity in background:
Three levels of public managers (think of a
pyramid):
1. Top: e.g. CEOs, rectors
2. Middle: e.g. dean of a faculty
3. Line: e.g. departmental chai
!! Important distinction: public managers are not On top of that: 21% spent at least 5 years in the private sector, 18% in non-
street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). profit. Public management is a multi-disciplinary field.
=> SLBs deliver services and are in direct
contact with end users (e.g. teachers, 2.3 So what? Why study public management?
nurses, police on the street). Studying it gives you insight into how the public sector can perform better and
<-> Managers manage. This course focuses on deliver better services. The public sector is also economically very large, so
managers. improving it has a big impact.
3. A multi-level approach to public management
The course is structured around three levels of analysis. This is the
roadmap of the semester & the course will also follow this order:
,4. Article: Bozeman & Bretschneider (1994) 4.3 The dimensional approach revisited
This article is the academic backbone of the lecture and directly The dimensional approach rejects the binary. Publicness is a
tests the core vs dimensional debate. Bozeman is a key author: continuum, driven by the degree of external political authority.
remember the name, you'll need it if you ever write a paper. It applies to all org types: government, business, non-profit,
hybrids.
4.1 Goal of the study
To check whether the dimensional understanding of publicness Key implications:
adds explanatory power on top of the core (ownership-based) • Few orgs are 100% public or private
understanding. • A private org can be "more public" than a government org
Case studied: R&D labs, looking at: on certain dimensions
• Patents and licenses (= private-style output) • The model handles sector blurring well
• Scientific publications (= public-style output)
Trade-off: it loses the simplicity of the core model, and creates
4.2 The core approach revisited measurement headaches (construct validity, instability of
The core approach says public/private differences are essentially criteria).
captured by legal ownership.
=> Underlying values include public interest (Benn & Gaus), 4.4 Conclusion of the article
political accountability (Appleby), and legitimacy (Dewey, The two approaches are not rivals but complementary:
Friedrich). • Core (legal status) has independent effects that don't
=> Empirical support exists for differences between public and disappear even when you control for dimensional
private orgs in: variables.
• Job satisfaction & commitment • Dimensional insights add a deeper layer that the core
• Motivation model misses.
• Perception of rewards
• Organizational structure Together they give a more complete picture of what
• Decision-making patterns "publicness" really does to organizations.
• Performance
Summary of key take-aways from Lecture 1
But the core approach struggles with hybrid orgs (e.g. R&D, 1. Public management = managing organizations that
technology) and is theoretically underdeveloped. Property rights create public value.
theory (De Alessi, Alchian & Demsetz) tries to fill the gap but lacks 2. "Public" can be defined in two ways: core (legal
empirical testing. ownership) and dimensional (degree of political
authority). They are complementary, not competing.
Lecture 2: Public service 3. Public managers come in three levels (top, middle, line)
and are not street-level bureaucrats.
performance 4. Public managers are a diverse group (multi-disciplinary).
5. The course will work through public management at the
1. Recap: where we left off macro, meso and micro levels.
Lecture 1 set up 3 anchor ideas that carry into today.
- Public management = managing public organizations, and "public"
can be read in 2 ways: the core view (legal ownership) or the 2. Today's roadmap
dimensional view (degree of political authority via resources, We unpack public sector performance in 3 moves:
goals, communication). = first, what it actually means (conceptualizing it), then how
- Public managers do this work at different levels, are not street- you measure it (dilemmas + choices), then how
level bureaucrats (SLBs), and come from mixed disciplinary organizations respond when they are measured (including
backgrounds. the dark side).
- The sector matters economically and its performance is the focus => Each step builds toward one main idea: performance looks
of today. objective but is full of judgment calls.
3. What's in a name? Conceptualizing public sector
performance
Before measuring anything, we need to know what "performance"
even covers, because people use the word loosely.
3.1 The core problem: measuring vs performing 3.2 The IOO model (Input : Output : Outcome)
- A nice one-liner from the lecture: "You don't fatten a pig by This is the backbone for thinking about dimensions. Which
weighing it." one "matters most" is context-dependent.
