'This is an important volume by an impressive collection of UK and international public management scholars, many of them linked to the major AIM Public Services research initiative. It combines a broad overview of current key developments and debates in public management, with valuable in depth chapters covering key topics. Its style is scholarly but clear and will appeal to reflective practitioners and academics alike.' Ewan Ferlie, King's College London
'Ideally, the field of public management would develop as the field of medicine has done - through a close collaboration among scientists and clinicians struggling together to deal with particular concrete problems the world faced. A major obstacle to this vision has been the difficulty of creating a strong academic community that could have a sustained, cumulative discussion that ran alongside, and offered a powerful analytical and empirical commentary on, the past and emergent practices of the wider professional community. The AIM Initiative represented a bold effort to break this particular bottleneck, and the important results are contained in this book. Anyone who wants to enter into a serious discussion of public management reform should read these chapters, and get in touch with these authors. There is a lot of good science and no small amount of practical wisdom contained in these pages.' Mark Moore, Director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University