ABSTRACT
Most people in the developed world would find it difficult to envisage life without the provision of public services. Indeed, over the past 60 years the rise of the welfare state in Western Europe and ‘big government’ in the United States has seen a tremendous expansion of publicly funded, if not always directly provided, services ( Burnes, 2004b ; Flynn, 2002). However, as is noted in the introductory chapter to this volume, throughout the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, the cost and efficiency of public services became a burning issue across the developed world (Clarke and Trebilcock, 1997; Common, 1998; Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). By the 1980s there was a rising clamour of voices calling for the rolling back of the welfare state (Doherty and Horne, 2002). However, though many state-owned industries and utilities were privatized over the next two decades, in the United Kingdom and most other countries the core of the welfare state and the level of public expenditure have survived astonishingly well (Flynn, 2002). Public services have often been criticized for being over-bureaucratic, resistant to change and poorly managed, yet over the past 25 years they have proved to be remarkably innovative and able to change in quite radical ways (Ferlie et al., 1996).