- The risk is that orgs spend so much energy proving performance
through bureaucratic measurement systems that actual service
delivery suffers. So measurement itself is not neutral: it can crowd
out the work.
3.3 Take-away #1: multiple dimensions, multiple levels
Performance is never one number. It lives at different org levels:
inside the org (e.g., efficiency for staff) vs outside (e.g., outcomes
for citizens). Same activity can look great on one dimension and
terrible on another.
Mnemonic (the 3 E's + 1):
- Economy → Efficiency → Effectiveness + Equity.
- Moves from money in → ratio → goals met → fair
distribution.
, 4. How to measure? Subjective vs objective 4.3 From technical to political choices
Once you know what dimension you're after, you still need to pick - What gets measured reflects someone's belief system
how. This is where technical choices bleed into political ones. (scientific, ideological, political).
- The DOGE (Department of Gov Efficiency, US) example
4.1 Why measure at all? makes this concrete:
Two reasons: (1) governments want to know if public money • Claim: cut 75% of federal staff = more efficient gov.
creates value (accountability), (2) they want to redirect funds if it • Reality: staff cuts would only close ~10% of the gap. The
doesn't. other 90% sits in healthcare, military, transport,
education, interest on debt.
4.2 Objective vs subjective: both have a role • Paradox: in the abstract, citizens want "less gov"; when
asked about specific programs, they want them kept.
So efficiency-as-slogan collapses once you unpack what
people actually value.
—> Many roads lead to Rome: the same performance
dimension can be measured in very different ways, and
- Objective is often called the "golden standard" but it's not the choice is rarely neutral.
automatic: counting isn't the same as understanding.
- Subjective data has grown in nonprofit research precisely 4.4 Take-away #2: measurement is hard + political
because some things (user satisfaction, perceived impact) can Many design choices are involved (technical: single vs multi-
only be captured by asking. item, objective vs subjective) and political (which indicators
make it into the report?).
—> Don't trust a performance number without asking who
5. So what? Organizational response strategies picked it and why.
Now we move from the measurers to the measured: how do orgs
and workers behave when they are held to performance metrics? 6. The dark side: organizational cheating
(Bohte & Meier, 2000)
5.1 Standardization or discretionary space? The Self- - Discretion is one thing; deliberate manipulation is another.
Sufficiency Matrix (SSM) case - When performance is hard to measure and stakes are high,
- The SSM is a tool imposed on Flemish social services (N=22 orgs) orgs may game the metrics = goal displacement (focusing
by local gov. Social workers score clients on life domains on the number, not the goal).
(finance, housing, mental health, etc.) at intake and every 3
months. 6.1 Three forms of organizational cheating
- The goal: equality through standardized scoring. Mnemonic: CLS = Cut, Lie, Sample
But standardization doesn't hold up on the ground.
—> Two levels of resistance surface:
1) The social worker finds the tool artificial and of limited
use. 4 reasons:
1. Good-day/bad-day effect: scores drift with mood ("rosy
light")
2. Client's perspective is ignored: a messy house bothers
the scorer, not necessarily the client 6.2 Which orgs cheat most?
3. Not all domains are equally easy to score (finance = • Orgs with scarce resources (catching up to better-funded
concrete, mental health = fuzzy) peers)
4. Too flat to capture real client complexity • Orgs with high task complexity (crime, poverty, education:
2) The organization layers its own problems on top: hard problems, measurable expectations)
1. Specialist focus: not every org works on every SSM • Decentralized human service bureaucracies where SLBs
domain aren't closely supervised
2. High caseloads → shortcuts (copy-paste), ask • Orgs with tangible rewards (money, recognition) tied to
colleagues (= scoring norms vary per org) metrics = incentives to game
Result: the same score means different things in different
places. Discretion wins over standardization. 6.3 What does NOT work to stop cheating?
- Adding more rules. Downs (1967): more control = more
7. Main take-aways evasion = stricter rules = vicious cycle + signals distrust to
Public sector performance is: staff.
