Table of Contents

2004
 

Volume Nine, Number Three
    

  Single Articles 

1. DOES QUALITY MANAGEMENT WORK IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR?
   Shand H. Stringham

   This article examines the quality movement in the United States during the past two decades in the context of public management. Its primary focus is on the utility of quality management approaches in the rapidly changing public organizational environment today in which stability is rare and change, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are frequently the only constants. The fundamental issue explored here is the appropriateness of the application of a management approach that was originally designed specifically for the corporate manufacturing environment to public management needs and requirements. Supplementing empirical evidence from several short-term applications of TQM in federal and state agencies, the paper reviews the impact of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's twenty-year experience with its quality improvement program on overall organizational performance and productivity. The synergistic effect of a comprehensive strategic management program on a public quality program is also examined. The article concludes with a discussion of the challenges of sustaining a quality program through the frequent changeover of senior political appointee leadership and the inherent tension between process improvement quality approaches and cost savings/cost avoidance approaches that surface during times of government fiscal crises.
    

2. RETIREE-ATTRACTION POLICIES: CHALLENGES FOR LOCAL GOVERNANCE IN RURAL REGIONS
   B. Douglas Skelley

   Retiree-attraction policies are particularly promising economic development strategies for many nonmetropolitan and exurban communities, yet scant attention has been given to the implications of such policies for local governance. Although these policies can bring dollars with a high multiplier effect to communities while imposing low demands on some public services, they are not without costs. After exploring the positive and negative aspects of retiree-attraction policies, this article poses questions such policies should raise for locally elected officials, public administrators, and other stakeholders concerning the sustainability of such policies and their community's readiness to undertake this kind of economic development.
    

3. TACKLING THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN DEPRIVED POPULATIONS: A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE DETERRENCE APPROACH
   Colin C. Williams

   The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically the public policy approach that seeks to tackle the underground economy in deprived populations by deterring people from engaging in such work by ensuring that the expected cost of being caught and punished is greater than the economic benefit of participating. Reporting evidence from an extensive study of underground work in 861 households in contemporary England, this paper uncovers that although some underground work in such populations is conducted for purely money-making purposes, the majority is carried out for friends, neighbors and kin for rationales associated with redistribution and building social capital rather than purely to make or save money. As such, the argument here is that unless governments seek to develop substitute mechanisms to enable engagement in such paid favors but on a legitimate basis alongside deterrence measures, then attempts to tackle the underground economy in deprived populations will end up destroying the social support networks that other realms of public policy are presently so actively seeking to develop. The paper concludes by providing an outline of the public policy changes required.