This postgraduate programme offers both part and full-time students the opportunity to examine the rapidly changing context of public work, including the pressures of globalisation, and international examples of how local communities can maintain public value and traditions.
The programme offers a critical social science appraisal of the international privatisation, marketisation and business reforms in the public sector. The course has core elements in managing public and voluntary organisations, partnerships and networks, participation and democracy, and strategy and planning in the public services. Local policy examples are examined in the context of different international examples of how localism evolves with national and international policy. There are also options to examine personal development and personal transformation as part of one's career development.
Areas of study
Learning includes an examination of the political and democratic context of public work and the current discourse of adding 'public value' to the limited governmental, managerial and business approach of the last two decades. The organisational coverage has at its core an examination of the organisation of partnership working, the current inter-organisational complexity of the public sector and the impact of the market fragmentation on the network world of modern public administration. This will include an examination of the contradictions of 'collaboration' versus 'competition'.
Students will find opportunities to examine the micro changes in public life, including the impact of policy and administrative changes on participation and democracy and the attempt to 'managerialise' most aspects of public life. This will include a critical deconstruction of concepts like choice, performance and strategy.
The course includes a guided choice of research methods options in order to prepare students before they start their dissertation.
Syllabus
Management in the Public Service Environment
Partnership Interagency Working and User Involvement
Strategy and Planning in the Public Sector
Policy Analysis
Policy Analysis
Learning by Objectives
Participation and Democracy
One research module from:
Quantitative Research Methods in the Social Sciences
Principles of Social Research
Doing Qualitative Research
Career and progression opportunities
The course, while critically evaluating the public sector reforms of the last two decades, will also be of applied relevance to those working in the field as they face the current partnership, organisational and managerial reforms. The course will allow students to make better sense of the social contradictions in these reforms allowing them to emerge as more confident and informed practitioners.
