- Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Karl Lofgren
Victoria University of Wellington, School of Government, Department Member
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Annual Conference of EGPA (European Group of Public Administration), Bucharest, Romania, 7-10 September 2011
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This study discusses the concept of employee resilience (ER), defined as the capability to use resources to continually adapt and flourish at work, even when faced with challenging circumstances. The concept is grounded in positive... more
This study discusses the concept of employee resilience (ER), defined as the capability to use resources to continually adapt and flourish at work, even when faced with challenging circumstances. The concept is grounded in positive psychology and conservation of resources (COR) theory and complements other concepts such as coping which describe employees and managers adapting to challenge and change. This study validates a scale of ER and examines attributes and job factors associated with heightened ER in public sector line managers. Study results show that heightened ER is associated with public service motivation (PSM), employees’ pro-social skills and constructive leadership by supervisors. ER is also associated with a climate for innovation. Theoretical and practical implications for strengthening employees’ resilience in public organizations are discussed.
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The governance of future built environments requires novel interdisciplinary discourses to address the complex needs within cities. Smart Heritage, the novel convergence of smart city and heritage disciplines, is one such... more
The governance of future built environments requires novel interdisciplinary discourses to address the complex needs within cities. Smart Heritage, the novel convergence of smart city and heritage disciplines, is one such interdisciplinary discourse that local governments can leverage for unique perspectives and capabilities. To deliver interdisciplinary discourses like Smart Heritage, it is the task for local governments to orchestrate the knowledge, processes, and initiatives between the two contributing disciplines and apply them to their local context and needs. However, as a novel discourse, no academic research is present on how smart city and heritage disciplines converge to deliver Smart Heritage within local government. This paper reports on the interdisciplinary knowledge, processes, and initiatives between the smart city and heritage disciplines in local government. The research conducted interviews with smart city and heritage advisors from three local governments in Aus...
Public engagement is a gendered experience, whether offline or online, something which is reflected in women’s experiences of social media. In this article, we seek to systematically explore the experiences from politically engaged women... more
Public engagement is a gendered experience, whether offline or online, something which is reflected in women’s experiences of social media. In this article, we seek to systematically explore the experiences from politically engaged women twitter users in New Zealand in order to draw some lessons, through a thematic and interpretative analytical approach, at four different strategic levels on how to deflect intimidating and aggressive behaviour. We conclude that understanding strategically how structural social locations like gender effect the ability to contribute to political participation and engagement, if addressed, can produce more inclusive and productive online political and policy spaces. Further, this strategic approach involves connecting together different levels of response to online negativity such as platform tools, space-curation, and monitoring, having these made coherent with each other, as well as with this strategic understanding of how structural social location ...
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Hvilke nye og gamle typer af sporgsmal har svenske politikkere defineret i forhold til den nye informationsteknologi? Kraever nye typer af sammenlignelige problemer og losninger nye institutionelle former for politisk styring og... more
Hvilke nye og gamle typer af sporgsmal har svenske politikkere defineret i forhold til den nye informationsteknologi? Kraever nye typer af sammenlignelige problemer og losninger nye institutionelle former for politisk styring og styringsmidler? I artiklen beskrives den grundlaeggende diskurs som denne fremtidsstyring formuleres indenfor. Desuden folger en kortlaegning af, hvordan denne diskurs har resulteret i nye institutionelle former for politisk styring og i hvilke "netvaerk" den har kommet til at spille en stor rolle. Artiklen viser, at diskursen om IT har haft en konkret betydning for organisering af policyomradet IT. Med en mere traditionel made at se pa styring kan man samtidig sporge om denne organisering har vaeret saerlig effektiv.
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This paper investigates the potential utility of leadership branding for the public sector by applying it as a sense-making approach to recent cross-sector leadership development initiatives that have been launched in the New Zealand... more
This paper investigates the potential utility of leadership branding for the public sector by applying it as a sense-making approach to recent cross-sector leadership development initiatives that have been launched in the New Zealand State sector over the past eight years. We critically assess the collective effort to build a new, distinctive and positive leadership brand for the New Zealand public service aimed at improving the material and perceived performance of the public sector. Based on a discursive analysis of documentary evidence produced by the central actors within the NZ government who are charged with leadership development across the state sector, we have sought to investigate the discursive practices of leadership roles and identities. Specifically, we ask two questions: what have been the dominant discursive constructions of leadership that have been promulgated within the New Zealand state sector? To what extent do these serve to strengthen or weaken a compelling le...
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Uppsatsen ar en kunskapsoversikt av den statsvetenskapliga forskningen i implementering med utgangspunkt i huvudsakligen Soren Winters integrerade modell. Efter att ha lokaliserat implementeringsforskningens placering i dagslaget sa... more
Uppsatsen ar en kunskapsoversikt av den statsvetenskapliga forskningen i implementering med utgangspunkt i huvudsakligen Soren Winters integrerade modell. Efter att ha lokaliserat implementeringsforskningens placering i dagslaget sa genomgas olika aspekter av implementering utifran forskningen. Avslutningsvis presenteras nagra rekommendationer till beslutsfattare.
The European Union (EU) has prominently been characterised as a regulatory state in the sense that perhaps the most significant authority of the EU rise out of its almost irresistible rule-making abilities. The rule-making abilities of... more
The European Union (EU) has prominently been characterised as a regulatory state in the sense that perhaps the most significant authority of the EU rise out of its almost irresistible rule-making abilities. The rule-making abilities of the EU are typified by having little or no direct budget ...
