British Journal of Management, Vol. 14, S1–S14 (2003)
Changing Public Service Organizations: Current Perspectives and Future Prospects Ewan Ferlie, Jean Hartley* and Steve Martinw School of Management, Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX. *Local Government Centre, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV8 7AL and wCentre for Local and Regional Government Research, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Aberconway Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU, Wales Email:
[email protected] [Ferlie];
[email protected] [Hartley]; Martinsj@cardiff.ac.uk [Martin] As governments and public service organizations across the globe engage in strategies of institutional and organizational change, it is timely to examine current developments and a future research agenda for public governance and management. This article commences with reflections on the state of the field, based on an analysis of papers published in the British Journal of Management over the last decade. While there was some variation apparent across the set, the ‘typical’ article was found to be influenced by the discipline of organizational behaviour, set within the health-care sector, using case-study methods within field-based studies, and investigating shifts in roles and relationships and the management of change. It has also in the past been UK-centric, though the journal editorial policy and our own article call for a stronger international and comparative focus in the future. The second section introduces the principle themes addressed in the other articles comprising this special issue on public service organizations. The third section explores a possible research agenda for the future, arguing for the significance of public sector research for the understanding of management more generally, and for examining the interface between private and public organizations (an increasingly common phenomenon). We suggest the need to set public services research in policy and political contexts, and suggest this may reveal organizational processes of wide interest. We call for a wider set of disciplines to engage in public management research, and to engage in moving the agenda from the study of efficiency to effectiveness as defined by a variety of stakeholders. We address the issue of how far public management researchers should become directly engaged with the world of policy and suggest that whether researchers engage in Mode 1 or Mode 2 research, their work would benefit from a stronger theoretical base.
Introduction This special issue of the British Journal of Management, which focuses on current developments in the study of public services organizations, is timely given the recent and current high-level political, policy and scholarly interest across a large number of countries in strategies of public management reform. Many governments and public service organizations are trying to secure fundamental changes in the governance, design and delivery of public services. For r 2003 British Academy of Management
example, the USA public services have undergone initiatives based on reinvention and reengineering; in France and Canada, there are movements towards decentralization and regionalization. There has also been continual restructuring in the UK public sector for over twenty years, initially based on securing greater productivity and value for money but more recently (though somewhat ambiguously) with a new emphasis on partnerships and networks. We should not assume that these ideas necessarily produce the intended outcomes declared
S2 at the front end of the reforming process. Reforming may be no more than a governmental fashion statement (Abrahamson, 1991, 1996), with highly superficial impact. There is a danger that the reforming cycle simply reproduces itself endlessly, as each generation of newly appointed ministers builds short-term political reputations on announcing ever newer reforms. There is, then, a need for independent analysis of the longer-term impact of reforming which can provide formative evaluation, feeding back into the organizational and institutional change process findings rooted in a higher-quality evidence base. This would help ensure that the decisions of senior policy makers are more congruent with what is known about how organizational and cultural change can be most effectively achieved. While this might give the appearance of slowing reform down, in fact the contribution could be to ensure that reform is deep rather than superficial, and sustainable rather than transient. This, though, begs important questions about the status and influence of present day knowledge about public management reforms and change, and how (if at all) this knowledge informs political action and policy. In particular, how can public management research inform current debates about public management reform? Public management reform is a global phenomenon (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000) and can only be fully understood at an international and comparative level. We should not assume that the history of public management reform is coming to an end or that all countries are converging on a much smaller public sector, perhaps based on an Anglo-American template, which in the recent past has essentially sought to make government run more like private-sector organizations. The core ideas which drive reforms may be different in nature from one country to another. They may also differ in their degree of political visibility (being seen as a technical agenda which can be left to ministries of public administration in some countries; while in others it is constructed as a strategic issue at the highest level). In the UK, public management research would benefit from taking a more international and comparative perspective, and being more aware of the assumptions, perspectives and practices in the public sector across the globe. There is much to learn from the pattern of reform in countries such as France and Germany (Pollitt and Bouckaert,
E. Ferlie, J. Hartley and S. Martin 2000). Germany presents a distinct alternative to the UK and the USA, based on an alternative model of the state (the so-called Rechtsstaat in which bodies of specialist law assume much greater importance than in Anglo-American polities). In France, since the 1980s, public management reforms have been driven by ideas of decentralization and regionalization which are very different from the efficiency and value for money-centred objectives of UK reforms. The UK reforms are, though, of international as well as national significance, with key ideas (privatization; quasi markets; ‘Third Way’ style reforms) having been exported to a number of other countries. It is not surprising that the study of public service organizations in the UK has re-emerged from the shadows in which it found itself in the Thatcherite era of the 1980s and 1990s. Public service organizations are once more seen as interesting and important sites of study and not merely as a residual category to be considered after the analysis of the private sector has been exhausted. We should not assume therefore that there is a uni-directional flow of learning from the private to the public sector: rather learning can flow in both directions. Public-sector organizations have proved a fertile ground for the development of organizational theory, both because of their high complexity and because they are ‘research friendly’. It is no longer assumed (if it ever was) that markets will replace all public agencies. There is a greater awareness of the possibility of market failure after the period of privatization and also of the need for a continuing public realm. The Advanced Institute of Management recently set up by the UK Economic and Social Research Council is developing basic management research capacity on public service organizations as well as privatesector firms. So, the time is ripe for a stocktake of what we already know in terms of recent public management research and for reflection on a possible future research agenda which would take public management research into a new phase. In our view there are important challenges for public management academics to face in terms of the type and focus of research that is now needed. We argue that too much public management research has been small scale, undertheorized and has been focused on application rather than theory building. If this view is correct, there are a
Changing Public Service Organizations number of questions about the research process to be considered. How can we not simply take problems from the field but also theorize them? How can we create more generalizable forms of knowledge which are not purely of local or narrow sectoral interest and which are more likely to address enduring themes and policy issues? How close (or distant) should researchers be to policy debates? This special issue provides an opportunity to explore some of these issues, to take stock of what we already know about public service organizations and to consider the status of such knowledge. It presents papers and book reviews on important current developments in publicsector management and in this editorial offers some suggestions for the development of a future research agenda.