1. An umbrella concept: multidimensional (equity, efficiency, —> What works better: professional + organizational norms,
effectiveness) + multi-level (org vs program) multi-indicator evaluation (don't collapse performance
2. Difficult to measure: balancing subjective/objective, single/ into 1 score), realistic task judgment.
multi-item, and which indicators count (= political choice)
3. Prone to response strategies: individual + org discretion, 6.4 Take-away #3: performance mgmt is situated + has a
sometimes sliding into cheating dark side
= Managing public sector performance is never just a
technical exercise. It sits in a specific context with specific
actors, and under enough pressure it produces creativity of
the wrong kind.
Lecture 1: Introduction
This first lecture sets the stage for the whole course. It does two things: it explains how the course works practically, and it introduces the empirical scope of
public management (the what, who and so what). The big idea you should walk away with is that "public" is not a black-and-white label, and that public
management can be studied at different levels.
1. Practical organization of 2. Empirical scope: what, who, so what?
the course Now that the practicalities are clear, we move to the substance. Public management is
Before diving into content, a few things fundamentally about managing public organizations that aim to create public value. To
to keep in mind about how the course is understand this, we first need to define what "public" actually means.
built.
• Main skeleton: the book MPOW 2.1 What is a "public" organization?
(George, 2021). You don't need There are two competing ways to answer this question: the core approach and the
to buy it. dimensional approach
• Add-ons: academic articles on
UFORA + guest lectures. 1) The core approach: public vs private as a dichotomy
• Articles: you must know the The core approach uses legal ownership as the dividing line: an organization is either
content, but not the research government-owned (public) or privately owned (private).
designs (this is not a methodology
course).
• Exam: written, closed book, 100%
of the grade. Everything
covered in class, readings or
guest lectures is fair game.
Illustration: WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) WADA shows why the core approach is too simple. It looks
public (serves a public goal, non-profit, partly publicly funded, talks directly with governments like the White
House), but also private (board members got kicked out, makes independent decisions). Conclusion: WADA
is more public than private, but not 100% either.
Illustration: Universities Same story. Universities have both private income (student fees) and public income
The two approaches are not rivals
(subsidies), and are governed by partly politically appointed boards. They sit somewhere in between.
but complementary.
- Use the core approach for a broad- 2) The dimensional approach: publicness as a scale
brush view ("does it matter that the Because the dichotomy doesn't fit reality, the dimensional approach treats "publicness"
org is public?") as a continuum.
- Use the dimensional approach for the —> An organization is more or less public depending on how much external political
fine-grained view ("which dimensions authority influences it.
of publicness then matter?"). Key idea: you can compare org’s on different dimensions of
publicness, like:
2.2 Who are public managers? • Resources (where does the funding come from?)
Once we know what a public organization is, the • Goals/agenda (who sets the mission?)
next question is: who actually manages them? • Communication (with whom does the org interact?)
But watch out: measurement is harder here, you risk comparing apples w
Public management is a broad concept. oranges.
Examples: Mark Rutte (head of NATO), Petra
De Sutter (rector UGent), Sofie Dutordoir (head No single mold (Hammerschmid et al., 2016) A study of 6,701 top EU public
of NMBS), Sergio Buitens (police chief). managers shows huge diversity in background:
Three levels of public managers (think of a
pyramid):
1. Top: e.g. CEOs, rectors
2. Middle: e.g. dean of a faculty
3. Line: e.g. departmental chai
!! Important distinction: public managers are not On top of that: 21% spent at least 5 years in the private sector, 18% in non-
street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). profit. Public management is a multi-disciplinary field.
=> SLBs deliver services and are in direct
contact with end users (e.g. teachers, 2.3 So what? Why study public management?
nurses, police on the street). Studying it gives you insight into how the public sector can perform better and
<-> Managers manage. This course focuses on deliver better services. The public sector is also economically very large, so
managers. improving it has a big impact.
