The fast changing context characterized by increasing complexities that public sector managers have to face, together with the cuts to public spending and public management education in particular, led to the necessity to... [ view full abstract ]
The fast changing context characterized by increasing complexities that public sector managers have to face, together with the cuts to public spending and public management education in particular, led to the necessity to rethink public education programs to be fit-for-purpose. Today more than ever, Executive Education (EE) programs have to be “value-adding” for participants, their organization and sponsors, proving their relevance and the uniqueness of their academic content (Oldfield and van den Berg, 2013). This work aims to apply the public service-dominant logic (PSDL) (Osborne, Radnor and Nasi, 2012) to the EE for the public sector, in order to provide a framework of analysis that can be applied to revise and design executive programs for public managers. In particular, PSDL offers its contribution at two levels of analysis. Firstly, it suggests how to revise and update public management curricula vis-à-vis of the new paradigms of the public administration studies (despite the contribution of the literature, the NPM approach is still dominant in public management curricula and the courses are mainly intra-function-based). Secondly, in a context still dominated by the practices drawn from the business sector in which EE is perceived and conceived as a product, PSDL contributes to the understanding of EE as a service. Hence, our framework conceptualizes EE as a public service, which effectiveness comes from the quality of the interaction, the co-production of the EE experience, the outcome orientation and the focus on the participant as key actor in the delivery process. This paper is an invitation to teach what we write, to practice what we teach and to teach trough the practice, which is what a public manager attending an EE would experience in terms of public service experience.
Osborne S., Radnor Z., Nasi G. (2012). A New Theory for Public Service Management? Toward a (Public) Service-Dominant Approach, American Review of Public Administration, 43(2), 135–158.
