Sorin Dan

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• PhD
• Assistant Professor of Public Management (tenure-track) at University of Vaasa

Digital Talent Management advances the concept of ‘digital talent’ and delineates strategies to attract, develop and retain them amidst large-scale digital transformation and an unpredictable future. It integrates existing, albeit fragmented, streams of scientific research on talent management and digital work, as well as empirical evidence from th...

‘A clear, thorough, comparative work. Dan offers the reader a careful, nuanced analysis, structured by partly competing, partly complementary theoretical perspectives. His exploration of the similarities and differences between western and eastern European cases is particularly interesting.’ – Christopher Pollitt, Emeritus Professor, Public Governa...

This article reviews the New Public Management (NPM) literature in central and eastern Europe (CEE) with the aim of assessing whether reforms have ‘worked’. Increasingly, academics have tended to argue against the suitability of NPM instruments in this region. To understand the impact of this much-debated policy, we first propose a classification o...

A central proposition of New Public Management (NPM) theory was tested by analyzing 519 studies on the impact of NPM reforms across Europe to establish whether performance-oriented reforms lead to changes in outputs or outcomes. Significant conceptual and methodological problems were immediately apparent. Few of the studies focused on outputs, and...

A R T I C L E I N F O JEL codes: O3 O32 O33 O310 O320 O330 O380 L320 L330 A B S T R A C T Blockchain technology (BT) can potentially enhance transparency, efficiency, and trust across all domains. However, it remains unclear how the relative adoption of BT between the private and public sectors compares in light of existing studies. This article co...

Background/context of the review: The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector is rapidly increasing, driven by its potential to enhance service delivery (including quality and equity), organizational effectiveness (better use of resources), and efficiency in government operations (economic rationality). AI systems, defined by...

Purpose This study aims to explore the required leadership competencies for successful blockchain technology (BCT) implementation in public sector organizations from a sensemaking perspective. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a multiple case study design. Primary data are collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with several re...

While artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted significant attention from public management scholars and practitioners in recent years, another emerging technology, blockchain, deserves similar consideration due to its equally disruptive and transformative potential (Cagigas et al., 2021; Sousa, 2023). In the late 2010s, blockchain technologies (...

This chapter explores the relationship between trust and public-sector AI. It examines the implications for trust of an AI program, AuroraAI, established by the Government of Finland that aimed to improve citizen centricity of public services. The chapter reviews the program's possible public benefits, risks, and ethical dilemmas and finds that the...

In this introduction to the special issue 'The New Public Management: Dead or still alive and co-existing? State of play at 40+' we suggest that we are witnessing two principal developments when it comes to NPM: its endurance in practice and reconsideration in theory. Building on recent research, we argue that NPM ideas and practices continue to be...

Building on socio-technical systems (STS) theory, this chapter explores the change processes that organizations go through as they implement blockchain in their operations. The chapter explores the interplay between the adoption of blockchain as a new disruptive technology and organizational change as a process and argues that a new kind of leaders...

The literature on open innovation (OI) has mainly been focused on the ‘bright side’ of OI, thus neglecting the limits of OI implementation influencing innovation processes during organizational change. It requires to develop a better understanding about the limits of OI. Therefore, this study explores the limits of OI during organizational change a...

Introduction Medical deserts are a growing phenomenon across many European countries. They are usually defined as (i) rural areas, (ii) underserved areas or (iii) by applying a measure of distance/time to a facility or a combination of the three characteristics. The objective was to define medical deserts in Spain as well as map their driving facto...

Background: Medical deserts are increasingly considered a problematic issue for many countries, which try to employ a multitude of policies, actions, and initiatives to achieve a better distribution of the health workforce (HWF). Aims and Objectives: Participants will be able to discuss different reasons for shortages of HWF in medical deserts and...

Digital transformation has become a buzzword that is permeating multiple fields, including public administration and management. However, it is unclear what is transformational and how incremental and transformational change processes are linked. Using the PRISMA method, we conduct a systematic literature review to structure this growing body of ev...

“Medical deserts,” areas characterized by limited access to healthcare services, are a growing global concern. These areas often face a shortage of healthcare professionals, which significantly contributes to poor healthcare access, reduced health outcomes, and health inequalities [1]. As future healthcare providers, medical students have the poten...

Background: Medical deserts are considered a problematic issue for many Western countries which try to employ multitude of policies and initiatives to achieve a better distribution of their health workforce (HWF). The aim of this study was to systematically map research and provide an overview of definitions, characteristics, contributing factor...

Introduction: Medical deserts are increasingly considered problematic and many countries employ a multitude of actions and initiatives to achieve a better distribution of the health workforce (HWF). This study systematically maps research and provides an overview of the definitions/characteristics of medical deserts. It also identifies contributin...

Purpose Despite the growing volume of European Union (EU) investments into reforms and public administration, how EU support contributes to administrative reform and capacity building at domestic level is still unclear. The article explains the EU's influence, domestic politicisation and previous administrative capacity on organisational change whi...

The purpose of this study is to explore the limits of open innovation (OI) during organizational change. It aims to offer approaches that can drive organizations to offset such limits and institutionalize the opportunities of OI. The empirical analysis is based on an in-depth single case study of an OI ecosystem initiative developed by a large mult...

This chapter concludes by bringing together the main arguments of the book and by outlining their implications for research and practice. It first summarizes the contribution that this book makes to the existing literature by defining and developing the concept of digital talent and delineating digital talent management (DTM) as a human-centered ta...

This chapter sets up the conceptual foundation for the remaining chapters, by reviewing the literature on digital work as performed by information and communication technology professionals and managers and the literature on talent management that focuses on defining talent. It then provides an original conceptualization of digital talent that refl...