A retrospective audit We start by examining what has been published on public service organizations in the British Journal of Management (BJOM) itself over the last decade (1992–2002). What does an audit of these papers tell us about the state of alreadypublished public management research? Between 1992 and September 2002, 24 papers were published on public service organizations in the BJOM. It is therefore a significant sub theme within the publications portfolio of the journal. BJOM is a general management journal sympathetic to submissions from the field of public management, which is by no means the typical pattern in management journals. It should also be noted that this was the period in which the BJOM was in its infancy, still building its own academic identity and reputation. We are therefore examining articles that were published early on in the academic positioning of the journal. Characteristics of the body of published work Many of the papers focused on public services management published in the BJOM over the last ten years display a set of common characteristics. Strong organizational behaviour strand. These articles display a predominantly organizational behaviour perspective, with a particular focus on
S3 core themes of organizational change (operational and strategic); organizational learning and the changing roles of different occupations within the public services together with their interrelationships (a typical article might examine the respective roles of doctors and NHS managers within the management of change). There are far fewer articles written from the disciplinary perspectives of strategy, organizational economics, marketing, accounting or finance. There were only two articles on privatization, even though this was a major policy theme in the 1990s. This perhaps reflects the relatively weak presence of strategy and organizational economics. Strong healthcare focus. The papers have had a strong healthcare focus (15). By contrast, central government accounts for only three articles and local government only two articles. The National Health Service (NHS) is a site of very considerable public management research activity, perhaps reflecting the strong R&D tradition in that sector (as well as its substantial research budgets). However health management research is so dominant there is a danger that it distorts the overall picture. The healthcare sector remains unusual in terms of the presence of an elite profession (medicine) which is not the case in other public services. Few articles conducted analyses across different UK public services or examined a mix of public and private-sector settings (Thomas and Dunkerley, 1999, represents an interesting exception). This lacuna suggests a need for more sophisticated designs which permit such comparative analysis across different domains. Mainly qualitative methods. The articles are mainly based on qualitative methods, as might be expected given the strong influence from organizational behaviour. There is a widespread use of case-study methods, including a number of single case designs but also comparative case studies, which have emerged as an important method (e.g. see Ashburner, Ferlie and FitzGerald, 1996, for a typical example). These designs are larger scale and provide a degree of external validity, reflecting the use of dedicated research teams (rather than the individual scholar combining personal research with teaching duties) and the substantial R&D resources available in the healthcare sector. Quasi-experimental methods,
S4 multivariate modelling, large-scale surveys or even the scaling based studies associated with the discipline of organizational psychology are generally absent, reinforcing Boyne’s (2001) observations on the curious disappearance of the quantitative tradition within UK public management research. The qualitative methods used are mainly standard in nature. Less-traditional qualitative methods are largely absent, such as participatory and action research (Hartley, Benington and Binns, 1997, is a rare exception), discourse analysis (except for Brooks’ 1999 discourse analysis of the language used in and about a vulnerable nursing subculture) and postmodernist writing. There is little use of critical modes of analysis, except perhaps for a passing interest in work intensification. So the ‘normal’ methodological stance has been to use relatively traditional forms of qualitative analysis, notably case studies, within field-based studies.
UK centric. This body of work is highly UK centric: indeed there are no non-UK based primary studies of public service organizations represented in the corpus of published work. There are also few comparative pieces which contrast UK public service organizations and their equivalents in other jurisdictions. Using this body of work, we cannot therefore even answer the question: are the UK public management reforms observed idiosyncratic or typical internationally? More primary international research and also more comparative analysis across different countries is a priority for the next decade. This is an area which may well change over the next phase of research, both because of an increasing awareness of the value of international and comparative perspectives, and also because the BJOM has strongly held values of being an international journal. For example, Hodgkinson’s (1999) editorial as incoming editor of BJOM stressed the need for BJOM to publish more high-quality work of an explicitly crossnational character and perspective as it moved into a second phase. If work from single countries (such as the UK) is to make a significant scholarly impact at an international level, it needs to engage with public policy issues which transcend single country boundaries or alternatively address theoretical perspectives that do the same.
