The traditional academic view of research is to derive new knowledge, generally involving studious inquiry and a search for new theories in order to contribute to an existing academic wealth of knowledge. This is alongside the primary objective of publishing peer reviewed articles in academic journals and the publication of relevant texts.

Continuing adult education requires continuous education of the educators themselves--a highly self-referential issue. This article focuses on educating a group of "urban educators" in the western part of the Netherlands who have been involved in broad urban educational programmes: school, parental education and participation, living…

Teaching Chinese students in an American university can be both challenging and rewarding. Cultural and language differences can lead to some superficial confusion and interpretational problems. However, the vast differences in the ways Chinese students view the role of the public sector, as compared to the US, can mean that the instructors and…

A big challenge to wise administrative reform is to ensure that reform does not threaten the organizational stability needed to ensure effective policy implementation and service delivery. There are of course many challenges, but this a vitally important one, and it is a main aim of this article to emphasize it. The article first presents a brief…

This paper advances a composite indicator called urban environmental virtuosity index (UEVI), in order to measure the efforts made by public local bodies in applying an ecosystem approach to urban management. UEVI employs the less exploited process-based selection criteria for representing the original concept of virtuosity, providing makes a…

A pilot controlled before-and-after design was used to assess the impact of a new master-level course in evidence-informed policy making on students' basic knowledge in evidence-based practice. The primary outcome variable was the mean percentage of pre-post improvement on the knowledge test. In the treatment group, the mean percentage of pre-post…

The past two decades have witnessed increasing global acceptance of the important role that capable leadership plays in education reform and school improvement. Consequently, policymakers internationally have actively sought means of strengthening capacity for school-level leadership, with a particular focus on the design of more effective…

A current challenge to public managers is the lack of a well-defined role. How can masters programmes prepare managers to live up to an undefined function? In this paper we argue that the lack of role description enhances the need for reflexivity and we show how it is done at Master in Educational Management (MEM). MEM provides the participating…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of principals in light of public management reforms taking place in the German educational system and in reference to the empirical patterns uncovered by the papers contained in the Special Issue. Policy makers have created new expectations and new technologies that seem to suggest to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate workplace learning among municipal officers in the high-learning-demanding organizational context of their work practice in the first year of mandate. Design/methodology/approach: A before-and-after quasi-experimental design was used to assess the effect of time of work practice on learning work…

This article points to the adverse circumstances in which public administration education and training has to take place in developing countries, more specifically in South Africa. This is especially seen in the combination of scarce resources and rapidly increasing enrolment. The consequence thereof is that the didactics of education and training…

Higher education accrediting bodies are increasing the emphasis on assessing student learning outcomes as opposed to teaching methodology. The purpose of this article is to describe the process used by Troy University's Master of Public Administration program to change their assessment approach from a course learning objective perspective to a…

The purpose of this article is to provide an assessment and analysis of public sector performance contracting as a performance management tool in Kenya. It aims to demonstrate that performance contracting remains a viable and important tool for improving public sector performance as a key element of the on-going public sector transformation…

To improve environmental hygiene in public housing estates in Hong Kong, the Housing Department launched the Marking Scheme for Tenancy Enforcement in Public Housing Estates in 2003. The marking scheme operates as a penalty-point system where sitting tenants will be expelled from their public housing units if they receive penalty points up to a…

In this paper, it is argued that the existing conceptual framework of "language policy" should be expanded to include perspectives from the emerging field of "language governance", as the latter pays attention to the multi-faceted internal and external contexts in which institutions and organisations seek to develop language…