MG402      Half Unit
Public Management: A Design-Oriented Approach

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The public needs capabilities from public organizations, such as those to implement major shifts in public policies; to provide safe and otherwise adequate public services; to deliver technological and programmatic systems through projects; to create credible scientific information for public and policy use; and to deter corruption across the public sector. Furnishing capability to accomplish such purposes requires management of public organisations, and, management, in turn, involves using professional knowledge and skilful abilities to devise mechanisms that will work in challenging situations and settings. 

In this course, students will learn how to engage creatively – as designers and managers -- with practical theories and case-based knowledge in creating mechanisms that work in enabling public organisations to play their crucial roles in government. In particular, the course will focus on how a design-orientation in professional practice can be directed toward overcoming specific conditions and widespread tendencies that work against any specific public organisation’s success in furnishing the capabilities required of it.  Case studies will be used to develop this design-orientation, while also expanding students’ familiarity with varied roles played by public organisations, e.g., using regulation to promote waste-reduction in a region’s industrial sector; using international cooperation projects to promote advanced technological education in a partner country; using design-projects to develop systems and operational procedures for performing sanitation functions in delivering a mass-gathering event attended by millions; using project organisations and tools to control the use of public money and authority in infrastructure projects; and using national-level auditing and criminal investigation tools to combat corruption at the local level.  In this sense, and by using pedagogical methods common to professional schools of public policy and management, the course is emblematic of the design-oriented professional discipline of Public Management.  (Additional course content information on the Course Moodle site.)

30 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

In its Ethics Code, LSE upholds a commitment to intellectual freedom. This means we will protect the freedom of expression of our students and staff and the right to engage in healthy debate in the classroom.

Contribute to a group project that recovers designs in the teaching case on the implementation of the Brazil in Action Program (up to 3500 words).

Publications:

E Bardach, ‘The Extrapolation Problem’ (2004); M Barzelay, Public Management as a Design-Oriented Professional Discipline (2019); M. Barzelay, et al.,‘Good Trouble in the Academy: Inventing Design-focused Case Studies about Public Management as an Archetype of Policy Design Research’ (2021); M Barzelay & C Campbell, Preparing for the Future: Strategic Planning in the U.S. Air Force (2003); M Barzelay & S Seabra, ‘Auditing Against Corruption’ (2020); J Bryson, Strategic Planning in Public and Nonprofit Organizations (2017); T Cellucci, ‘Developing Operational Requirements’ (2008);  J Koopenjan, et. al., ‘Competing Management Approaches in Large Engineering Projects’ (2011); B Lawson, What Designers Know (2004); J Tendler & S Freedheim, ‘Trust in a Rent-Seeking Society’ (1994); J van Aken et. al., Problem-Solving in Organizations (2007); D Vaughan, ‘Organizational Rituals of Risk and Error’ (2005); S. Glennan, The New Mechanical Philosophy (2017).

Teaching case studies: 

‘Brazil in Action’; ‘Managing Long-Term Organizational Collaborations in International Development: The Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology’; ‘Managing a Governmental Campaign for a Mega-Event: Strategic Planning for the 2019 Kumbh Mela Hindu Festival in Uttar Pradesh’; ‘Paying the Bills in the Junta of Andalusia’; ‘Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project’; and ‘Assessing Strategic Risks: Col. Jim Engle and the U.S. Air Force Futures Games’.

Course participation (10%)

Case analysis / study (45%)

Essay (45%)

Case analysis: Write an individual case-analysis recovers designs in the teaching case on the implementation of the Brazil in Action Program (3000 maximum word length). 

Essay: Write an essay responding to one of several available topics, which will demonstrate the ability to use the analysis of cases that recover designs in public programs in enhancing practical frameworks in Public Management (3000 maximum word length). 

Class participation: Based on attendance and contribution to class discussions including in groups.  Completing a self-reporting form is required (10%). 

For detailed assessment information, including all deadlines and timings, please see the relevant course Moodle page. Assessment timings will be available at the start of each term.