E. Ferlie, J. Hartley and S. Martin Stronger empirically than theoretically or methodologically? Most of the articles are empirically based and report primary (rather than secondary) data. So there is a strong emphasis on contemporary data collection within the field. Researchers are engaged with policy related issues and sometimes are actively working with or within contemporary public service organizations. The wider biases of empirical UK social science seem to have replicated themselves within this domain. However, there are the vices of these virtues to consider because empirical analysis can too easily degenerate into empiricist analysis. There are some warning signs of excessive empiricism. There are very few theoretical or methodological pieces (apart from Gregory and Martin’s 1994 exploration of methodological issues within the evaluation of public-sector programmes). Some of the articles apply existing management theory to a substantive policy problem, but the development of theory is relatively rare (an interesting exception is Currie’s 1999 article which applies and extends the theory of ‘middle out’ change in a NHS setting). Some articles, unfortunately, address a policy problem with very little theoretical underpinning or they have a poorly developed account of methods. There are very few synthetic reviews which at their best can establish ‘what we know’ within a particular subfield of public services management, offer an overall assessment and propose a research agenda for the future. There has not always been effective cumulation across the different primary studies published, even where (as in the NHS) there is a critical mass of research activity and publications which might be subjected to synthesis (Stewart, 1999).
The link with policy and practice Does the wider debate on knowledge production have lessons for the way in which we might conceptualize the links between public management research and public management policy and practice? There is a growing literature on so called Mode 1, Mode 2 and Mode 3 research methods and styles (Gibbons et al., 1994; also Huff and Huff, 2001, and Tranfield and Starkey, 1998, debate this issue within BJOM itself; see also Whitley, 2000 and Starkey, 2001). Gibbons
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Changing Public Service Organizations et al. (1994) write of an evolution from Mode 1 (academically dominated) research to Mode 2 research (where knowledge is co-produced by a wider set of stakeholders within the context of its use). The conventional criticism of academically driven management research is one of overdomination by academic criteria and isolated from a wider set of interested stakeholders (Starkey and Madan, 2001; Tranfield and Starkey, 1998). This indicates a further shift to Mode 2-based knowledge production. Huff and Huff’s (2001) critique of Mode 2 stresses its potential for becoming too narrowly orientated towards shortterm problem-solving and calls for a more conversational and dispersed Mode 3. Many of the articles in this set can be assessed as already ‘Mode 2 like’. They enable us to consider the possible implications of a wider shift for social sciences, based on this analysis within a subfield already near to Mode 2. Often the research projects which form the early empirical base of later published papers are close to the agenda of policy and practice, possibly starting their life as funded evaluations. They are not academically derived but ‘tasked’ projects. For example, the effects of the introduction of the internal market in the NHS stimulated the funding of a significant number of research projects. They in turn provided empirical data for some of the subsequent articles reviewed here. It is interesting to note that less published material has as yet come through on the UK’s New Labour modernization agenda for public service reform (i.e. post-1997) although the flow of papers may increase. At the end of these tasked evaluations, academic ‘backfilling’ typically takes place (Tranfield and Starkey, 1998), which locates empirical data and a policy-oriented report within wider theoretical debates. This suggests that it may be possible to combine evaluation with some theoretical and curiosity based work. However, in practice there are limits to what can be achieved through backfilling, so the theoretical discussion in the final papers often remains of a modest nature. Another observation is that the perspective of some of the articles appears to be aligned with the agenda of senior management (or government), to the exclusion of the perspectives of other legitimate stakeholders. If this tradition is indeed ‘Mode 2 like’ in its approach, then there are clearly methodological dangers.
Mode 1 forms of research are evident more strongly in the authorship of these articles which are nearly always written by academics rather than a joint team between academics and reflective practitioners. In some cases, however, the research emerged from partnerships established with the field. Examples include Connelly, Connelly and James’ (2000) exploration of educational ‘good practice’ in case studies set up in collaboration with a set of local public agencies and Harrison and Miller’s (1999) exploration of the role of clinical directors which sprang out of a linked management development programme between the healthcare sector and a university. The BJOM ‘house style’ in its first and second decades? So BJOM displayed a clear ‘house style’ in its publication of research into public management within its first decade. The ‘typical’ article was influenced by the discipline of organizational behaviour, set within the healthcare sector, used case-study methods within the field, and investigated shifts in roles and relationships within the management of change (e.g. Currie, 1999; Ong, 1998). It has been UK-centric. We conclude that the published work has so far been highly concentrated within certain sectors, disciplines and methods. So how should the mix change as BJOM moves into its second decade? Our audit has revealed some important ways in which the body of published work on public management could usefully develop. We need more breadth of perspectives and studies which cross a range of different services and countries. A second possible response is that the UK public-management academic community should make a virtue of an emerging tradition. UK scholars in this field are internationally strong in terms of their field-based research. OB influenced, case-study based, work represents an already well-established activity, with a possibility in the future for greater accumulation, more sophisticated designs and hence for producing work of international significance. Such work still requires greater methodological sophistication and a stronger relationship with – and development of – theory, to complement the applied and policy-based work which has often been evident so far.
