Organizational models and public management reforms

Abstract

This paper is based on a research on public management reforms conducted in three municipal governments in Italy, Spain and the United States. The main objective of this paper is to perform a comparison of the four organizational and relational models that have been inspiring the design of structures and processes in recent reforms in public organizations. A public management reform is a set of innovations in public management policies and in the design of programmatic organizations carried out by a public organization, based on a fairly coherent set of justifications and rhetoric. Public management reforms are generally backed by justifications of efficiency, accountability and flexibility. In the long run public management reforms have the potential to change the organizational and relational model of a public organization. Sometimes public management reforms are used merely for rhetoric purposes. Other times public management reforms have little effect or fail completely. The analysed models are the bureaucratic model, the New Public Management, the Entrepreneurial Government and Public Governance.

The weberian bureaucratic model is based on the rational-legal authority as the source of power inside bureaucratic organizations, which power emanates from the norms, from formal institutions, and not from a charismatic profile or from tradition. The NPM is an extra-bureaucratic normative model for designing and managing public administration based on values of efficiency, effectiveness and competitiveness. The "Entrepreneurial Government" was synthesized by Osborne & Gaebler in a book written in 1992, inaugurating a pragmatic style of public management clearly inspired by the new managerial sciences. The Public Governance is a model of horizontal interaction between public and private actors in policymaking. Recently, the progressive shift from the bureaucratic model to these new organizational and relational models of NPM, EG, and PG has been considered as a new global wave of public management reforms. It is important to remind that the presumptive "magic" of public management reforms has to be taken cautiously.

This paper has shown that firstly: the new organization and relational models share important characteristic with the traditional bureaucratic model: they are not rupture models, and they also put emphasis on the control function. Secondly, public management reforms can easily become symbolic policies or rhetorical when politicians and public officials strive to enhance the public perception of the administrative organizations using public management reforms as a vehicle for that aim. It is not rare complete efforts of reforms going further in rhetoric than in deeds. The paper ends up advancing a research agenda for those interested on themes of public management reforms.