IPMN Newsletter 2000
Number 4

Dear IPMN Colleagues:

IPMN continues to grow and develop. We now have about 525 members from 60 nations. Our International Public Management Journal (IPMJ) is thriving under the editorship of Professor Fred Thompson. To subscribe your library to IPMJ,
direct the appropriate librarian to the web site: www.elsevier.com/locate/pubman. In addition, we are starting a new e-journal, The International Public Management Review with vol. 1, no. 1 to be out soon.

Also, our Sydney and Wellington 2000 conference/workshop book, Learning From International Public Management Reform (in 2 volumes) will be out later this year, published by Elsevier. Additionally, plans are well underway for our next workshop in Odense, Denmark, to be hosted by Professor Kurt Klaudi
Klausen, as noted below.

INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC MANAGEMENT NETWORK WORKSHOP 2001

Location: University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Dates: July 18-20, 2001

Theme: "Developing and Integrating Graduate Public Management Curricula:
Contrasting Perspectives"

Public management programs face a challenge to reorient their curricula and pedagogy in a variety of ways to bring them into line with contemporary societal, organizational and student needs. Our disciplinary stove-pipes that include political science, public administration, administrative law, organizational strategy, behavior, and design, sociology of organizations, psychology, human resources management, managerial accounting and control, economics and operations research, quantitative methods and statistics, and information technology and computer science, have always been dysfunctional insofar as they have had more to do with faculty preparation than social, organizational and student needs. Nowadays, such stove-piping in academe appears to be increasingly irrelevant. Many public sector organizations will not be compartmentalized in the way that public management programs are designed and delivered at present. What we see emerging in many instances are smaller, flatter organizations, organized around a set of generic value-creating processes and specific competencies.

Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster refer to these new kinds of organizational arrangements as hyperarchies, after the hyperlinks of the World Wide Web.
Evans and Wurster assert that, like the internet itself, these kinds of organizations have eliminated the need to channel information. This, they claim, challenges all hierarchies, whether of logic or of power, "...with the possibility (or the threat) of random access and information symmetry."
Consequences of this change include the possibility of having more people engage in decision making across the organization rather that just at the top, closer ties between service deliverers and citizens, consumers, clients and other stakeholders. It also creates the possibility of far greater organizational transparency and responsiveness. Of course, we must recognize the need to continue to prepare students to work in older-style hierarchical
organizations because the world in many cases is slow to convert to this and other new models. The obligation to meet the needs of a wider variety of types of organizations thus presents a challenge to contemporary public management curriculum design.

Under any organizational circumstance, our pedagogy should be oriented to helping students learn how to work outward and upward, through the organization, and back across the entire supply chain to create value from knowledge. According to Peter Block, this means restructuring the delivery of knowledge away from entrenched disciplines and organizing it more around
students, "...rather than requiring the student to integrate knowledge across disciplines," moving faculties out of their specialties to, "...learn enough about other fields to develop a truly integrated curriculum."

To develop such curricula, faculty from various fields of study need to learn to talk and listen to each other more effectively. It will not suffice to change only the content of our curricula. We must also transform information exchange between the discourse communities that are concerned with public management education. It is possible to envision curricula built around a
broader range of discourse management tools. 
These include:
1. Dictionaries of cultural and disciplinary dialects that enable
collaborators with different backgrounds to understand each other's vocabulary.
2. Mental maps and representation protocols that enable users to develop graphic representations of their own or others' basic conceptual approaches to problems.
3. Problem structuring protocols that are integrated with search and analysis agents operating over banks of relevant information available on intranets, perhaps organized using hypermedia linkages.
4. Management of protocols for meetings and discussion to help participants generate options, identify pros and cons, and track the flow of discussion and debate.
5. A set of protocols governing the etiquette of discourse.

The Odense workshop will explore the possibilities of using basic tools of discourse analysis to attempt to achieve greater integration in the evolving field of public management, and to explore implications for curricular  design.

A preliminary program outline and schedule is provided below.

