2005 Media Releases
Wednesday, 30 November 2005
Launch of new book, 'Public Policy: the Competitive Framework'
The Deputy Speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, Mr Peter Loney, will host a function at Parliament House on 14 December to celebrate the first anniversary of La Trobe University’s Public Sector Governance and Accountability Research Centre (PSGARC).
At the function, a new book on public policy by Dr Ewen Michael, 'Public Policy: the Competitive Framework', will be launched.
Dr Michael is a senior lecturer in economics and policy in La Trobe’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management within the Faculty of Law and Management.
He was the School’s deputy-head from its inception in 1996 until January 2004, and has since taken up the role of PSGARC Deputy Director. The publication represents the first book produced by the Centre.
Dr Michael has considerable industrial and academic experience, and has written extensively over the past 20 years on issues concerning the economic impacts of privatisation, public policy, transportation, tourism and community services.
His current research focuses on the development of niche market clusters in rural areas to enhance opportunities for growth and employment in regional communities.
Published by Oxford University Press, 'Public Policy: the Competitive Framework', provides a new interpretation for the analysis of public decision-making.
It assumes that most of the issues that affect public policy are market-based, in that a society demands changes to improve its own welfare. In this sense, much of policy-making is driven by small and incremental effects within segments of the market, and that it is the impacts on these small segments which give rise to the demands of stakeholders within the community and the formation of interest groups.
Dr Michael argues, however, that the paradigm of competition sets out the guidelines for how groups within a society can interact with those who control the public decision-making process.
The book deals with the complexities of policy and the democratic process, but it has been designed to be read and used by students, managers and analysts within the business community, for they too are critical contributors to the policy-making process.
Rather than rely on the discourses of the social sciences, the book attempts to explain how a democratic society makes its collective decisions by working with terms and concepts that are more familiar to the business practitioner – from economics, management and marketing.
In this sense, it is a contentious interpretation of social democracy for the 21st century.