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Contributions to this special issue The four papers featured in this special issue all offer in-depth analyses of recent management change in a range of public sector settings. Hinings et al. (2003) analyse the re-organization of healthcare provision in Alberta between 1995 and 2001. Regionalization has been a major strand of public service reform in the Canadian system. Taking an organizational change perspective, they argue that healthcare ‘reforms’ exemplify the major challenges that confront interventions designed to transform public services. The restructuring of Alberta’s healthcare system through the creation of a small number of regional health authorities in place of more than 200 separate hospitals and health boards has been characterized by a high level of uncertainty about policy outcomes. Hinings and his colleagues argue that this stems from the scale of reform, a lack of understanding of the desired end point and the frequency of political intervention. The task and environmental uncertainty which this has produced have been reinforced by loose coupling between healthcare systems, organizations and professions. As a result, although the interventions in Alberta have been intentional and carefully planned, there has been a high probability of unanticipated outcomes. Hinings et al. argue that unanticipated, unrecognized and unstated consequences of planned change in the public sector are widespread and merit greater attention from both researchers and policy makers. McNulty (2003) examines the impact of a flagship initiative intended to redesign patient processes in a large UK NHS hospital trust. This initiative drew on re-engineering ideas imported into the NHS from American authors (Hammer and Champy, 1995) by management consultants. Like Hinings et al., he focuses on the question of whether this initiative can be said to have achieved the ‘Big Bang’ change claimed for it at the beginning of the process. He draws upon detailed, qualitative data collected over a threeyear period between March 1995 and March 1998 to compare and contrast processes and impacts in two clinical specialties – orthopaedics, and accident and emergency medicine. His analysis suggests that some existing practices were indeed redesigned but that in many cases old practices were reproduced. The eventual impacts on
E. Ferlie, J. Hartley and S. Martin services were often therefore less dramatic than those hoped for by managers. In orthopaedics, relations between the ‘reengineers’ and medics were good. Redesign was blended with clinical agendas in ways that mobilized professional participation and gained legitimacy for new approaches. By contrast, relations between managers and A&E doctors were characterized by hostility and conflict and attempts to redesign processes had only limited effects. McNulty concludes that the chances of transformational change in settings of relatively poor pre-existing work relations are slim and that the pace of reform is determined at least as much by professional agency as by managerial agency. New practices, relations and processes will not, he argues, be adopted if clinicians do not perceive them as having legitimacy. Professional/managerial relations are of interest internationally, given the important role of professionals in many public sectors. Butler’s (2003) paper contributes to the organizational change literature in public service organizations, analysing determinants of the adoption of new approaches to service delivery in local government. Drawing upon the notion of receptivity, he analyses contrasting approaches to housing management in two English local authorities between 1996 and 2000. Examination of key strategy documents and interviews with local authority officers, local politicians and tenants, highlighted major differences between the two councils. In the first case, the Director of Housing was able to impose a ‘low change, non-receptive’ strategy that kept the housing management functions in-house. By contrast in the second case, local politicians created a ‘high-change, receptive context’ which resulted in the outsourcing of housing services to private contractors. However, despite their very different approaches, the strategies of both councils were, Butler argues, influenced by the same four ‘receptivity factors’ – ideology, leadership, institutional politics and implementation capacity. He suggests that current attempts to reform public services need to pay particular heed to these variables and concludes that cross-sectoral analysis of receptivity is needed to enhance our understanding of organizational change. Vangen and Huxham (2003) focus on the question of leadership for collaboration in public service organizations. Public leadership is a
Changing Public Service Organizations theme of widespread interest at the present within policy and scholarly domains. Leadership in public organizations includes important collaborative as well as competitive or directive elements. They examine the role of partnership managers in organizing collaborative activities between UK (more particularly, Scottish) agencies. They situate their analysis in the context of the increasing importance of working across organizational boundaries, arguing that understanding how collaborative approaches add value has become essential to analysis of the changing roles of public-sector organizations. The paper uses what the authors describe as ‘naturally occurring’ data gained whilst they acted as facilitators and/or consultants to a range of public and community sector partnerships based in Scotland over the last six years. They espouse a ‘practice-oriented theory’ consistent with the increasing emphasis on the need for management research to address the needs of policy makers and practitioners as well as contributing to theory. The heart of their thesis is that successful partnership managers combine two, very different, leadership styles. Many activities are undertaken in ‘the spirit of collaboration’. In particular partnership managers frequently need to be able to ‘embrace’ (draw in) members of a partnership. They also need to empower them, to ensure their continued involvement and to mobilize partners to ensure action. Paradoxically though, effective partnership managers are also able to draw, when appropriate, on a different sets of skills, which Vangen and Huxham label ‘collaborative thuggery’. They have to be assiduous networkers able to push organizations towards collaborative activities and, where appropriate, be able to ‘play the politics’ needed to exert influence over key individuals and/or organizations. Vangen and Huxham suggest that these two modes of leadership exercised by partnership managers mirror dichotomies suggested by classical theories of management and leadership (between, for example, democratic and autocratic leadership, participative and directive leadership, and relationship versus task-oriented leadership). They emphasize, however, that partnership managers lack the legitimacy conferred on leaders operating in more traditional, hierarchical settings. To understand their activities it is therefore necessary to ‘filter’ the organizational leadership literature through collaboration theory.