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While project management (PM) has become an almost constituting element of modern public organisations, empirical research on PM in the civil service, let alone government offices, has been overlooked. In this article, we will on the... more
While project management (PM) has become an almost constituting element of modern public organisations, empirical research on PM in the civil service, let alone government offices, has been overlooked. In this article, we will on the basis of public organisation recruitment efforts illustrated through a textual analysis of job adverts for the Danish Civil Service, analyse how the individual roles related to project management in civil service organisation from 1982 until 2011 has emerged in terms of the following dimensions: a) the project managerial role, b) required competences for PM, c) whether the role of PM refer to internal or external projects, d) which stages of the policy cycle which are subject to PM, e) and whether we are talking about permanent project management organisations or just temporary projects. These questions are then applied on a minor empirical textual analysis of job adverts in a Danish professional journal in the period of 1982-2011 with the aim of genera...
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One recurrent narrative in the discussion about managerial public sector reforms is the growth in organizational professionals as a response to new accountability regimes. New Zealand has experienced modest growth rates in the general... more
One recurrent narrative in the discussion about managerial public sector reforms is the growth in organizational professionals as a response to new accountability regimes. New Zealand has experienced modest growth rates in the general public sector workforce. Less studied, though, is whether the composition of the public sector workforce has changed, with an increase in organizational functions supportive to management. Based on descriptive workforce data, followed by follow-up interviews, this article presents a multifaceted and complex picture of a growing new public bureaucracy with the main task of managing chains of accountability.
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Research methods and designs from the social sciences and beyond can, and should, be applied in research directed at EU affairs. The purpose of this edited collection is twofold:(1) to provide a state-of-the-art examination of social... more
Research methods and designs from the social sciences and beyond can, and should, be applied in research directed at EU affairs. The purpose of this edited collection is twofold:(1) to provide a state-of-the-art examination of social science research methods in EU studies and (2) to provide innovative guidelines to the advancement of more inclusive and empirically sensitive research methods in EU studies.
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The advent of digital social media in China has altered our understanding of who sets the policy agenda and forms public opinion. Using text mining analysis of more than 74,000 Weibo user comments (over 4 million words) on 6 years'... more
The advent of digital social media in China has altered our understanding of who sets the policy agenda and forms public opinion. Using text mining analysis of more than 74,000 Weibo user comments (over 4 million words) on 6 years' worth of The People's Daily media coverage, this study investigates social media interactions on family planning policy issues between the state-run news media and individual users in China. Our analysis demonstrates that Weibo postings about the topic by government-run news networks and comments by the general public are affecting each other, but also presenting partially reverse or bottom-up agenda-setting effects. Through latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) modeling, we identified major latent topic sets (women's right to work, family culture/tradition, law/regulation, and social welfare/wellbeing) and found that Weibo users' main concerns on China's family planning have changed over time. We also found that gender differences affect ...
How do policy workers actually use academic research and advice? While there are several recent studies regarding this question from other Westminster jurisdictions (e.g. Talbot and Talbot, 2014, for the UK; Head et al., 2014, for... more
How do policy workers actually use academic research and advice? While there are several recent studies regarding this question from other Westminster jurisdictions (e.g. Talbot and Talbot, 2014, for the UK; Head et al., 2014, for Australia; Amara, Ouimet and Landry, 2004 and Ouimet et al., 2010, Canada), similar academic studies have been rare in New Zealand. So far, most of the local research in this field has been conducted by the prime minister’s chief science advisor and the Office of the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Committee, with the particular instrumental purpose of improving the government’s ministries and agencies’ ‘use of evidence in both the formation and evaluation of policy’. However, none of these studies have asked how, and to what extent, policy workers in government are utilising academic research in their everyday work.
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This aim of a more integrated e-government, which goes beyond the establishment of ’single’ governmental websites, calls for both horizontal, as well as vertical integration of otherwise separate public agencies and au- thorities who are... more
This aim of a more integrated e-government, which goes beyond the establishment of ’single’ governmental websites, calls for both horizontal, as well as vertical integration of otherwise separate public agencies and au- thorities who are supposed to collaborate towards ’joint’ and ’needs-based’ electronic solutions to the bene t of citizens. Consequently, many of the current endeavours of integrating government information systems is best described in terms of ’network governance’ in which interdependent, yet autonomous, agents through in- stitutionalised network arrangements, are in charge for the actual implementation of the policy. While many authors have described this implementation processes in purely technical interoperability terms, the article frames this development as a policy process of governing self-regulating networks. is paper is primarily a theoretical think piece in a systematic framework for the analysis of meta-governing the policy process of electronic governmen...
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During the 1990s a new policy area - ICT-policy - evolved in Swedish politics. It manifested itself through a number of unprecedented initiatives from the government including a new type of institutional set-up. These initiatives all... more
During the 1990s a new policy area - ICT-policy - evolved in Swedish politics. It manifested itself through a number of unprecedented initiatives from the government including a new type of institutional set-up. These initiatives all encompassed an underlying idea of governing the new policy ...
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In Denmark, as elsewhere, the past 10 years have witnessed an increasing interest in the political aspects surrounding the introduction of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in both academic, as well as political... more
In Denmark, as elsewhere, the past 10 years have witnessed an increasing interest in the political aspects surrounding the introduction of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in both academic, as well as political circles. However, if one disregards the ...