3. A multi-level approach to public management
The course is structured around three levels of analysis. This is the
roadmap of the semester & the course will also follow this order:
,4. Article: Bozeman & Bretschneider (1994) 4.3 The dimensional approach revisited
This article is the academic backbone of the lecture and directly The dimensional approach rejects the binary. Publicness is a
tests the core vs dimensional debate. Bozeman is a key author: continuum, driven by the degree of external political authority.
remember the name, you'll need it if you ever write a paper. It applies to all org types: government, business, non-profit,
hybrids.
4.1 Goal of the study
To check whether the dimensional understanding of publicness Key implications:
adds explanatory power on top of the core (ownership-based) • Few orgs are 100% public or private
understanding. • A private org can be "more public" than a government org
Case studied: R&D labs, looking at: on certain dimensions
• Patents and licenses (= private-style output) • The model handles sector blurring well
• Scientific publications (= public-style output)
Trade-off: it loses the simplicity of the core model, and creates
4.2 The core approach revisited measurement headaches (construct validity, instability of
The core approach says public/private differences are essentially criteria).
captured by legal ownership.
=> Underlying values include public interest (Benn & Gaus), 4.4 Conclusion of the article
political accountability (Appleby), and legitimacy (Dewey, The two approaches are not rivals but complementary:
Friedrich). • Core (legal status) has independent effects that don't
=> Empirical support exists for differences between public and disappear even when you control for dimensional
private orgs in: variables.
• Job satisfaction & commitment • Dimensional insights add a deeper layer that the core
• Motivation model misses.
• Perception of rewards
• Organizational structure Together they give a more complete picture of what
• Decision-making patterns "publicness" really does to organizations.
• Performance
Summary of key take-aways from Lecture 1
But the core approach struggles with hybrid orgs (e.g. R&D, 1. Public management = managing organizations that
technology) and is theoretically underdeveloped. Property rights create public value.
theory (De Alessi, Alchian & Demsetz) tries to fill the gap but lacks 2. "Public" can be defined in two ways: core (legal
empirical testing. ownership) and dimensional (degree of political
authority). They are complementary, not competing.
Lecture 2: Public service 3. Public managers come in three levels (top, middle, line)
and are not street-level bureaucrats.
performance 4. Public managers are a diverse group (multi-disciplinary).
5. The course will work through public management at the
1. Recap: where we left off macro, meso and micro levels.
Lecture 1 set up 3 anchor ideas that carry into today.
- Public management = managing public organizations, and "public"
can be read in 2 ways: the core view (legal ownership) or the 2. Today's roadmap
dimensional view (degree of political authority via resources, We unpack public sector performance in 3 moves:
goals, communication). = first, what it actually means (conceptualizing it), then how
- Public managers do this work at different levels, are not street- you measure it (dilemmas + choices), then how
level bureaucrats (SLBs), and come from mixed disciplinary organizations respond when they are measured (including
backgrounds. the dark side).
- The sector matters economically and its performance is the focus => Each step builds toward one main idea: performance looks
of today. objective but is full of judgment calls.
3. What's in a name? Conceptualizing public sector
performance
Before measuring anything, we need to know what "performance"
even covers, because people use the word loosely.
3.1 The core problem: measuring vs performing 3.2 The IOO model (Input : Output : Outcome)
- A nice one-liner from the lecture: "You don't fatten a pig by This is the backbone for thinking about dimensions. Which
weighing it." one "matters most" is context-dependent.
- The risk is that orgs spend so much energy proving performance
through bureaucratic measurement systems that actual service
delivery suffers. So measurement itself is not neutral: it can crowd
out the work.
3.3 Take-away #1: multiple dimensions, multiple levels
Performance is never one number. It lives at different org levels:
inside the org (e.g., efficiency for staff) vs outside (e.g., outcomes
for citizens). Same activity can look great on one dimension and
terrible on another.
Mnemonic (the 3 E's + 1):
- Economy → Efficiency → Effectiveness + Equity.
- Moves from money in → ratio → goals met → fair
distribution.
