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Innovation

Innovative Russian Civil Servants (Part 2 / 4)

This is the 2nd part (2/4) of my Open Talk on Innovation and Public Service Motivation that I delivered at HSE Day 2016, at 8th of September in Moscow’s Gorky Park.

Мосгорпарк

The job of any public administration is to do something: The job of Мосгорпарк is to run and maintain the parks and recreational areas in the City of Moscow, and to develop them. Moscow offers its residents more than a dozen big parks, covering more than 100 sq. km. Gorky Park is the most popular among them, at par with Sokolniki, according to 2012 ratings.

Mosgorpark was founded only in 2011; as a branch of the Ministry of Culture of Moscow’s City Government. Its ambitious mission statement is to “make Moscow convenient for all”; the annual budget for doing so is some 8bn rubles (equals some 110m euros) in 2015 and 2016 (down from 11bn in 2014).

Given its mission statement and budget, Mosgorpark employees few own permanent staff. The official staff number is 70 employees, including the agency director Marina Lyulchuck, and four executive directors. When the agency was created in 2011, most public administrators came to their position because of their excellence in other professional fields, such as architecture, landscaping, and event-management (Interview with agency head Marina Lyltchuk, http://moscowtorgi.ru/news/gorodskoe_hoziaistvo/1495/, retrieved 2016-09-07).

Error-correcting and innovative behavior

Routine jobs

Running and maintaining Gorky Park – this seems to include a lot of routine jobs, e.g. cleaning up the bins, planting flowers, fixing broken benches, and providing a safe environment for visitors.

Even baseline performance requires innovation

But every organization not only has to get day-to-day routine work right. Even achieving a baseline level of performance, touching the bottom line of expectations, from time to time requires some innovation.

It is not enough to clean up the bin in Gorky Park every morning. As an agency head or executive director you have to come up with “new ways of doing things” (Fernandez and Moldagiev 2013) from time to time.

Simon & March

This is something two of the founding fathers of modern Public Administration have emphasized more than 50 years ago. The first one was Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel laurate; the second was James G. March; in 1958 they co-authored a book called “Organizations”.

Create mindset

New ways of doing things – this is just another term for innovation. Visitors demand events, new attractions for kids. To keep up with these growing demands requires a creative mindset. And it requires employees with a high level of innovation motivation. This is what makes a top-performing organization.

 

Let put this idea more generally: Civil servants exhibit two types of behavior:

  • The first type of behavior is error-correcting behavior. To a varying degree public servants try to detect and fix small errors in everyday working routines.
  • The second type of behavior is innovative behavior. Public Administration heavily relies on rules, or standard operating procedures. SOPs help civil servants to take a decision in standard situation. But SOPs do not support public managers in non-standard situations. In non-standard situations civil servants to a varying degree try to come up with new ways of doing things.

An example of innovative mindset: (‘A lot of families with kids are visiting the park. But it is inconvenient for them to use adult toilets, and wash-bowls. Let’s install wash-bowls for kids.’)

The case of Gorky Park demonstrates that both error-correcting and innovative behavior has positive effects for community members.

Kategorien
Innovation

Innovative Russian Civil Servants (Part 1 / 4)

On September 8, 2016 Higher School of Economics celebrated annual HSE Day in Moscow’s Gorky Park. I delivered an Open Talk on the relationship between Innovation and Public Service Motivation. Here is the first of four parts (1/4) of what I said:

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen

Thank you very much for your interest in Public Administration, Innovation and Russian Civil Servants. Gorky Park is an excellent location to talk about Innovation and Civil servants.

The Three Parachute Tower

Just have a look to the marble-colored twisted tower (pictured above).

When I saw it for the first time two weeks ago, I initially thought it was a new look-out platform. I was really excited, took my camera and raced over there – just to learn that you cannot climb it up. Залезать на Башню – нельзя!

From a plate nearby I learned that actually this is a mock-up model of a funfair attraction from the 1930ies. 80 years ago bold ordinary Muscovites did parachute jumping from the platform at the top. There were three pre-installed parachute – so it assumed the name Three Parachute Tower. According to some sources this Soviet bungee jumping became one of the major attractions in Gorky Park.

I do not know what happened to the tower after the Great Patriotic War. But in 2015 a mock-up model was put in front of Gorky park main entrance as a New Year’s Three. And people liked this very special Ёлка.