While talent management emerged and later developed as a focus in both the academics’ and practitioners’ agendas, companies continue to face challenges in implementing talent management strategies. This is particularly the case with respect to digital talent and the use of digital talent management that takes into account and decidedly integrates t...

This chapter surveys the literature regarding organizational attraction, development and retention strategies as they apply to digital talent. In combination with the literature review, the chapter integrates key practices found in the information and communication technology industry and discusses their implications for digital talent management.

The social contributions of research activities have become more and more important in the rapidly changing innovation environment. Despite the fact that industrial commercialization of research results constitutes one of the most essential drivers for innovation and competitiveness, most generally used social impact evaluation criteria do not incl...

The objective of this paper is to explore the way in which firms are changing to become more collaborative and oriented towards open innovation while managing inter-organizational partnerships. Drawing on change management, particularly 3-step change process model and open innovation (OI) literature, this research aims to explore the antecedents of...

New societal challenges are setting growing demands for innovation policy both on international and national levels. To address societal challenges and creating sustainable change in addition to achieving economic benefits, the innovation space is evolving and getting more complex. In this paper, we study how the understanding of the innovation spa...

This publication is the final report of a research and development project to develop the Digitalisation Academy, funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment and carried out by the University of Vaasa’s Innolab. The international multidisciplinary group of researchers studied the experiences of the students and the representatives of...

This article looks at the idea and practice of “customer focus” in higher education. As a global trend with origins in the business and corporate world, customer focus has come to increasingly shape public services worldwide. Influenced by business thinking, terminology, and practices, governmental organizations across policy areas have used custom...

This chapter estimates the extent and trend of poverty in Romania during transition, using grouped distributional data and Lorenz curve interpolation. It asks the question: do estimates derived from grouped distributional data differ from those in the literature derived from survey data? It finds that the poverty estimates introduced in this chapte...

Reviews existing relevant literature on public management reforms and coordination generally and specifically for public hospitals. He grounds the book in the existing literature and identifies gaps with the aim of enhancing the theoretical and practical relevance of his research. He finds that (1) the concept of coordination is under-theorized but...

Documents specific cases and problems of coordination in the Estonian public hospital system such as contradictions in the coordination of medical personnel, duplication in the hospital network and divergence in the coordination of expensive medical equipment. Dan convincingly argues that the best explanation for these coordination problems consist...

Finds empirical evidence of unintended consequences of excessive coordination, which include increased paperwork, focus on process at the expense of focus on patient outcomes (i.e. quality of healthcare and patient safety) and persistent areas that resist coordination such as information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure and elite...

Explains in greater detail the choice of theories, develops an original theoretical framework and lists specific propositions derived from sociological institutionalism and principal-agent theory. In this way, he sets a theoretical foundation for empirically exploring the relationship between management reforms and central coordination of hospitals...

Discusses the findings across the country cases and draws theoretical and practical conclusions for his research. He concludes that (1) in the face of organizational reform, the state capacity to coordinate the decentralized and autonomous hospitals has been put to the test; (2) hospital autonomy has overall posed serious challenges to the central...

Discusses the choice of research design in light of the aims of the book. On the basis of the extent of hospital management autonomy and decentralization, he distinguishes between four cases: an NPM case characterized by high hospital management autonomy and decentralization—Estonia, a non-NPM case (low hospital management and centralization)—Roman...

Finds evidence of problems of coordination in the public hospital system in Romania and argues that conflicting interests and goals between central policy institutions, most notably the Ministry of Health, and hospitals coupled with cultural factors best explain the effectiveness of central coordination. He argues that hospitals follow their own or...

This book explores both theoretically and empirically the unprecedented wave of management reforms in public hospitals in Europe over the past 25 years. It carefully examines the ways in which these reforms have influenced the ability of national policy-making institutions to manage the system of public hospitals as a whole. The book covers key pub...

In seeking to benefit from the competitive pressures exerted through marketization, governments have hoped to gain improvements in public service efficiency. Yet, concerns remain about the effects of marketization on how equitably public services are provided. We consider evidence about the relationship between the introduction of market-type mecha...

A framework to assess coordination problems in hospital systems.

This article reviews the New Public Man-agement (NPM) literature in Central and Eastern Europe, looking particularly at reforms in Estonia, Hungary and Romania. It fnds that research that assessed changes in internal processes and ac-tivities within the public sector by far outnumber research that assessed changes in outputs and outcomes. Signifcan...

This paper reviews the New Public Management literature on the effects of the creation and ongoing operations of agencies across European public sectors. It finds that the bulk of evidence concerns internal effects on processes/activities of agency creation and management and little evidence on outputs and outcomes. The article identifies a number...

This study estimates and discusses the effects of TANF cash benefits receipt on single parents' (mothers' and fathers') labor supply, measured by employment status. The study uses a sample of 9,974 able single parents with dependent children (age ≤ 18) for 2007 from the March Supplement 2008 Current Population Survey. I conduct a logistic regressio...

Since the early 1990s, major reform in healthcare has been adopted in former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. More than 20 years after, reform in healthcare still draws much interest from policy makers and academics alike. One of the dynamic components of reform has been the reform of payment systems in primary care. This article...

This study has been compiled as an internationally comparative contribution to the parliamentary inquiry by the Dutch Senate into the effects of privatization and agencification on the relationship between citizens and the (national) government.

This article estimates the incidence of poverty in Romania during early and late transition, from 1997 to 2005, using grouped distributional data. It compares the estimates obtained with the literature and finds great variation in methodology, estimation parameters, and the size of the estimates across studies. The poverty estimates proposed are br...