Michael is currently working on a book project titled Differential rules in public management: Design lessons for differential regulation in government budgeting and performance for Edward Elgar. The objectives and coverage of the book include the following:

‘Disorientation characterizes current thinking around policy design for public management. The ‘new public management’ legacy endures, but in an age of fiscal austerity it seems afflicted by diminishing marginal returns to better government, and its systemic successors remain ill-defined and highly contested. Against this background, this book returns to the one of the foundational questions of public management: how best to design institutional arrangements to optimize both central control and situational flexibility in bureaucratic structures. It builds on important new trends in public management scholarship focused on the role of ‘rule frameworks’ in guiding effective behaviours, and the various ways that key organizational actors in government can deploy ‘regulatory’ approaches to mitigate the deficiencies of managerialist, market and network approaches to organizing public services. The book is a systematic review of the ‘regulatory’ role of central agencies, and the development and application of a range of new rule-based conceptual frameworks to critical internal functions governing public policies and services, and in particular resource allocation and performance management systems. A primary objective of the book is to enhance the policy capacity of finance and policy agencies at the centre of government, and to help develop resourcing and accountability frameworks that make more effective use of rules to generate greater public value in terms of what governments do and how they do it.’