Nakamura Ayako

Mechanisms for controlling government organizations have attracted major interest from public administration researchers. Cultural theory has been used as a tool to identify the core control approaches of individual organizations. Whereas major existing studies have applied the theory based on the cultural types using nominal-level measures, this article builds a novel set of interval measures, focusing on two fundamental factors of government control proposed by cultural theory: grid-group dimensions. The measures are applied to assess suicide risk control systems in the English (HMPS) and Japanese prison services (JPS). The results highlight the fatalistic approach in HMPS and egalitarian approach in JPS, as well as demonstrating the structural characteristics of each risk control system beyond nominal lists of control tools.

Coordinating organizations horizontally is a longstanding difficulty of public governance, often called departmentalism in central government systems. Several tools for horizontal coordination have previously been analysed but shared performance targets across departments have received relatively little attention. This article develops a control theory of shared performance target systems for horizontal coordination of departments consisting of 'director' (shared objective and target setting), 'detector' (shared monitoring of progress), and 'effector' (shared feedback to promote achievement of targets) components. The theory distinguishes between two kinds of shared targets: those promoting sequential coordination and simultaneous coordination among departments. The expectations of control theory are assessed for the Public Service Agreement (PSA) adopted in the United Kingdom. PSAs enabled a step change increase in discussion of shared policy objectives across departments. However, despite these benefits, the fundamentally separate broader ministerial and departmental accountability structures led to the setting of vague outcome targets, underdeveloped performance reporting, and fragmented delivery arrangements for shared targets.