This anecdote about three parachutes, a Ёлка and a mock-up model serves as an excellent example of innovative behavior in public administration. It is an example of how Gorky Park managers come up with new ideas of how to offer Muscovites a sound recreational area.

Basic Terms

Innovation

The Three Parachute Tower serves as an example of innovative behavior in Public Administration.

An innovation is an idea, program, or policy that is new to the organization adopting it (Reference). Innovative behavior means to come up with new ways of doing things.

Public Administration & Bureaucracy

Gorky Park is run by a government agency, Mosgorpark.

Another term for government agencies is bureaucracy. By bureaucracy we usually understand the work of civil servants in Public Administration. Public Administration is also a science, a science that explains “what government agencies do, […] why they do it” (James Q. Wilson 1989), and how they do it.

Government agency

The job of any government agency is to do something: Public Administration and civil servants are providing public goods and services. We need such services like law enforcement, public transport, or parks, so we are in need bureaucratic organizations. We are need of coordinated activities of public officials because a single individual usually cannot provide a public service for a large community own its own, even if she is the most intelligent person with a strong will and power.

You can maintain your own Дача, but you will fail to run Gorky Park on your own.

There are a lot of things do in a community like Moscow. And so there are a lot of government agencies, in Moscow, in Russia, and in almost any country around the globe. E.g. police departments, schools, Mosgortrans (running public buses and trams), Mosmetro (running the subway system), and Мосгорпарк.

 

This is what I do as an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at HSE: I am analyzing what government agencies do, how they do it, and why. Today I would like to share with you some new results about Innovation and Russian Civil Servants.

Kategorien
Public Service Delivery

Public Service Delivery A Century Ago

By public service delivery we usually understand the process of providing the members of a community with monopoly services like law enforcement, street sweeping, firefighting or emergency medical services.

A new outdoor photo exhibition in Moscow’s Vorontsov Park is showing how public service delivery looked a century ago in pre-revolutionary Russia.

DSCF7969 (Kopie)

A Moscow Street cleaner in 1900 by an unknown photographer

dscf7970 (Kopie)

Above: A Firefighter brigade in 1907, by unknown author

DSCF7971 (Kopie)

The first medical emergency vehicle in 1913

DSCF7990 (Kopie)

A team of police officers equipped with cameras; nowadays’ job description would be forensic photographer

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Uncategorized

Personality traits of future civil servants

A recently ‘Advance Access’-published article from Arjen van Witteloostuijn, Marc Esteve and George Boyne in JPart makes a big step towards modern behavioral public administration. Simon, March and other founding fathers of 20th century PA have long ago laid out the basic idea and concepts that PA is as much about human behavior of civil servants in government agencies as it is about a meaningful delegation of administrative tasks between layers on the organization chart.

Arjen van Witteloostuijn, Marc Esteve and George Boyne now empirically demonstrate that different types of personality traits heavily influence the motivation of future civil servants to serve the public interest, that is, their level of Public Service Motivation (PSM), one of the core concepts of current PA research. Public Service Motivation (PSM) has been reported to be associated with ‘positive’ things like individual and organizational performance.

Journal of Public Administration Research And Theory, 2016, 1–16

doi:10.1093/jopart/muw027

Advance Access published April 27, 2016

Wittelsoostuijn and his two co-authors argue that two motives underlie PSM, affective and non-affective motives. Compassion (COM) and self-sacrifice (SS) are the affective motives of PSM. If you are an honest and humble person as well an emotional and agreeable individual, you will very likely report a high level of compassion and self-sacrifice, that is, two affective PSM motives. But if you are keen to conscientiousness, that is, doing things thoroughly because you consider it to be your personal duty, your level of compassion and self-sacrifice will be rather low.

Attraction to policy-making (APM) and commitment to the public interest (CPI) are nonaffective motives of PSM. If you are the type of person that is open to new experiences you are likely to be attracted to policy-making and thus to work in the public sector.

Wittelsoostuijn and co-authors use the responses from two survey questionnaires filled by 320 undergraduates.