, 4. How to measure? Subjective vs objective 4.3 From technical to political choices
Once you know what dimension you're after, you still need to pick - What gets measured reflects someone's belief system
how. This is where technical choices bleed into political ones. (scientific, ideological, political).
- The DOGE (Department of Gov Efficiency, US) example
4.1 Why measure at all? makes this concrete:
Two reasons: (1) governments want to know if public money • Claim: cut 75% of federal staff = more efficient gov.
creates value (accountability), (2) they want to redirect funds if it • Reality: staff cuts would only close ~10% of the gap. The
doesn't. other 90% sits in healthcare, military, transport,
education, interest on debt.
4.2 Objective vs subjective: both have a role • Paradox: in the abstract, citizens want "less gov"; when
asked about specific programs, they want them kept.
So efficiency-as-slogan collapses once you unpack what
people actually value.
—> Many roads lead to Rome: the same performance
dimension can be measured in very different ways, and
- Objective is often called the "golden standard" but it's not the choice is rarely neutral.
automatic: counting isn't the same as understanding.
- Subjective data has grown in nonprofit research precisely 4.4 Take-away #2: measurement is hard + political
because some things (user satisfaction, perceived impact) can Many design choices are involved (technical: single vs multi-
only be captured by asking. item, objective vs subjective) and political (which indicators
make it into the report?).
—> Don't trust a performance number without asking who
5. So what? Organizational response strategies picked it and why.
Now we move from the measurers to the measured: how do orgs
and workers behave when they are held to performance metrics? 6. The dark side: organizational cheating
(Bohte & Meier, 2000)
5.1 Standardization or discretionary space? The Self- - Discretion is one thing; deliberate manipulation is another.
Sufficiency Matrix (SSM) case - When performance is hard to measure and stakes are high,
- The SSM is a tool imposed on Flemish social services (N=22 orgs) orgs may game the metrics = goal displacement (focusing
by local gov. Social workers score clients on life domains on the number, not the goal).
(finance, housing, mental health, etc.) at intake and every 3
months. 6.1 Three forms of organizational cheating
- The goal: equality through standardized scoring. Mnemonic: CLS = Cut, Lie, Sample
But standardization doesn't hold up on the ground.
—> Two levels of resistance surface:
1) The social worker finds the tool artificial and of limited
use. 4 reasons:
1. Good-day/bad-day effect: scores drift with mood ("rosy
light")
2. Client's perspective is ignored: a messy house bothers
the scorer, not necessarily the client 6.2 Which orgs cheat most?
3. Not all domains are equally easy to score (finance = • Orgs with scarce resources (catching up to better-funded
concrete, mental health = fuzzy) peers)
4. Too flat to capture real client complexity • Orgs with high task complexity (crime, poverty, education:
2) The organization layers its own problems on top: hard problems, measurable expectations)
1. Specialist focus: not every org works on every SSM • Decentralized human service bureaucracies where SLBs
domain aren't closely supervised
2. High caseloads → shortcuts (copy-paste), ask • Orgs with tangible rewards (money, recognition) tied to
colleagues (= scoring norms vary per org) metrics = incentives to game
Result: the same score means different things in different
places. Discretion wins over standardization. 6.3 What does NOT work to stop cheating?
- Adding more rules. Downs (1967): more control = more
7. Main take-aways evasion = stricter rules = vicious cycle + signals distrust to
Public sector performance is: staff.
1. An umbrella concept: multidimensional (equity, efficiency, —> What works better: professional + organizational norms,
effectiveness) + multi-level (org vs program) multi-indicator evaluation (don't collapse performance
2. Difficult to measure: balancing subjective/objective, single/ into 1 score), realistic task judgment.
multi-item, and which indicators count (= political choice)
3. Prone to response strategies: individual + org discretion, 6.4 Take-away #3: performance mgmt is situated + has a
sometimes sliding into cheating dark side
= Managing public sector performance is never just a
technical exercise. It sits in a specific context with specific
actors, and under enough pressure it produces creativity of
the wrong kind.
