Public sector policy and management

Manchester Business School (MBS) has one of the largest number of staff researching Public Policy and Management in the UK, with around 70 staff actively engaged in research, executive education and consultancy in this area. As well as this, it has an established Masters' degrees in Health Service Management and is launching a new Masters' in Public Administration (MPA) in 2012.

Research across MBS embraces a number of subject groups. We have a very strong track record of attracting external research funding from a range of agencies including the research councils (ESRC, MRC); the European Commission; the Department of Health research programmes (PRP, SDO, etc); national government departments and agencies (National Audit Office, Department of Work and Pensions, Department for International Development, Department for Communities and Local Government, etc); and charitable research funders (BUPA Foundation; Commonwealth Foundation).

Our programme of research is organised around four main research themes

  • Performance, Evidence and Evaluation: This theme examines public performance and questions understanding of what evidence we can use to assess public service activity. It also examines methods of evaluating public services through the utilisation of theory-driven and realistic methods. Work based on performance regimes and performance management, the nature of what counts as evidence and the application of realistic ideas to evaluation is well established, and the possibilities of future synthesis between performance and evaluation represents an exciting new area of research.
  • Governance, Regulation and Accountability. This theme embraces two levels of research; first, examining how public services are organised at the local level, raising issues of service design and redesign, how organisational turnaround can be achieved, issues of organisational autonomy and agencies and organisational partnerships. At the national level it examines governmental policymaking and accountability processes, and the linkages between regulation, governance and performance. This area also embraces studies of policy making, and the use of different modes of organisation in public services such as markets, hierarchies and collaborative networks.
  • Affective Public Management. This theme examines psycho-social explanations of public sector organisation and change, the evolution of contradictions and paradox of individual behaviour and well-being at work including work examining psychological contracts and risk assessment. Work here is funded by Department of Health.
  • Social theoretical explanations of public management. This theme is concerned with examining how public sector organisation and reform can be explained using theoretical frameworks from sociology, political science and psychology, and includes research examining the political economy of public reform, critical realist, the role of contradiction and paradox in organisation and policy and new institutionalist considerations.

As well as these themes, research, teaching and consultancy activity takes place in the areas of change management, leadership and the examination of workforce issues such as collaborative working, role redesign and new ways of working, and HRM within public services and organisations. Much of this work has been undertaken in collaboration with colleagues elsewhere in the People, Management and Organisations division.

As future aspirations, comparative research will be a priority, focusing both on geographic comparative work between areas and nations, but also between services. This is intended as an integrative approach between the themes outlined above, and as a means of ensuring their knowledge creation is of international standard.

There is also the potential that work considering the role of markets in the public sector could provide the basis for a future research theme, evaluating and examining the means by which users navigate newly created markets, how organisations market their services, and their impact upon public performance.

Research centres involved in this research area include: