Professor Michael Barzelay

I came to the LSE in 1995 as a joint appointment between the Interdisciplinary Institute of Management (now MES Group) and the Government Department. I am currently Professor of Public Management based in the MES Group. Before joining the LSE, I was associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

My substantive research centers on public management reform and the management of strategy development and innovation within governmental organizations.

The public management reform work has culminated in a symposium issue of the International Public Management Journal (Vol. 6. No. 3, 2003).  Other publications within this line of research are my book on The New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue  and "Explaining Public Management Policy Change: Germany in Comparative Perspective,". I have recently compared this research approach - called institutional processualism - with three neo-institutional approaches to the study of public management policy change ("From New Institutionalism to Institutional Processualism: Advancing Knowledge about Public Management Policy Change".) This line of research began with my 1992 book, Breaking Through Bureaucracy: A New Vision for Managing in Government.

The research on strategy development and innovation within government organizations has culminated in Preparing for the Future: Strategic Planning in the U.S. Air Force, which received the National Academy of Public Administration's Louis Brownlow Book Award in 2004.Several years ago I published a book on a similar theme in Spanish, entitled Gestión Pública Estratégica. My current work along these lines focuses on developing innovative routines of performance planning (in the U.S. Air Force Materiel Command), central oversight of implementation of strategic infrastructure projects (Brazil’s Federal Government), and strategic planning and programming (European Commission).

In recent years I have been developing an articulated approach to research design for instrumental case studies of processes. This effort is reflected in an article in the International Public Management Review; a revised conference paper on extrapolation-oriented research and case research methods: "Learning from Second Hand Experience"; a methodological guide (written in Spanish) Guia Metodologica;  and a regular lecture in an LSE course on fundamentals of research design.