S7 Interestingly, these papers share some of the characteristics of the ‘typical’ BJOM article on the public sector that we have identified above. All four papers rely on qualitative (rather than quantitative) data gained in the course of close observation of and/or interaction with policy makers and practitioners. All four sets of authors draw on perspectives from theories of organizational behaviour. Three of the papers analyse developments in the UK public sector, and two focus on healthcare reforms. The distinctive strengths of these papers are that they connect primary data to ‘big themes’ (organizational change; the adoption of innovations; leadership; collaboration; managers and professionals) which are of broad and indeed international appeal and seek to develop theory further in those areas on the basis of the primary data presented. There is also one international paper, from Canada. The similarities between the four papers do not end there. All the authors believe that their research findings have important implications for policy makers and practitioners. Vangen and Huxham are the most explicit in seeking to inform and guide the actions of practitioners. But all four sets of authors highlight what they see as policy-relevant findings and they clearly believe that these will be of real assistance to those responsible for developing public policy and managing public-sector organizations. The papers by Hinings et al., McNulty and Butler, for example, all analyse factors that determine the adoption (or non-adoption) of managerial reforms. They therefore offer important findings for those seeking to understand and promote change in the public sector. Moreover, all four papers warn, either explicitly or implicitly, of the difficulties of achieving fundamental change and caution against the often over-optimistic hopes invested in publicsector reform programmes by their advocates. After a decade or more of concerted and repeated attempts to produce transformational changes across the public sector, it is clear that there is no guarantee of ‘success’. Hinings and his colleagues, McNulty, and Vangen and Huxham, in their different ways, all demonstrate the severe difficulties associated with the introduction of new ways of working in the public sector, be they institutional restructuring, process redesign or greater interorganizational collaboration. Of
S8 course, there are also significant levels of complexity found in major change processes in the private sector, so that the public sector is not peculiar in these respects. The four papers suggest that marked variations in rates and levels of change are the norm and attest to strong likelihood of policy interventions and management reforms both failing to fully realize the expectations of their champions and having a range of unintended and unanticipated consequences. In this sense, the evidence is similar to that of the private sector, where empirical research suggests that organizational change either fails in entirety or fails to meet expectations in about half to two-thirds of organizations (Burnes, 2000). Arguably, then the public sector may not be that different from the private sector in terms of many of the key processes of strategy and implementation. This in turn begs questions about why it is that policy makers choose, or find themselves under pressure, to continue to assume that reforms will normally be speedily enacted and achieve their objectives without major risk or unintended consequences, and seem unable to break out of this pattern. That public-sector reforms are complex, contested and fraught with risk should not, of course, come as any great surprise – though in the political and policy domains a naı¨ vely optimistic view of the potential of managerial reforms appears to persist despite clear and repeated research evidence from public management scholars as from other disciplines. For researchers of public-sector change, the contributions to this special edition indicate that public management research is able to make progress in terms of both theory development and in identifying insights that will be useful to policy makers and practitioners.
An agenda for the future In this section, we set out some themes and suggestions for a future research agenda on public service organizations. This illustrates the many issues which might fruitfully be pursued in research, but is not intended to be either comprehensive or restrictive. Our hope is to provide a stimulus for management researchers across the globe to continue to seek to research, and in particular to theorize, public management.