The article is so interesting because it fuels our understanding what types of individuals are going to work as civil servants. What is their personality structure? The paper links personal psychology to modern public administration research.

pictured above: Russian federal ministry of agriculture, located at Moscows Garden ring

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Isolated communities: an adaptive challenge for Russian Public Administration

An interview with Artemy Posanenko from Higher School of Economics about his research on isolated communities was recently published on the German-based website ‘decoder: decoding Russia’. Artemy, who is also a co-author of a 2016 book on wandering workers in Russia that is short-listed for one of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Monograph, did field-research on remote villages in Northern Russia.

The interview (in German) including impressing photos is available at www.dekoder.org/de/article/sie-sind-voellig-frei-abgeschiedene-doerfer-russland

Remoteness can take on various forms and degrees. A village might be located on the other side of a river not far away from a provincial capital, but being cut off from roads. This is mild degree of loneliness; when the river is frozen in winter people can just walk on its surface to next town.

Other villages are really distant from the next big settlement. Examples can be found in the far northern region of Archangelsk were up 40 per cent of citizens are living in isolated communities, according to estimates of Artemy.

Some remote place look back on a long history, Artemy names a small village that had been found 500 years ago. Others were established only during Soviet times in the 1950ies and 1960ies. Artemy reports that interpersonal trust and cooperation is highest among inhabitants of old and far remote villages; it is rather low in ‘artificial’ places founded some 40 years ago.

In Soviet times there were only lone but not fully isolated communities. Central government bore the costs of holding up a network of cost-intense transfers via helicopter or ferry/boats to remote locations. In Post-soviet times government lost any interest in financing these transportation links. Lonely villages become separated ones.

For regular Continental Europeans such kind of remoteness is far beyond imagination. Up to here the results from Artemy’s research. What are the implications for Public Administration research?

Remote villages are an adaptive challenge for Russian Public Administration. In a considerable chunk of Russia citizens live in a way that heavily deviates from living and working in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladivostok or any other city. And so does delivering public services to them.

Two important issues do arise for public bureaucrats = high rank policy-makers, back-office administrative professionals, and front-line civil servants.

  1. Implementation of standardized policy norms. What circumstances justify deviating from centrally set policy standards? Under regular circumstances uniform policy standards and standard operating procedures (SOP) protect citizen from arbitrariness of public bureaucrats. But in remote locations centrally set standards become burdensome.
  2. Should administrative professional and front-liners be allowed to deviate from professional norms if it benefits people in remote locations? Artemy reports that fishery inspectors enforcing the law in remote locations come from other regions to avoid potential conflicts of interest with locals. Another behavioral question of interest is whether civil servants are willing to deviate from SOP’s and/or professional norms for the sake of people living under non-normal circumstances.

How to cite: Tim Jaekel. 2016. „Isolated communities: an adaptive challenge to Russian Public Administration“. Publicsector-research.net: Blog on public sector research and teaching. Retrieved YYYY-MM-DD (replace with current date, e.g., 2016-05-05).

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Russia talks Public Service Reform: Lessons from abroad

In the latest volume of The Moscow Time (TMT, No. 5752) Oleg Buklemishev from Moscow State University (MGU) argued that the upcoming federal special commission for public service reform is “a fig leaf for real change”.

I do not agree with his statement that Public Sector Reform is cheap talk.

Oleg Buklemishev makes as point when he writes that “very few elements of … market based governance have proven successful”. Yes, we now know that naïve New Public Management approach of one to one copying of private sector management techniques that was hailed in the 1990ies produced a lot of unintended side-effects. But we only know after yet another decade of reform evaluation.

The lesson from two decades of Public sector reform in Western world is that doing nothing is not a preferable alternative. If Russian public service suffers from inefficiencies there should be more public reform talk and not less.

Key performance indicators yield as lot of unintended side effects. No doubt about it. But measuring and comparing performance of government agencies in terms of whatever also stipulated the notion that public service should be about maximizing citizens’ well-being and not agencies’ budgets. This was its significant contribution.

Take UK’s local public sector as an example. In the late 80ies and until the 1990ies local government accountability was rather a mess. It was the Audit Commission, founded already in 1985, but significantly empowered only in the late 1990ies that changed that. They applied a good-cop bad cop approach. In their bad-cop role they conducted tough performance assessments for all local councils. Their assessments were based on performance indicators, but also and on-site visits. In their good cop role they always include a peer element in their inspection frameworks, that is, the view of local peers was always reflected when judging in a local council’s policy performance and managerial capacity.

