Questões de Inglês - Palavras conectivas | Connective words para Concurso

A Free Press Needs You

By The Editorial Board

August 15, 2018

               In 1787, the year the Constitution was adopted in the USA, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to a friend, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

               That's how he felt before he became president, anyway. Twenty years later, after enduring the oversight of the press from inside the White House, he was less sure of its value. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” he wrote. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” 

           Jefferson's discomfort was, and remains, understandable. Reporting the news in an open society is an enterprise laced with conflict. His discomfort also illustrates the need for the right of free press he helped to preserve. As the founders believed from their own experience, a well-informed public is best equipped to root out corruption and, over the long haul, promotes liberty and justice. “Public discussion is a political duty,” the Supreme Court said in 1964. That discussion must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” and “may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

(www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/15/opinion/editorials/free-press-local -journalism-news-donald-trump.html?action=click&module=Trending& pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Trending. Adaptado.)

New Public Management Model

        The new public management model, which emerged in the 1980s, represented an attempt to make the public sector more business-like as well as to improve the efficiency of the Government, borrowed ideas and management models from the private sector. It emphasized the centrality of citizens who were the recipient of the services or customers to the public sector.

        New public management system also proposed a more decentralized control of resources. It explored other service delivery models so as to achieve better results, including a quasi-market structure where public and private service providers competed with each other in an attempt to provide better and faster services.

        The Core Themes for the New Public Management were:

1. A strong focus on financial control, value for money and increasing public sector efficiency;

2. A command and control mode of functioning, identifying and setting targets and continuous monitoring of public sector performance;

3. Introducing audits and controls at professional level, using transparent means to review public worker performance, setting benchmarks, using protocols to ameliorate public sector worker professional behaviour;

4. Greater customer orientation and responsiveness and increasing the scope of roles played by non-public sector providers;

5. Deregulating the labor market, replacing collective agreements to individual rewards packages combined with short term contracts;

6. Introducing new forms of corporate governance, introducing a board model of functioning and concentrating the power to the strategic core of the organization.

(www.managementstudyguide.com/new-public-management.htm. Adaptado.)

TEXT I

In Europe, Weber still rules

Statecrafting

Jul 13, 2016

Steven Van de Walle

True, many tools and management practices associated with the NPM such as staff performance talks or management by objectives have become very common. Across all countries, the almost 7000 top civil servants we surveyed list achieving results and ensuring an efficient use of resources among the most important roles they have. They are also in agreement that, compared to five years ago, the public sector has made major progress in terms of efficiency and service quality — two main objectives of the NPM.

There are ‘NPM champions’ — countries that have gone further than others in reforming the Weberian state. Think the UK or the Netherlands, where public employment is increasingly normalised, and delivery contracted out. But even there, the structures of traditional public administration remain firmly in place.

Some elements of the NPM are still mainly absent from current management practice in European countries. Internal steering by contract is not very common, and performance related pay is very rare despite the popularity in reform talk. The weak presence of flexible employment also shows that the Weberian model still dominates. Despite attempts to normalize public employment in some countries, civil servants still enjoy a unique statute. We also observed this during the fiscal crisis, where outright firing permanent civil servants or cutting salaries has been relatively rare.

For civil servants, referring issues upwards in the hierarchy is still the dominant response in situations when responsibilities or interests conflict with that of other organisations. European top civil servants consider the impartial implementation of laws and rules as one of their dominant roles, and largely prefer state provision of services over market provision, with the exception of the British, Danish, and Dutch.

There are clear country differences, with management ‘champions’ such as the UK, Estonia, Norway and the Netherlands, and more legalistic and traditional public administrations such as in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary and Spain. The adoption of newer reform ideas suggest that the Weberian state may now be in decline. Yet some of the other findings of the survey, reported above, show that Weberianism’s main ideas are still deeply embedded in European countries.

(Source: https://statecrafting.net/in-europe-weber-still-rulesa851866dbf02. Retrieved on January 21st, 2018)