E. Ferlie, J. Hartley and S. Martin Our starting suggestion is that the key issues to be addressed in the study of public services organizations are of interest not only to public management researchers, steeped in the language, policy context and cultures of public services, but also to management research in general. While there are some sector-specific themes and issues in public management, there are also a number of organizational, interorganizational and management dynamics which are particularly evident in public service organizations, but which are also present, sometimes half-glimpsed, in privatesector organizations. While the period of the 1980s was characterized, in the Anglophone countries at least, by the assumption that learning should flow from the private to the public sector (consistent with the ‘new public management’ paradigm which was prevalent, e.g. Ferlie et al., 1996; Hughes, 2003, Saint-Martin, 2000), it is just as important to consider what private-sector management might learn from the public sector. For example, many public service organizations, in the current period of a risk society (Beck, 1992) have to deal with the consequences of uncertainty, volatility and change. Brunnsson (1985) has argued that: ‘[Political organizations] expose fundamental problems connected with rationality and action and can teach us a great deal about fundamental problems and solutions in organizations . . . They deserve more attention than organizational theorists have given them hitherto’ (p. 186). So it is important to consider how we map and characterize public service organizations, and how we can use this mapping to stimulate further management research of a more general nature. A deceptively simple question such as ‘what is a public service organization?’ for example requires us to peel back a number of complex distinctions. These refer not only, or even primarily, to the lists of contrasts which are sometimes drawn between public and private organizations, (and where the conclusion generally is that there is overlap in characteristics between the sectors, which exhibit within as well as between sector variation). Nor does it simply refer to the ‘publicness puzzle’ of Bozeman (1993), echoed by Boyne (2002) within the UK context, which suggests that publicness is multi-dimensional not uni-dimensional. Rather, we need to address the question of what are public service organizations for? And also how are the interrelationships
Changing Public Service Organizations between the public and private sectors (and the oftneglected third, or voluntary sector) changing? In the recent past, when the ‘new public management’ (NPM) paradigm was dominant (Ferlie et al. 1996), the question of what public service organizations were for or what they added for the benefit of a variety of stakeholders was largely ignored. The focus was on improving efficiency and value for money, not on the complexities of effectiveness (and how effectiveness was to be judged and by whom). Public organizations could, it was assumed, be made more efficient by the application of private-sector management techniques and processes. The focus was on the ‘delivery’ of public services (a term which ignores the fact that some, though not all, public services are co-produced not delivered in the conventional sense of that word. Good examples would be education, the rehabilitation of prisoners or the treatment of some illnesses. This focus also ignores the importance of governance issues in public organizations). However, there is now an increasing interest in what is the ‘added value’ of public organizations (e.g. Benington, 2003; Moore, 1995). To answer this question requires more than auditing the quality and quantity of public services delivered – we have to look at governance arrangements (how decisions are made, on whose behalf and for which stakeholders) and we need to look at outcomes not just outputs (e.g. lower mortality rates, improved physical and psychological wellbeing of individuals, groups and communities not just services produced). The ‘added value’ of public organizations is itself subject to values (political and personal), which are sometimes fiercely contested in public arenas (the media, parliamentary and other institutions) and therefore public organizations cannot be divorced from the political and policy contexts in which they are located. This means that, in contrast to the tenets of new public management, political and policy considerations are significant and pervade the leadership, strategy and management of public service organizations. It also implies that we need to understand much more about how political leadership influences public organizations, how political leadership can be exercised in different ways from managerial leadership, and how managerial leaders have to develop political nous and act politically on occasions. We also need to
S9 understand how political leadership interfaces with managerial leadership. It can be argued that this is significant not only for the public sector, where the role of politics is explicit but also for the private sector, where internal and external political influences and values may be equally important though often hidden or implicit. So public management cannot be divorced from the policy and political contexts in which it is located. While it may be tempting to view public management as simply management in a different arena from that of the private sector, (and the new public management movement encouraged and developed this viewpoint), we believe that public management in fact has to be intimately connected with the aspirations, pressures and contingencies of the political world. Public managers are constrained by the fact that they work within a set of legal, regulatory and policy rules and demands, and are required to be accountable for their and their organization’s actions. This accountability is in the full glare of the public eye, not only in the media but also through an apparently expanding set of regulatory, inspection and scrutiny regimes (there is a huge research agenda as to whether and/or how regulation and inspection leads to sustained improvement in performance for public service organizations). Moore (1995) argues that public managers can only operate effectively where they have legitimacy/authority for their work as well as operational resources (and public values). Public managers therefore have to be alert to the opportunities and constraints of the policy setting in which they are located, to the changes in needs and aspirations of users and citizens, and to other changes which may be taking place in the external environment. Arguably, too much research on public-sector reform has been based on taking governmental assumptions of reform for granted and has taken insufficient account of these other changes to which some public service organizations are responding, or which they are anticipating. Again, there may be important lessons for management and for management research in other domains where issues of regulation, accountability and public trust are often vital, though sometimes less explicit. If the research agenda is to move on from the new public-management paradigm to embrace questions of effectiveness as well as of efficiency, then we need to understand more about how we
