Book Review: Directions of Development of Public Administration in Poland.

• Author: Jakimowicz, Aleksander
• Position: Book review

Reflections on the sidelines of the book by Daniel Rzeczkowski (2014), Potencjal Innowacyjnosci Sektora Administracji Publicznej [Innovative Potential of the Public Administration Sector]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Pages 164. ISBN, EAN: 9788301174590.

The cognitive purpose of Daniel Rzeczkowski's book is the explication of the reasons of a gradual decline of Poland's position in the international ranking of innovativeness of the e-Government sector. The ranking is prepared every two years by the UN. According to the basic claim of the work, that objective cannot be achieved without transition to a local level and explaining how the public sector of administration works, and how it functions at the level of communes. This entails using case study as one of the basic research methods. The reasons for the selection of the Warmia-Masuria Province have been made clear in the work. The research hypotheses assumed by the author have inclined him to undertake research on human capital resources on a wider scale in the above-mentioned province. On the one hand, the web pages of commune offices, and the bulletins of public information placed there, are evaluated as potential innovation carriers and, on the other, what we have here is a unique attempt at the identification of systematic errors in the process of public services rendering. In connection with the latter, the author refers to the hypothesis of rational expectations. The research issue raised in the work should be regarded as non-trivial and practical. Also, the innovatory approach consists in proposing methods of comprehensive evaluation of the public administration sector at the level of communes. Besides, the book has certain theoretical advantages. The conclusions drawn on the basis of the empirical research have allowed the author to propose development of such a model of perception gaps, in which local and central multimedia customer service offices would become a mechanism for the elimination of the gaps.

The work, constituting the subject matter of the present discussion, consists of the introduction, the contents, seven theoretical-empirical chapters, the conclusion and the bibliography. In the first chapter, the reasons for undertaking the research, the objectives, the scope of research work, the research hypotheses and the applied methodology are presented. The author has undertaken an extremely important and, at the same time, challenging task of explicating the reasons for the systematic decline of the Polish public administration sector's innovativeness. The search for a comprehensive method of evaluation of the e-Government sector at a local level and an attempt at an identification of innovativeness in the customers of public administration communal offices, indicate the genuineness of this study. In the research proceedings exemplification was used, which allowed the author to fluently shift the considerations from an international to a local level in order to "point out the factual gaps in the system of public services rendering in this region" (p. 10) in the example of communes and of the condition of human capital in the Warmia-Masuria Province. The logical structure of the work presented in this chapter involves the separation of three pillars of research--two empirical and one theoretical. The first empirical pillar covers the research on the quality of public services rendered online. It involved the application of an analysis of focuses on the evaluation of the communal office's web pages and public information bulletins found there. The second empirical pillar involved the evaluation of human capital in the region in question and the application of the principle of correspondence analysis for the purposes of the detection of the systematic errors occurring in the processes of communication between a civil officer and a customer. The theoretical pillar refers to service quality models and processes of reduction of the perception gaps predicted by these models. Here, once again, the innovatory character of this work shows that, since the proposed-by-the-author multimedia services office, whose design is discussed later in chapter seven, it turns out to be the searched-for mechanism of gaps reduction. Integration of all the themes of this work, empirical and theoretical, has provided a basis for the elaboration of a synthesis, consisting in formulating indications aimed at raising Poland's position in the UN's ranking, thus specifying the necessary conditions for triggering the innovativeness potential inherent in the people entering into interaction with the public administration sector.

One of the advantages of this work is making a reference to wikinomics --a new school of economic thinking based on four principles: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally (Tapscott and Williams 2006 2012). Wikinomics is based on seven non-standard business strategy patterns: peer pioneers, ideagoras, prosumers, new Alexandrians, platforms for participation, a global plant floor, and a wiki workplace. The author applies these patterns in his empirical research, which becomes particularly evident in chapter six, where the evaluation of the presumptive potential of the innovativeness occurring in the public administration sector was carried out. Among the author's interesting...