Michael Barzelay has been an academic at the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ since 1995. As Professor of Public Management, he became a member of the Department of Management at its inception in 2006 and served as Head of Department in 2013-15.
The preparation for Professor Barzelay’s academic career included an undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where he designed his own interdisciplinary major, entitled Studies of the Developing World. His graduate work was undertaken at Yale University, where he first earned a Masters’ in Public and Private Management (MPPM) and then a PhD in Political Science. His doctoral dissertation supervisor at Yale was Charles E. Lindblom. Professor Barzelay’s doctoral dissertation, Alcohol in Brazil’s Energy Strategy, was published by University of California Press. He started teaching and researching about public management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government as an Assistant Professor of Public Policy in 1985.In 1992, his first book on public management, A New Vision for Managing in Government was published by UC Press, with translations in and .
At ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳, Professor Barzelay’s research initially centred on policy-making and change, beginning with his at University of California, Berkeley in 1997 and the 2001 publication of Improving Research and Policy Dialogue (also published in Spanish).This book’s research agenda on public management policy change led to two journal symposia and additional articles, written in collaboration with academics from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the US. This line of research also resulted in an article about designing as well as in receiving the for Excellence in Public Management Research.
Throughout the past 20 years, Professor Barzelay has been working on research to expand professional knowledge about public organizations and professional practice within them. The first major step in that direction was Strategic Planning in the U.S. Air Force, which received the from the US National Academy of Public Administration. An important further step was Methodology for Extrapolation-Oriented Case Research.” The culmination of this work is as a Design-Oriented Professional Discipline, published by Edward Elgar in September 2019. This manifesto book