• Leadership, including new research specifically about leadership in the public sector, including new coverage of the O'Toole-Meier model of public management.
• Motivation and work attitudes, including the recent stream of research on public service motivation, and very recent surveys of the work attitudes of government managers and employees, such as the U.S.O.P.M "Human Capital Survey" of 2002 and the recent Brookings Institution survey.
• Recent analyses of the characteristics of "high performance" and highly effective public organizations, the conclusions from which can be taken as guidelines for enhancing performance.
• The studies evaluating the impacts of the Reinventing Government movement and the National Performance Review during the 1990s and up to the present.
• Organizational effectiveness and performance assessment of public organizations, with newly-included coverage of the Government Performance Project, the Balanced Scorecard, and the evaluative efforts under the President's Management Agenda  of the current administration.
• A recent stream of research on "governance" that attempts to take into account multiples levels and networks of institutions, authorities and actors.
• New coverage of numerous recent studies comparing public and private organizations, managers, and/or employees on most of the factors mentioned above, based on a thorough review of the numerous comparative studies of this sort that have appeared since the second edition.

 New and updated examples, such as:

• The major organization redesign in the Internal Revenue Service (1998-present) and organizational restructuring of the Brookhaven National Lab.
• Examples of goal, mission, and value statements from the 2002 strategic plans of selected federal agencies.
• The Department of Homeland Security as an example of the importance of managing and organizing in the public sector.

 Newly-included description and examples of recent developments in the practice and field of public management:

• Description of the National Public Management Research Conferences and the newly formed National Public Management Research Association.
• The Human Capital movement in the federal government and other levels of government.
• The President's Management Agenda.