Program Outline and Schedule

Wednesday July 18th
13.00-15.00 IPMJ Editorial Board meeting and Lunch at Knudsens Gaard Hotel

15.30-16.00 Registration at Department of Political Science and Public Management
Location: Lucernemarken 1

16.00-16.30 Welcome and Opening Remarks:
Tage Koed Madsen (Dean of the Faculty of Social Science)
Kurt Klaudi Klausen (University of Southern Denmark)
Kuno Schedler (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland)
Lawrence Jones (The Naval Postgraduate School, California)

16.30-17.00 Presentation of the inaugural Naschold Award for Excellence in Public Management Research
Presenter: Alexander Wegener, Berlin Science Center

17.00-19.00 Plenary Address and Panel Discussion:
Speaker: Krister Ståhlberg, Åbo University, Finland

Panel on Scandinavian Public Management Reform including:
Erik Johnsen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Kari-Pekka.Maki-Lohiluoma,
Government of Finland (invited)
Sigurd Helgasson, Iceland (invited), and others

19.00-19.30 Open Forum Questions and Discussion
Closing Remarks: Kurt Klaudi Klausen

19.45 Reception at the Town Hall of Odense

No host dinner in town - choice of restaurants open

Thursday, July 19th
9.00-12.00 Structured Dialogue on the Context of Public Management Curriculum and Program Development
Chair: Fred Thompson (Willamette University)
Rapporteur: Michael Barzelay (London School of Economics, UK)
Participants: Open forum

Questions: What are the critical characteristics that differentiate
the public sector in different national settings? What is special about management in the public sector versus the private and the
voluntary/nonprofit sectors? What is generic to management? Should the emphasis of PM programs be on "public" or "management", or both? * (See
note
below)

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.00-17.00 Approaches to Graduate Public Management Curriculum and Course
Design
Chair: Riccardo Mussari (University of Siena, Italy)
Rapporteur: to be appointed

13.00-14.30 Presentation: "One Approach to Public Management Curriculum
Design." Lawrence Jones (The Naval Postgraduate School) and William Zumeta,
(University of Washington, USA)

15.00-15.30 Discussant comments (two discussants - to be determined)

15.30-16.45 Open dialogue

16.45-17.00 Closing remarks; procedures for the following day, Kurt Klaudi Klausen

18.30 Reception at the University of Southern Denmark

20.00 Formal Dinner

Friday, July 20th
9.00-12.00 Building Diverse Curricula and Programs: Alternative Designs by
Working Groups

Chair: Sandford Borins, University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada
Rapporteur: to be determined

9.00-9.15 Instructions to Work Groups (Borins)

9.15-10.45 Group Workshops: An Exercise in Building Unique PM Program
Models
(Break-out sessions into working groups: tentative groupings:
Scandinavia; UK and Commonwealth nations; European Nations; the U.
S.;
International)

10.45-12.00 Presentation of Alternative PM Program Designs by Working Groups

12.00-12.30 Open Dialogue

12.30-13.30 Lunch

13.30-16.00 Alternative Pedagogical Approaches in Public Management
Chair: Kuno Schedler, University of St. Gallen, Schwitzerland
Rapporteur: to be appointed

13.30-14.30 Panel Discussion: "Experiments with Innovative Teaching Models
and Methods."

Christoph Reichard, University of Potsdam, Germany
Aage Nedergaard, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Michael Barzelay, London School of Economics and Political Science
Nancy Roberts, The Naval Postgraduate School
Others to be invited

14.45-15.15 Discussant Comments (two discussants to be determined)

15.15-16.00 Open Dialogue

16.00-16.30 Closing Remarks, Future Developments for IPMN
Kuno Schedler, Lawrence Jones and Kurt Klaudi Klausen

17.00 Castle Tour and Farewell Celebration

* Note: Other questions for discussion include:
What disciplines should be represented in the PM curriculum?
Which degrees should be offered?
How do student characteristics affect the curriculum, e.g., pre-service versus in-service; age, etc.?
What are important student market variables, e.g. international, national, sub-national, etc.?
What is the program target market (e.g., day versus evening, etc.)?
In what language(s) should instruction be offered (single, bilingual,
multiple)?

What are some of the pedagogical alternatives for instruction?
What is the impact of new technologies on the PM curriculum?

THOMPSON RECEIVES NASPAA/ASPA DISTINGUISHED RESEARCH AWARD

Fred Thompson, IPMJ editor and Grace and Elmer Goudy Professor of Public Management and Policy, Atkinson Graduate School of Management, Willamette University, received the biennial NASPAA/ASPA Distinguished Research Award
at the Awards Banquet of the 30th Annual National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration Conference in Richmond, Virginia, Thursday October 19, 2000. The NASPAA/ASPA Distinguished Research Award, "Srecognizes
the research of an individual whose published work has had a substantial impact on the thought and understanding of public administrationS and the specific consequences for the way we think about the field." Previous awardees include Allen Schick, James L. Perry, Robert T. Golembiewski,
Charles Goodsell, Patricia Ingraham, David Rosenbloom and the late Charles E.
Levine. Our congratulations to Fred!

Best Regards,

Larry Jones
IPMN Coordinator