The introduction of dualistic administration in the municipal government in the Netherlands in 2002 created the profession of the registrar. This article contains a description of the way Dutch municipal registrars fill in their office nowadays. The research shows that registrars deal with a wide range of tasks, that can be divided in four task fields: secretarial tasks, facilitating, representing and advising councillors. In the filling in of these task fields several profiles of registrars arise. So the basic registrar mainly organizes council meetings and reports on these meetings. The basic registrar plus performs the same tasks, but is also active in a few other task fields. The strategic advisor is the most active on all task fields. There are some significant differences between the three profiles when it comes to the importance of registrars to their activities, their value orientations and their competences. Contextual factors are hardly important, except the size of the municipality. It is also remarkable that the registrar has shown little activity with respect to two developments that are becoming increasingly important for municipal councils: regionalization and socialization of local government. |
Bestuurswetenschappen
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Bestuur en wetenschap als tandem?! |
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Auteursinformatie |
Artikel |
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SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
Artikel |
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SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
There is a lot of criticism on the profile descriptions in which Dutch municipalities express the requirements which they put on a new mayor to be appointed. They would look too much like each other and contain few real choices. This article describes the requirements Dutch municipalities put on candidate mayors and analyses the discriminatory power of profile descriptions. A content analysis of 231 profile descriptions and talks with five focus groups show that municipal councils especially ask for integer networkers and linkers, who are above all effective, empathic and communicative. The differences between municipalities in this respect are small and the municipal size hardly makes any difference. Municipal councils do not fully utilize the opportunities in profile descriptions for local customization and barely translate the local conditions into specific requirements. The explanation for this is partly located in isomorphic processes, that lead to uniformity: municipal councils follow the guide of the national government for the appointment process and copy texts from each other. At the same time the office of the mayor in the Netherlands asks for a specific content, that is translated into the profile descriptions. It is therefore the question if the criticism on profile descriptions is fully justified. They do have discriminatory power, although municipal councils could make much sharper choices in what they expect from a mayor, appropriate to the challenges the municipality faces. |
Artikel |
Leidende principes voor bestuurlijke innovatie: naar een robuust referentiekader |
Auteurs | Frank Hendriks |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
In administrative practice as well as in administrative science administrative innovation is a much desired good. In this article the author makes an attempt to describe the good, or the better, that can be pursued with administrative innovation, much sharper than has been done in the past. The result is a substantive framework for qualifying and evaluating administrative innovations. The article arises from a special interaction research, that started with a question from administrative practice (about the leading principles for administrative innovation in the Dutch municipality of Breda) and ended in a confrontation between desiderata from administrative practice on the one hand and foundations from administrative science on the other hand. Finally, these six leading principles emerged out of the investigation: responsiveness, productivity, involvement, counter-pressure, creativity, and good governance. The author also discusses how the resulting framework can be used and understood. The framework is robust because it not only is theoretically (the literature on governance and democratic innovation) inspired and founded, but also recognizable and manageable for administrative practice. |
Discussie |
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Auteurs | Rik Reussing |
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
Exactly a hundred years ago Jos van der Grinten wrote an article in De Beiaard (a catholic magazine) with which he established his name as early administrative scientist. In this respect he is an important ally of Gerrit van Poelje, who is generally recognized to be the founder of the (local) administrative sciences in the Netherlands. This essay discusses the most important themes in the work of Van der Grinten against the background of the early debate about the quality of local administration in the Netherlands. The essay also looks into his place in the history of (local) administrative sciences, not only nationally in relation to Gerrit van Poelje, but also internationally in relation to the American writer Frank Goodnow. In 1923 Van der Grinten (until his early death in 1932) was the first professor of State and Administrative Law at the new Catholic University of Nijmegen. As the city secretary of Nijmegen he played an important role at the arrival of this university to Nijmegen, but in this period he also contributed to the (local) administrative sciences. In this sense he is the forerunner of Public Administration, first at the Legal Department and later at the Social Department of the Radboud University in Nijmegen. |
Discussie |
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SamenvattingAuteursinformatie |
This essay describes how municipal councillors can make the difference in the multiple democracy, in which forms of representative and participative democracy touch upon each other. The essay has three parts. The first part addresses the questions: what do you make politics of, and how do you fill in your role as municipal councillor in this multiple democracy? The second part is about the question: where to steer and control in the local interplay? The final part of the essay discusses what forms there are and at what moments they can be used. The key argument of the authors is that municipal councillors can make the difference by: (a) working on social assignments and connecting to these social assignments the administrative and organizational assignment by setting priorities; (b) being responsible for the whole system (for the community and for the municipality); (c) steering on a democratic process on the basis of clear criteria; (d) ensuring appropriate forms per assignment and per policy phase; and (e) thereby also supervising implementation and management. |
Praktijk |
Internationale tijdschriften en boeken |
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Auteursinformatie |
Praktijk |
Stadshuis van Weert |
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Auteursinformatie |