S10 can define, operationalize, measure and evaluate public services and public service organizations. Newman (2001) has outlined a possible postNPM ‘governance’ paradigm which places far more emphasis on partnership, networking and lateral modes of organizing than the vertical ‘command and control’ forms typical of the NPM paradigm. It also takes a more pragmatic view of which services can be delivered publicly and which privately. There is little research which has sought to explain why it is that some services appear to operate more effectively in the public sphere while others fare better in the private sphere (but see Boyne, 2002), and some appear to be more effective if they are jointly produced. Such an endeavour would present an intriguing area of enquiry, probably requiring the development of a contingency approach to public services, which moves away from the either/or mentality which has blighted debates over the last couple of decades. It would need researchers to specify in more detail what is meant by ‘effective operation’ and to define the conditions which support effectiveness, not only from managerial or professional points of view, but also from the users’ and the citizens’ points of view. Again, this means that public management would need to be linked explicitly to public policy-making. It would also mean giving more attention to issues of organizational design and functioning in terms of ‘fitness for purpose’ (Mintzberg, 1993) rather than working with a set of assumptions of a uniform standard of organization and management regardless of sector, service or stakeholders. This should help take the debates about public management out of the realm of the ‘one best way’ (long since abandoned in organizational behaviour, but somehow still retained by many policy- makers in government) and into models of organizational and interorganizational functioning which reflected their environmental, policy and historical contexts. One rather pessimistic view might be that the NPM paradigm is dated and highly contestable; yet shows a high degree of resilience in practice. Newman’s (2001) own assessment of the extent to which there has been a sustained shift in the UK to the governance paradigm was nuanced: the rhetoric of change was more evident than the reality. The ‘command and control’ structures built up in health organizations during the NPM era are now embedded and difficult to shift
E. Ferlie, J. Hartley and S. Martin (McNulty and Ferlie, 2002) towards more lateral forms. The extent to which public services organizations are in practice moving to a postNPM era is an intriguing theme. Our analysis of the papers published in BJOM over the last decade shows that they share the characteristic of much UK social science in being more empirical than theoretical. This begs important questions about what kinds of theoretical development would be beneficial for the healthy development of the public management field. We have noted that there is a preponderance of papers in BJOM written from an organizational behaviour perspective, with relatively few from strategy, finance and economics backgrounds. Yet, it could be argued that more generally in the field of public management there has been an over-reliance on theories from economics, with policy makers being particularly influenced by public choice theory and principal agent perspectives. Public choice theory has certainly underpinned the ‘new public management’ approach (e.g. Hughes, 2003) and yet it could be argued that the premises and assumptions which underpin it remain largely untested, and are certainly contested from other socialscience perspectives. There are a range of alternative approaches which might be used to explain motivation and behaviour in public organizations, and a significant challenge could be mounted to an overly economistic and rationalist view of individuals and organizations. This might, for example, require the development and refinement of concepts and theories from organizational behaviour and organizational psychology (including cognitive psychology, see Hodgkinson, 2003), and the use of economic theories beyond those derived from neo-liberal economics. If we are to move beyond the new public management paradigm, then there needs to be new theory development which is as encompassing and as engaging as public choice theory has been for economists. We will also need to develop clear and compelling theories to reflect sub-domains of public management, including strategy, leadership, motivation of staff, engagement of citizens and users. These need to take account of collaboration for public purpose rather than just the competition which is assumed to underlie many private-sector organizations. We will certainly also need to generate greater breadth in theoretical perspectives. Welcome
Changing Public Service Organizations though frameworks derived from organizational change are, we need more contributions from a much wider range of disciplines represented within (and beyond) schools of business and management, including strategy, organizational economics, marketing and ‘soft’ systems. The lack of a sustained, in-depth body of work on public-sector strategy making seems to us a serious weakness. Relatively little has been published, for example, exploring the effects of different financial regimes, such as the use of more private-sector capital or the introduction of novel accounting systems within the public sector. A stronger focus on theory (while retaining a strong grounding in empirical evidence-gathering) will enable researchers not only to examine outputs and outcomes but also to develop an understanding of change processes which underlie the phenomena being examined. While it has been common practice to draw on the current UK’s government’s mantra of ‘what matters is what works’, for researchers this is not sufficient. We need to know what works, for whom, when, in what circumstances and why (see for example Pawson and Tilley, 1997). Without a theoretical framework, however rudimentary, public management research will be vulnerable to the pressures and politics of the day and will be unable to create meaningful generalizable findings which are of wider relevance, across services, sectors and countries. Evaluation research has helped to develop a more rigorous approach to understanding public management, but there is still some way to go to produce robust theoretical frameworks. An important area for further theoretical development is that of inter-agency and interorganizational working which is an important component of the governance paradigm. Is partnership working and networking just a current fad, fashion or folderol? Or does it represent a set of important organizational innovations, taking us into territory beyond the familiarity of NPM-style organizational forms? While policy makers may sing the praises of these new organizational forms, academic researchers appear more sanguine about the outputs, outcomes and opportunity costs, anticipating a set of organizational tensions and paradoxes rather than a nirvana of organizational form (Benington, 2001; Pettigrew and Fenton, 2000; Sullivan
