Call for papers 

for a Special Issue of the Journal “Public Administration Issues”

The journal “Public Administration Issues” (https://vgmu.hse.ru/en/, ranked in Scopus Q3 and in Web of Science Q3) is happy to put out a call for papers for the upcoming English-language Special Issue: Comparative Performance Management in Government: International Cases.

Guest Editor: Professor Tobin Im, Dean of Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University.

Co-editors: Professor Alexey Barabashev, President of Graduate School of Public Administration, Higher School of Economics (Moscow), and Assistant Professor Jesse W. Campbell, Incheon National University, South Korea

Theme of Special Issue:

The promise of performance management in government has proved to be so compelling that today we are well into an "era of government by performance management" (Moynihan & Pandey 2004). Performance management seeks to improve the performance of public programs and agencies by developing and adopting clear and specific organizational goals, decomposing these goals into quantitatively reliable indicators, collecting performance information over time, and, ultimately, allocating organizational resources in order to meet performance targets. As an ongoing process, performance management may streamline operations, focus the efforts of employees, and, ultimately, increase the accountability of government. Governments around the world have endeavored to reap these benefits by adopting performance management practices.

Like most managerial and administrative movements adopted by government, however, the performance management revolution was initiated primarily in the West, and, more specifically, by the governments of English speaking countries. As such, although the principles and assumptions underlying performance management reform seem contextually neutral, in practice there may be a number of operational, performance, and even cultural factors that affect how the practice is used and develops outside of its native context. For example, South Korea has adopted many of the key instruments in the performance management toolkit, however, there are lingering doubts about how far the system has affected real change (Im, 2016).  In contrast, bureaucrats in the Russian Federation have adopted a variety of coping strategies in order to address the reporting demands brought about by the implementation of a robust program of performance management reforms at many levels of government (Kalgin 2016). Given these and many more examples, to the extent that the contextually specific assumptions underlying performance management are not explicitly recognized and taken into account during the implementation of performance management reforms outside of the Western context, unintended outcomes may ultimately occur that undermine the potential of the reforms. Consequently, studying performance management and measurement in practice outside of the Western context may yield valuable theoretical and practical insight into a paradigm that is now largely taken for granted.

In this special issue of Public Administration Issues, we seek to bring together articles examining the implementation of performance management and measurement regimes in diverse contexts. Specifically, we are looking for studies that help to shed light on the unique aspects of performance management regimes in contexts that differ considerably from the West. Both qualitative and quantitative studies are welcomed, however, provided that contextually relevant phenomena are the focus of the case study or incorporated into the empirical model. Specifically, we hope to address the following questions in the Special Issue:

• Which areas of government have been most amenable to performance management reform, and which have resisted?

• What are examples of unintended consequences of performance reforms, and what general lessons can be drawn from these?

• What are the difficulties and problems of implementing the performance management into the practice of governance?

• What are the most advanced national and regional performance assessment projects? 

• Are these practices disseminated, and are there any obstacles for their successful dissemination?

Important Dates  and Information:

• Abstract submission deadline (no more than 500 words): September 30, 2019. 

• Deadline for submission of manuscripts on the basis of accepted abstracts: January 31, 2020. 

• Proposed date of publication of the special issue: May 2020.

Guidelines for authors (requirements for manuscripts) are: https://vgmu.hse.ru/en/

Please, send your abstracts to the addresses: 

tobin@snu.ac.kr

jessewcampbell@gmail.com

and in cc to: 

abarabashev@hse.ru

vgmu@hse.ru