Unveiling management trends in the public sector: A literature review and research agenda

Central governments are tasked with delivering effective and efficient public services that rely on the general population's fiscal contributions. To achieve economic and social goals, the public authorities enact policies and make use of public organisations and facilities to implement these policies. The latter need to be appropriate for each specific public, environment and time. Political, social, management, financial and environmental events, among others, can trigger policy change, so officials’ strategies need to be adjusted to match changing contexts.

Policy design must thus consider the relevant settings, while simultaneously paying attention to which assets are required to implement policies and the liabilities this process will imply. Public policies depend on taxes paid by resident populations. The better the policies are designed and the more reasonable the required fiscal contributions are, the more easily people will understand policies’ social and financial beneficial impacts on their lives. In recent years, scholars have been paying more attention to the public sector's tax policies (Altshuler & Goodspeed, 2015), decentralisation policies (Baskaran & Feld, 2013), government finances and accounting issues (Buckwalter et al., 2014).

Over the years, management, finance and economic issues have been addressed, and authors have expanded this body of knowledge from different perspectives regarding the public sector's varied challenges in these areas. The coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic's effect on financial markets may mean that governments will have to design new public sector instruments to assist these markets and the real economy's recovery (Chubarova et al., 2020; Kovac et al., 2020).

To ensure sustainable research paths focused on the public sector, new studies should be grounded in previous contributions and follow scholars’ suggestions for future research, so that researchers can address the issues that have received inadequate attention.

The present study aims to provide scholars and practitioners with a bird's eye view of the literature on management, finance and economic issues in the public sector. Thus, the public sector organisations are the focus of this research, meaning that their particularities will be addressed in critical analysis, namely, problems of transparency and corruption (Ochrana & Pavel, 2013), as well as their expected collaborative approaches to policymaking (Batory & Svensson, 2019).

This research focuses on answering the following questions: –

RQ1: What thematic clusters stand out in the literature on management topics in the public sector?

To address these questions, an extensive automated analysis of the literature indexed in the Scopus database was conducted and the scientific articles containing the most significant terms in each cluster were examined more closely. The results contribute to the existing knowledge on management, finance, and economic issues in the public sector, bring up future research directions about these topics, and help governments design better public policies.

The number of publications has been consistently increasing over the years (see Figure 2). The oldest year of publication found in the database is 1950, meaning that this was the date when studies started being published. Despite the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was when the most research addressing public sector issues was published.

Fig. 2:

The documents in the dataset are spread across 2,898 different journals and books. Table 3 identifies the publications in which the largest number have appeared (i.e. more than 100 documents). The top two journals have published almost 400 documents each.

Regarding the contributions’ influence, the results show that a total of 287,492 citations refer to the documents in the dataset, which means that these sources were cited an average of more than 16 times each. However, a significant proportion of the documents received only one citation (i.e. 2,034 out of 17,928). The findings indicate that only four publisher agencies owned the 10 most productive journals (Table 4). Four of them were from Elsevier and three from Taylor & Francis.

Most authors were part of a research team, so about 63% of the documents were written by two authors or more. Overall, these scholars generally formed teams composed of two to four authors. The data collected over the last seven decades indicate that collaborations have become a success-driven strategy among scholars in this discipline (Figure 3).

Fig. 3:

This success is shown in the average of citations received from the articles published by research teams (mean = 17.4) versus the ones published by single researchers (mean = 13.8). Indeed, the t-test for independent samples assuming unequal variances rejected the null hypothesis of the equality of the population means (p < 0.001).

The co-word map generated by VOSviewer software's automated analysis is shown in Figure 4. VOSviewer's algorithm grouped the themes identified into six clusters. The terms within each cluster are presented in larger circles if the term's frequency in the dataset is higher, based on full counting statistics.

Fig. 4:

The six identified clusters within the literature on the public sector can be labelled as follows: economic growth during crises (cluster 1), reforms for the future (cluster 2), human relations (cluster 3), successful practices (cluster 4), partnerships (cluster 5) and public banking services (cluster 6). Table 5 lists the most frequent terms in each cluster and each term's number of occurrences.

Cluster 1 (shown in red in Figure 4) includes 47 terms related to research on economic growth during crises. The studies addressing these topics have investigated determinants of cost inefficiency (Sakata, 2004), developed cost estimation models (Tas & Yaman, 2005) and tested governments’ growth models (Spann, 1977). Researchers have found evidence that government policies reduce operational costs, increase the number of firms in the market and create incentives to innovate (Baerlocher, 2021). After investigating public sector external debt's impact on economic growth, Silva (2020) concluded that external debt should be reduced and assigned to tradable sectors.