S11 and Skelcher, 2002). Research in the public sector could be valuable to the understanding of interorganizational dynamics in the private sector too. There is likely to be considerable impact of interorganizational collaboration (and competition at times) on our theories of strategy, leadership, management and organizational change, which until recently have largely been built from studies of organizations operating as singletons. The development of e-government may add a spur to these studies of interorganizational functioning. Interorganizational studies also alerts us to the increasing importance of not researching the public-service sector in isolation, but also examining its links both with the private sector and with the voluntary sector. The development of the role of community leadership for local government, and local interagency working among other parts of the public services makes these particularly critical questions to explore. We have noted that the ‘first decade’ BJOM articles did not reflect developments in the social sciences around discourse analysis and postmodern perspectives on organization. This is perhaps surprising given the prevalence of rhetoric as a political and policy-making tool, and the fact that one of the ‘outcomes’ of public enterprise is political rhetoric and discourse. It can be argued that the ‘modernization’ agenda of the current UK government is less a break with former governments in terms of practice, though it may be in terms of rhetoric (see for example, Newman, 2001). Some research has examined the links between rhetoric and public management (for example Hood, 1998), though more attention to this theme by researchers would make academics less vulnerable to the unsubstantiated claims about ‘reform’ and ‘transformational change’ which have been uttered by those in political power. Research could also fruitfully examine how public managers try to curb, cope with or copy the rhetoric of policy makers as they try to implement national or local change initiatives. Research might also examine the positive public functions of rhetoric about change. While public management research has, until recently, operated primarily on the basis of qualitative studies (especially case studies), there are some signs of an emerging quantitative approach, and even some studies which triangulate data across different methods. We must not lose sight
S12 of the value of case studies. Theoretical and generalizable contributions can be achieved even in a single case study design (for example, in Goffman’s 1961 analysis of the organizational form of a mental hospital gave insights into total institutions). However, solid evidence about the functioning of public management and public service organizations also requires detailed analysis of large datasets, across a range of organizations. Such datasets are starting to enter the public domain (and therefore be accessible to researchers) in part through the greater (and possibly more reliable) collection of data by public service organizations for performance management purposes, and also because of the prevalence of published regulation and inspection reports. In addition, the commitment of some public organizations to the collection of data over a period of years means that longitudinal analyses of published data may soon become both possible and meaningful. Public service organizations present a real opportunity to management researchers to examine developments over time, because there exist units of organizational analysis (e.g. schools, hospitals, certain types of local authority) which share certain characteristics and exist in such numbers as to make analysis more robust than in certain industrial sectors. In the end, though, data triangulated across both quantitative and qualitative methods will ensure that researchers understand not only the prevalence and progress of particular features of public management, but also that they understand the meanings and interpretations which are given, by a range of stakeholders, to those events. Public management research, as noted earlier, needs to conceptualize and operationalize comparative research. Without international comparison, parochial UK-based research will occupy an interesting but partial intellectual space, and will be divorced from policy initiatives and theoretical developments in other countries. International and comparative research enables highly challenging questions to be raised, including what is unique about particular state contexts, and what is prevalent across different state contexts. It enables research to examine and map the contingencies which shape public policy and public management, and to explore institutional as well as policy influences on processes and outcomes (c.f. March and Olsen, 1989; Scott,
E. Ferlie, J. Hartley and S. Martin 2001). Such broadly-cast research may be better placed to escape the overly rational approaches of ‘reform’ to understand the cultural, rhetorical, societal, institutional and organizational influences on policy and outcomes. The links between policy and research always contain tensions, whether conducted under Mode 1 or Mode 2 conditions (Gibbons et al., 1994). On the one hand, strengthening the links between theory and practice enhances access to research sites, including sensitive political phenomena. On the other hand, distance can enable researchers to undertake impartial research, untrammelled by the realpolitik of organizational and policy research. Our suggestion here is that a stronger theoretical approach will benefit the public management researcher regardless of where they are located on the dimension between pure Mode 1 and pure Mode 2. If researchers are able to theorize public management phenomena, then they will be better able to use existing research (including systematic literature reviews), to theorize their own work, to perceive and understand the complexities of governance and public management, and to contribute to policy debates and actions. This will enable them to ground their own work and, where appropriate, to challenge some of the assumptions about public management and governmental reform. Some of the current initiatives in government are not grounded in evidence. For example, some of the developments in local-government leadership initiatives are based on assumptions about individual leadership which were left behind by researchers a few decades ago. Assumptions in the policy world about how learning takes place by individuals and by organizations does not reflect current academic thinking about knowledge creation and knowledge management. Policy makers’ assumptions about organizational change continue to be dominated by models which are planned, rational, formal and without risk – even though researchers have accumulated sufficient evidence from both the private and the public sectors to show that this is only part of the story (e.g. Weick and Quinn, 1999). So the use of theory – from both the public and the private sectors – will help to produce an evidence-based approach to conceptualizing and even to some extent carrying out reform. It is unrealistic to expect government policy making to be based entirely on evidence – there are too many political
Changing Public Service Organizations contingencies and expediencies for this to be likely. However, we can expect researchers to be informed themselves about state of the art evidence, with strong foundations in theory, rigorously tested by logic and empirical data. This will help them in formative evaluation work with policy makers and practitioners, and will also help them contribute to high quality research on governance and public management. In conclusion, we hope that readers will find this review of the ‘state of the art’ of public management research in BJOM a useful overview. The four articles contained in the special issue also give a flavour of current high-quality public management research, internationally as well as nationally. The special issue also includes three reviews by the editors of important recent public-management texts, which address major international and paradigm issues. The field is currently extremely lively and we hope this special issue will further engage the interest of a broad spectrum of readers in contemporary public service management.
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