Redesigning the Work of Human Services

(Hardback)

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This work explores alternative organisational designs for the delivery of human services - designs that emphasise collaborative governance and partnerships among public and private agencies, local control and responsibility for results, and the use of innovative information, planning, and community capacity-building technologies. The book redefines the debate about whether human services should be privatised or not. The author suggests that the basic task of human services - to enable families to socialise the young - is one that can neither be fulfilled effectively by the state nor by private agencies. Rather, carefully crafted public-private partnerships, when combined with new accountability mechanisms and the sophisticated use of emerging information technologies, are likely to offer more in the way of effective, efficient and appropriate human services. Because this work is grounded in the literature on both human and business services, the author's suggestions for major redesign are comprehensive but intelligently qualified.

Reviews

In this comprehensive and scholarly book, O'Looney outlines the rationale and thought processes for delivering services to children and their families through integrated, flexible, community-based, collaborative systems, and approach that would replace the confuding and largely unsucessful maze of categorically funded programs and orgainzations....For scholars and students of cross-system approaches, this work is encyclopedic... Upper-division undergraduates and above.-Choice
"In this comprehensive and scholarly book, O'Looney outlines the rationale and thought processes for delivering services to children and their families through integrated, flexible, community-based, collaborative systems, and approach that would replace the confuding and largely unsucessful maze of categorically funded programs and orgainzations....For scholars and students of cross-system approaches, this work is encyclopedic... Upper-division undergraduates and above."-Choice

Author Bio

JOHN O'LOONEY is Public Service Assistant at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, University of Georgia, and a consultant to local and state governments in human resource management, organizational development, program evaluation, and applied research. A member of the Georgia Research and Evaluation Team, O'Looney is the author of numerous articles and studies, and a book on undesirable land use, Economic Development and Environmental Control (Quorum, 1995).