Public Service Efficiency

Reviews / Votes

Andrews and Entwistle deliver an innovative approach to public service efficiency that carefully crafts theory and practice around a multifaceted concept of efficiency. Simplistic ideas of Economic and Pareto efficiency, that have dominated political aspirations for public administration for far too long, are dismantled using a critical and realist approach. This highlights the trade-offs and contradictions that public managers experience in their day-to-day practice. I commend their four faces model to practitioners and students, as it will aid understanding of the challenges managers experience when trying to improve services. Most important of all this books takes us beyond a preoccupation with productive efficiency to reconnect service improvements with democratic and public values.

Philip Haynes, Professor, University of Brighton, UK

Efficiency is a concept which has widespread use in everyday conversation. Andrews and Entwistle address the fallacy of the everyday understanding of this term by their discussion of the complexities of this concept in this book. This is a nuanced critique of efficiency in the setting of public management, an area of study which is highly contested and which is beset by `wicked` policy problems. The authors offer a powerful assembly of ideas of efficiency for both serious scholars of, and policy makers in, public management.

Irvine Lapsley, Editor, Financial Accountability & Management, and Director, IPSAR, University of Edinburgh Business School, UK

The book makes the case for rethinking how to apply public service efficiency in public administration. Compelling arguments are presented for a multi-dimensional approach that covers democratic and economic elements and the interaction between the dimensions.John Halligan, Professor, University of Canberra, Australia

Andrews and Entwistle also remind us in the conclusion that productive efficiency, distributive efficiency, dynamic efficiency, and allocative efficiency are not new ideas. However, putting them under the big umbrella called 'efficiency' may motivate scholars to find a better way to reconcile them, combine them, and balance them...this attempt to reconcile and balance the different faces of efficiency is probably another merit of Andrews and Entwistle's book.

Chung-An Chen is an assistant professor in public administration and public policy at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore