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In 1995, Robert Behn introduced American public administration to the need for common “big questions” to become a significant academic discipline, similar to the physical sciences. Chinese civil service laws were just being promulgated then, and so the discussion that ensued in Public Administration Review and elsewhere was not particularly salient for China. The largely U.S. literature did not take an international or comparative turn, yet it later became an active conversation in the Chinese literature, which is struggling to deal with its own identity crisis and the value of its research. Developing the big questions of Chinese public management research is extremely relevant in today’s environment because China is the world’s second largest economy, and their civil service has had significant time to mature. Chinese researchers have recently called for the development of domestically embedded (i.e., Sinicized) big questions. This article discusses the relevance of Behn’s questions on micromanagement, motivation, and measurement in the Chinese context and proposes alternate wordings of Behn’s questions to make them meaningful within the Chinese cultural and institutional context (while avoiding suggestions of replacing the basic Chinese political structure). Our hope is this discussion will spark a lively debate among the relevant Chinese research community.

Public private partnerships (PPPs) have evolved as a strategic response to public sector resource deficits and for pooling technical, managerial, and financial resources from the private sector. In this article, we identify the key factors necessary for a collaborative management strategy and analyze the structural and operational issues of two infrastructure projects in Australia. This article explains how a PPP offers a different set of strategic options to deal with complex micromanagement issues and argues that the success of PPPs depends on the processes and actions used to cocreate managerial social capital, building mutual trust by sharing risks, responsibilities, and experience.

Managed care is increasingly subject to political micromanagement and to attacks in the press. Managed care is undergoing the kind of bureaucrat bashing familiar to government employees, because managed care plans are being asked to perform the same type of allocation of social resources (in this case, access to health care) typically conducted by government employees. In so doing, managed care has run afoul of two deeply ingrained American traditions: bureaucrat bashing and overhead democracy. This article uses a case study of managed care bashing to argue that private interests who perform a role in allocating social resources will be subject to the same type of criticism government employees face in allocating social resources (bureaucrat bashing), as well as political leaders’ impulses toward control (overhead democracy). The ombudsman model of governing managed care is advanced as an alternative to managed care bashing and overhead democracy.