Regarding economic growth goals, Krieckhaus (2002) asserts that public sector efforts are crucial to mobilising financial resources for investment. Investment is overall a key term in this cluster. The studies addressing topics in this cluster have investigated the results of public investment in education (Patrinos, Psacharopoulos & Tansel, 2020; Stern, 2017), research and development (Walwyn, 2007) and innovation (Heher, 2006). Authors have also contributed to identifying return on investment metrics in the public sector (Cuganesan & Lacey, 2011), including efforts to expand the literature on public sector performance measurement.

Cluster 2 (shown in green in Figure 4) includes 33 terms that fall within research on reforms for the future, in which accounting, response, tourism, new public management, public sector reform, future and transition appear frequently. This cluster covers studies of accounting reforms (Christensen & Rocher, 2021; Cuadrado-Ballesteros & Bisogno, 2021; Jayasinghe et al., 2020) that highlight opportunities in this process (Koeberle, 2005). The authors focusing on topics in this cluster have a special interest in European countries’ response strategies (Simonet, 2010), as well as those of Australia (Fraser-Baxter & Medvecky, 2018) and the United Kingdom (Male & Kelly, 1989). For the European nations, scholars have compared governments’ different approaches to controlling healthcare costs. Other researchers investigating Australia's policies have highlighted the local media's important role in public and political responses to environmental issues. The final set of authors has discussed public sector clients’ organisational responses to value management techniques and their implications for the United Kingdom's construction industry.

Cluster 3 (shown in dark blue in Figure 4) comprises 29 terms covering research in the human relations field. The main studies addressing topics in this cluster have focused on organisational human resources issues, namely, leadership, satisfaction and motivation. Tran, Nguyen and Hoang (2021) investigated the effects of leadership on accountability and public sector financial reporting. Various scholars have studied the cause–effect relationships between human resource management practices, organisational commitment and public organisation employees’ satisfaction (Blom, 2020; McGrandle, 2019), providing evidence of policies’ role in promoting job satisfaction.

Cluster 4 (shown in yellow in Figure 4) includes 26 terms from research specifically concentrating on Africa's reality, although not always exclusively. African studies have explored government legislation and policies’ effectiveness in terms of promoting equal opportunities for men and women to move into senior and top management positions, reporting that no progress has been made and even that women's advancement has actually regressed (Mathur-Helm, 2005). Similarly, analysing policies’ effectiveness but with respect to anti-corruption practices, Manyaka and Nkuna (2014) conclude that South Africa's public sector faces major challenges that prevent the legislative framework and strategies for combating corruption from being effective. Problems include, among others, inadequate application of legislation, insufficient political will and deployments, and an absence of meritocratic systems.

A substantial number of publications related to this cluster have explored success factors of and barriers to adopting systems and practices, as well as related opportunities. Researchers have detected differences between private and public sector organisations in their perceptions of critical success factors’ significance and degree of development regarding the adoption of enterprise resource planning. Variations are apparently due to organisations’ ability to tackle problems (Seres, Tumbas, Matkovic, & Sakal, 2019). In their comparative study, Céu Alves and Matos (2013) confirmed that private and public sector organisations find opportunities to engage in enterprise resource planning, through which these entities can obtain real-time information useful to decision-makers and can integrate business applications.

Studies related to this cluster have also provided evidence of the public sector's adoption of knowledge management systems. The technology–organisation–environment framework is considered to be the best conceptual model for investigating adoption of knowledge management systems because it considers organisational and environmental contexts (Alatawi, Dwivedi, & Williams, 2013). When the public and private sectors were compared, knowledge management was found to be perceived as a management philosophy in the public sector. The latter has made more advances in knowledge construction, although public organisations are more dependent on people-based embodied knowledge (McAdam & Reid, 2000).

Cluster 5 (shown in purple in Figure 4) comprises 18 terms from research on partnerships, in particular, strategies for successful public–private partnerships. Academics have explored different data analysis techniques for identifying and characterising success in these partnerships through studies on Egypt's education sector (Helmy, Khourshed, Wahba & El Bary, 2020), South Africa's water and tourism infrastructure projects (Dithebe, Aigbavboa, Thwala & Oke, 2019; Tshehla, 2018) and Ethiopia's road projects (Debela, 2019). In contrast, other investigations have sought to determine why public–private partnerships sometimes fail in the transport sector (Soomro & Zhang, 2016) or for prison contracts (English & Walker, 2004). The results contribute to a better understanding of how both partners’ decisions and actions affect their ability to solve the problems arising in this type of partnership.