Russia still lacks an equivalent to the late Audit Commission. This is something I consider to be worth talking about.

pictured above: Adhesive label for the one-stop-agency of Moscow’s Bauman district

How to cite: Tim Jaekel. 2016. „Russia talks Public Service Reform: Lessons from abroad“. Publicsector-research.net. Retrieved YYYY-MM-DD (replace with current date, e.g., 2016-04-29).

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Monthly Public Administration Discussion Meeting

I am co-organizing and co-chairing the monthly PA discussion meeting at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow together with Jesse Campbell. We established this series in autumn 2015; we just had our 7th meeting (see post „From Skillset to Mindeset“). We started as a closed shop of some 10-20 people from the School, and now announcing events campus-wide. The meetings are open to researchers and students from across all disciplines. Prior registration is not required; however, if you do are not a member of HSE please contact me before an upcoming event. I will announce upcoming events here and at this blog’s subpage „Public Administration Discussion Meeting“.

(pictured above: view from Lubyanskaya Square onto with one of the seven sisters skyscrapers)

Recent meetings

7th Public Administration Discussion Meeting: “From Skillset to Mindset: A New Paradigm for Leader Development of the Senior Civil Service”. Presenter: Robert Kramer, National University of Public Service in Budapest. 2016, April 18.

6th Public Administration Discussion Meeting: “Contemporary Russian otkhodnichestvo”. Presenter: Natalia Zhidkevich & Artemy Pozanenko, Higher School of Economics. 2016, March 14.

5th Public Administration Discussion Meeting (Three presentations; 2015, February 16):

  • Tobin Im, Seoul National University “Defining New Stages of National Development: A Time Perspective Approach”
  • Alexey Barabashev, Higher School of Economics: “Crisis of State Governance and Theoretical Tools for its Overcoming”
  • Alexander Kalgin, Higher School of Economics: “Performance management, satisfaction, and turnover: The role of organizational alignment”

4th Public Administration Discussion Meeting. “Public or private? Which values determine the choice of profession of MPA students?” Speaker: Tamara G. Nezhina, Higher School of Economics. 2015, December 14

3rd Public Administration Discussion Meeting: “How to determine optimal staff size in the local administrations”. Speaker: Ilya Akishin, Higher School of Economics. 2015, November 23

2nd Public Administration Discussion Meeting: “The Application of Quantitative Methods for Study of Civil Service Reform”. Speaker: Georgy Borshevskiy, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). 2015, October 19

1st Public Administration Discussion Meeting: “Theory of an Effective State, and governmental Bodies Evaluation” Speaker: Alexey Barabashev, Higher School of Economics. 2015, September 21

 

To

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No matter what’s your profession – let’s bike to work

“No matter what’s your profession- let’s bike to work” reads a bicycle drive approved by Moscow City Government I recognized in the metro yesterday.

The poster indicates that there will be a kind of action day on 20th of May. The City Government of Moscow launched similar campaigns to boost the share bicycling in public transportation in recent years. Bicycle-sharing stations are visible all over the city. Green colored bicycle lanes of some hundred miles length have been created in major routes throughout the capital. From time to time I am even witnessing some brave bicyclists on the bus lane of Leninskiy prospekt.

I appreciate these policy-actions.

To the reader it might be noteworthy that the bicycle-use drive is supported / co-organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a partisan endowment from the German Social Democratic party.

How to cite: Tim Jaekel (2016): „It doesn’t matter who you are working with – you may bike to work“. Publicsector-research.net. Retrieved YYYY-MM-DD. (add current date here, e.g. 2016-04-23)

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From Skillset to Mindset

The best thing in bureaucracy is hierarchy: Getting things done that require the physical and intellectual capacities of more than one individual is best archieved by top down orders, according to Max Weber. We know now that clear goal orientation and managerial autonomy (e.g., Moynihan 2008) as well as some ambitious policy entrepreneurs hired from outside (Teodoro 2011) should be added to the list of ingredients of a successful agency.

The worst thing in public administration is unconscious incompetence, according to Robert Kramer: People are unable to admit that they do not know a solution to a wicked problem.