Cluster 5 also highlights scholars’ analyses of performance measurement based on comparative studies. Previous research in this area has provided different perspectives on performance management's applicability in the public sector (Borst et al., 2014). In addition, studies have concentrated on how practices are borrowed from other management areas (e.g. marketing) (Modell & Wiesel, 2008) or how performance differs around the world with respect to public-funded and development organisations (Gangopadhyay et al., 2018).

Finally, Cluster 6 (shown in light blue in Figure 4) includes eight terms from research on public banking services. These publications are especially common from 2012 onwards following the financial crisis that started with banks’ excessive risk-taking. These topics’ greater concentration since the crisis is visible in the co-word map overlay (see Figure 5), in which terms in this cluster are mainly in light green and yellow.

Fig. 5:

The present study's results reveal that this cluster's topics are especially of interest to researchers focused on India's public sector, as shown by the significant number of studies they have published. Authors have assessed the global financial crisis's impact on this country's public sector banks (Bapat, 2012), commercial public sector bank capital and risk (Mohanty & Mahakud, 2018) and efficiency, returns to scale and changes in total factor productivity (Kumar, Charles & Mishra, 2016). Based on their empirical research, Kamble et al. (2011) also concluded that private banks are perceived to be superior in service quality dimensions compared to public sector banks with regard to effectiveness, access and tangibles. However, the latter cited scholars found that the public sector's banks are considered better in terms of price and reliability.

Previous systematic literature reviews of public sector–related studies identified two areas of knowledge: accounting and management. Researchers who reviewed publications on accounting in the public sector have concentrated on, in general, accounting themes and, more specifically, financial accounting and management accounting topics. In the field of management, scholars have underlined the need to expand research on subjects such as citizenship, control, innovation, human resources, marketing and performance. Table 6 presents a systematisation of the topics mentioned by scholars who have suggested more studies of the public sector are needed.

In accounting, scholars have pointed out that researchers need to conduct longitudinal studies of behavioural accounting in the higher education sector (Schmidt & Günther, 2016) and of accounting's creation of public value (Bracci, Papi, Bigoni, Deidda Gagliardo, & Bruns, 2019). A review of the research on non-financial reporting formats in public sector organisations confirmed that studies have failed to address sustainability reporting in the public healthcare sector (Manes-Rossi, Nicolò, & Argento, 2020). The process of adopting the International Public Sector Accounting Standards has also been underresearched. According to Schmidthuber et al. (2020), scholars must examine the adoption of accounting standards cross-nationally, carry out normative research and develop stronger theoretical foundations for studies on this topic. More work in this area could be especially important, given the evidence that accounting standards’ implementation alone may not facilitate comparisons of adopters’ financial reports (Hermosa del Vasto et al., 2019; Polzer et al., 2021).

In management accounting, cross-country and cross-sector analyses are evidently gaps that should be filled with further research. The findings could be particularly important to those seeking to improve performance-based budgeting in the public sector (Mauro, Cinquini, & Grossi, 2017). Scholars also need to pay attention to management accounting practices in this sector in emerging economies. van Helden & Uddin (2016) suggest that more studies will be necessary to develop a fuller understanding of how these practices are affected by the interplay between public management programmes and political, economic and cultural contexts.

In management research, public sector organisations and co-creation with citizens have been widely studied. Scholars have developed systematised research agendas in this area, including that future studies should focus on conceptual research to explore further the concepts of co-creation, bureaucratic red tape, public leadership and public service motivation (de Geus, Ingrams, Tummers, & Pandey, 2020). In addition, empirical research could offer a better understanding of why co-creation barriers exist and how they can be removed (Baptista, Alves, & Matos, 2020).

Internal auditing and management controls are also areas in which scholars suggest further research is needed. Future studies should include cross-country and cross-market analyses to uncover additional evidence at the international and regional levels and to understand cultural, institutional and demographic characteristics’ impacts on these controls (Nerantzidis, Pazarskis, Drogalas, & Galanis, 2020; van der Kolk, 2019). Public sector human resources have also received significant attention as comprehensive literature reviews have already been conducted of the literature on intellectual capital, talent and knowledge management. Franken et al. (2020) and Kravariti & Johnston (2020) call for more research on benchmarking better or worse talent management practices, as well as discussing how and why approaches’ success is context driven.

Intellectual capital is another area in which few longitudinal and empirical studies have been carried out or frameworks and models have been tested in specific public sector contexts (Dumay, Guthrie, & Puntillo, 2015). In addition, quite narrow specialisations are required when journals and researchers seek to address knowledge management topics, according to Massaro et al. (2015). The cited authors suggest studies in this field require cooperation among authors from different disciplines to develop a synthesis of the knowledge already published and conduct critical analyses of this information.

Researchers who have investigated branding in the public sector have also called for new frameworks that are more accurate and suitable for dealing with this sector's particular management challenges (Leijerholt, Biedenbach, & Hultén, 2019). Because performance management is high on public sector organisations’ agenda in times of decreasing resources, academics have conducted systematic literature reviews to map out paths for future research in this area. Business process management's critical success factors are further characterised as another important but underresearched area, particularly since few studies have been peer reviewed and published in leading journals (Syed, Bandara, French, & Stewart, 2018). Similarly, continuous improvement's critical success factors need more investigation but specifically with quantitative methods, such as in-depth interviews and questionnaires, to develop continuous improvement models for the public sector (Fryer, Antony, & Douglas, 2007).

Finally, regarding sustainability, Dal Mas et al. (2019) identified emerging topics, including strategy and entrepreneurship. The cited authors suggest academics should focus on output and outcome measures in the public sector in less-investigated public services and geographical areas. Long-term sustainability outcomes are also highlighted by these authors as needing additional research (Trireksani et al., 2021).

Drawing on the analysis of the literature, we propose an overarching map of the theoretical contributions in management in public sector organisations, which have not been mapped to date. The originality of this literature review lies in its analytical techniques that allowed to cover the content of the entire literature, avoiding providing insights based on only a sample. Thus, this study offers a consolidated view of theoretical and practices in the public sector field. Moreover, the study defines potential avenues towards addressing the sustainability and technological or human resource challenges in public sector.

The clusters identified in the entire sample of articles on the public sector that address accounting, finance and economics include active and non-active topics, providing scholars with a bird's eye view of this literature. The automatic computer analysis was complemented by traditional content analysis, which was applied to the documents covering topics related to each cluster. This in-depth analysis clarified which problems researchers have addressed in each area, how authors have employed empirical or conceptual approaches and what their main results are.

In addition to making contributions to theory, this study systematised the lessons learned in past decades, thereby assisting governments to design appropriate public policies for future challenges. More specifically, the analyses unveiled a cluster of knowledge about previous crises’ impacts on accounting, economics and finance, providing practitioners and policymakers with a bird's eye view of the literature and topics being addressed. These findings can help public sector decision-makers and professionals become more aware of the practices contributing to making administrations and their laws more efficient and effective, as well as opportunities and new ways to implement improvements.

The results comprise a pool of thematic clusters organised, so that they can be critically analysed by public sector practitioners in light of their specific contexts and challenges. This critical reflection could be crucial to finding the best tools to deal with the current COVID-19 pandemic, which involves a complex mix of health, economic and financial issues. Resilience and agility grounded in innovative management practices and accurate accounting systems are critical capacities with regard to responding to not only this crisis, but also the on-going public sector challenges such as climate change, demographic trends and health and well-being promotion.

This review's findings also provide an outline of suggested paths for future research defined by scholars who reviewed the literature on public sector accounting and management. These systematised guidelines for further studies have implications for future investigations of economics, finance and accounting in the public sector.

More recently, resilience and recovery have become the mottos for organisations and individuals who must deal with the massive challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these terms do not appear frequently in the literature on the public sector nor are they linked to any of the clusters identified. Scholars are evidently only now starting to address these topics. Researchers could investigate how accounting can help public sector organisations to increase their agility to change and adapt to crises and risks (Tallaki & Bracci, 2020) and to strengthen these entities’ organisational capacity to build more resilient systems (Mazzucato & Kattel, 2020). Also, clusters show research in different public sector tiers (e.g. central government, state government and municipalities) and different issues with the management field, which provide researchers with paths for conducting a more in-depth study of those tiers in a narrowed down perspective.

Finally, the methodology applied in the present study has implications for future reviews as it includes a search query and lexicon of terms referring to the public sector. These tools can be used in future research on the same topic to ensure that the sample of articles collected reflects the relevant body of literature.

The present study uses Scopus database for collecting data that is on the basis of the results, which is a large abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature used in similar studies. Nonetheless, some authors opt to consider more restricted databases (e.g. Web of Science) to only consider the bibliometric data included in periodicals with the greatest impact on their fields. Moreover, this study does not include grey literature (e.g. books, or thesis) because they are not documents from indexed peer-reviewed periodicals, but others studies consider that those publications may also be considered in some cases to compare the differences between white (peer reviewed) and grey literature (not peer reviewed) (Santos & Laureano, 2021).