Robert last Monday (18th of April) presented and discussed his work in this month’s Public Administration Discussion Meeting  at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), a research seminar series that I organize and co-chair together with Jesse Campbell. Robert currently holds the International Chair of Public Leadership at the National University of Public Service in Budapest; prior to that he taught at the American University, and served the US federal government for some 20 years, a big chunk of that time in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So he knows how government agencies look like from the inside.

In current times of (even more) uncertainty and goal ambiguity the unability to admit that ‚I do not know‘ is a major source for organizational underperformance. Robert’s convincing example was the bumpy implementation the website underlying the Obamacare program, where people can now sign up for a health insurance.

Unfortuneatly being unable to admit that I do not know results from bureaucratic hierarchy. Administrative professionals have little incentives to trying new ways of doing things, that is, innovative and error-correcting behavior. Robert argues that they rather prefer silo-solutions, and stick to a common stay-in-your-lane mentality.

In his talk and in an underlying paper „From Skillset to Mindset: A New Paradigm for Leader Development of the Senior Civil Service“ that is currently under review at PMR, Robert argues that administrative decision maker „will have to develop new mental capabilities“ to adress to behavioral phenomenon. „(N)ew ways of thinking are necessary“; which requires developing a mindset that allows to cope with adaptive challenges, rather than further enhancing the existing skillset. Robert advocates for an instrument called transformative action learning: the art of learning how to learn, unlearn and relearn.

To me the value added was his focus on individual level behavior and the psychological public administration decision making. Robert creates a link between neuro-cognitive science and theory, developmental psychology on the one hand and individual level learning and organizational management on the other hand. I consider this to be an relevant contribution towards Behavioral Public Administration.

(pictured above: XVII April conference at Higher School of Economics, Moscow.)

 

How to cite: Tim Jaekel. 2016. „From Skillset to Mindeset“. Publicsector-research.net. Retrieved YYYY-MM-DD (add current date, e.g., 2016-04-25)

 

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Endogenous Shocks in Social Networks: Effects of Students‘ Exam Retakes on their Friends‘ Future Performance

Maria Marchenko from the University of Manheim, Germany and the Higher School of Economics, Moscow yesterday presented a model to estimate the effect of an endogenous shock on future network performance. The presentation was held at HSE’s Center for Institutional Studies Research Seminar. The related paper „Endogenous Shocks in Social Networks: Effects of Students‘ Exam Retakes on their Friends‘ Future Performance“ should be available at https://sites.google.com/site/mariavmarchenko/jmp.pdf.

The network consists of 1st and 2nd year undergrad students at the Nizhniy Novgorod branch of HSE. Students create links and ties to peers, while living in the same dorm and taking the same courses.

The endogenous shock is a retake of one of the network members, that is, that one of the students in such a network fails in an exam. HSE is highly selective, after three retakes a student will expulsed by default.

Now, the question is, to what extent, if at all, the retake of one of my friends affects my future performance, and the future performance of all my other friends?

Two major issues arise in such a setting. 1. The shock is highly endogenous. Proper instruments, IV, are required. Maria uses the individual characteristics of the friend of my friend as instruments.

  1. Estimation strategy. Maria uses a 2SLS approach. Probably oversimplifying her sophisticated model in a first step the dependent variable is the likelihood that I will fail in an exam, i.e. that I experience a retake. The residuals from this estimation are then taken for the second step. The depend variable is now the difference in my performance, in terms of average grading scores, between now (in the year the shock happens) and the next year. On the right hand side of the equation are an array of individual level characteristics, including tuition free place or not, higher education of parents, and high school exam and university entry scores; network characteristics, that is, and a term for correlated effects.

The effect of the shock on the network performance varies depending on the set of controls in the equation. But there is a negative effect; at maximum a retake of my friends will increase my future performance by .4 standard deviation, SD.

I very much like the basis idea of Maria’s work and the empirical approach. The crucial issue in studying peer effects is whether such an effect is physically, and logistically feasible, as Gigi Foster from UNSW’s Business School has highlighted in a presentation in the same seminar series roughly one year ago. In the case of students it is absolutely reasonable that there are potential spillover effects.

What I would like to see in a paper are some plots that demonstrate the predicted levels of the dependent variable “(change) in future performance” over the possible range of network characteristics, given an endogenous shock of retake; all other variables from the equation held at their mean value. This would also help to understand how robust the findings are.