The End of History and the Last Man

The evolution of the New Public Management movement has increased pressure on state bureaucracies to become more responsive to citizens as clients. Without a doubt, this is an important advance in contemporary public administration, which finds itself struggling in an ultradynamic marketplace. However, together with such a welcome change in theory building and in practical culture reconstruction, modern societies still confront a growth in citizens’ passivism; they tend to favor the easy chair of the customer over the sweat and turmoil of participatory involvement. This article has two primary goals: First to establish a theoretically and empirically grounded criticism of the current state of new managerialism, which obscures the significance of citizen action and participation through overstressing the (important) idea of responsiveness. Second, the article proposes some guidelines for the future development of the discipline. This progress is toward enhanced collaboration and partnership among governance and public administration agencies, citizens, and other social players such as the media, academia, and the private and third sectors. The article concludes that, despite the fact that citizens are formal “owners” of the state, ownership will remain a symbolic banner for the governance and public administration–citizen relationship in a representative democracy. The alternative interaction of movement between responsiveness and collaboration is more realistic for the years ahead.

From Responsiveness to Collaboration: Governance, Citizens, and the Next Generation of Public Administration

For nearly 70 years scholars have been discussing the characteristics of action research and it is apparent that there is an increasingly wide range of forms that action research takes in practice. Here we argue that such diversity is not haphazard and that we must be cautious about developing all-embracing standards to differentiate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’. Rather this diversity is inspired by different philosophical stances, which usually remain tacit in published accounts thereby fuelling ambiguity and controversy about what action research should entail in practice and as to its ‘scientific’ status. The aim of this article is to explain the apparent diversity of action research in the organization studies domain, by clarifying how variable philosophical assumptions systematically lead to the constitution of distinctive forms of action research with their attendant conceptions of social science. This diversity is illustrated, with examples from the relevant literature, in terms of variation in: the a...

Action research: Explaining the diversity

Making Sense of Management

Collaboration is a prerequisite for the sustainability of interagency programs, particu- larly those programs initially created with the support of time-limited grant-funding sources. From the perspective of evaluators, however, assessing collaboration among grant partners is often difficult. It is also challenging to present collaboration data to stakeholders in a way that is meaningful. In this article, the authors introduce the Levels of Collaboration Scale, which was developed from existing models and instruments. The authors extend prior work on measuring collaboration by exploring the reliability of the scale and developing a format for visually displaying the results obtained from using the scale.

Measuring Collaboration Among Grant Partners

Books reviewed:

Jane Arsenault, Forging Nonprofit Alliances.

Eugene Bardach, Getting Agencies to Work Together: The Practice and Theory of Managerial Craftsmanship.

Seymour B. Sarason and Elizabeth M. Lorentz, Crossing Boundaries: Collaboration, Coordination, and the Redefinition of Resources.

Can Agencies Work Together? Collaboration in Public and Nonprofit Organizations

In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett (1998) traces the effects of corporate reengineering, and similar reforms in private-sector management, on the individual worker. He argues that our drive for flexible, efficient business processes has produced a sense of detachment on the part of human actors and a disconnection between firms and society at-large. As such, the reform agenda has forced us to rethink our notions of work, organization and community. In light of the global trend toward public management reform, we may draw important parallels between Sennett's image of the private sector and the experience of civil servants at the threshold of the twenty-first century. The transformation of government organizations, which in the vernacular of Reinventing Government and the New Public Management are characterized as excessively rule-bound, hierarchic and thus inflexible, has resulted in unintended, deleterious consequences for the public employee. We propose that the effort to break the routines of bureaucracy, create more flexible public organizations, and decentralize decision-making has removed crucial pillars from the foundation of public administration. For the individual, the practice of government has become disorienting. The ethic of service has been displaced by the persistent quest for change and values of commitment and consistency have been cast aside and replaced by the new norms of innovation and risk-taking. We also suggest that reinvention also has changed the system of power in public organizations. While the contemporary reform movement espouses

Character, Corrosion and the Civil Servant: The Human Consequences of Globalization and the New Public Management

Current theories of organization tend to discuss the management of change across networks in a grammar of instrumental reason, thereby offering legitimacy to the imperialism that emerges when groups come together in a shared‐change experience. However, by adopting principles of critical theory, the social research project initiated by a group of scholars known as the “Frankfurt School”, we may challenge this degradation of knowledge and its companion, human domination. A critical theory of interorganizational change reveals three forms of organizational imperialism: cultural domination, cultural imposition, and cultural fragmentation. From this perspective, we may understand the deleterious human, social and cultural consequences of organizational expansionism, and thereby initiate a dialogue for cultural emancipation, a more meaningful, culturally sensitive approach to change.

Cultural imperialism: A critical theory of interorganizational change

Organizational change involves patterns of engagement across organizational lines and thus carries important cultural implications for participants and groups within communities of organizations. This article proposes using allegory as an interpretive device in the study of organizational change. Allegory allows organizational research to appreciate the way “characters” introduce distinct qualities into the change experience. Based on an action research program with public organizations in the state of Delaware, the article reveals the promise of allegory both for explicating theory and informing reflexive practice.

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Joseph W. Grubbs

Papers

Can Agencies Work Together? Collaboration in Public and Nonprofit Organizations

Character, Corrosion and the Civil Servant: The Human Consequences of Globalization and the New Public Management

Cultural imperialism: A critical theory of interorganizational change

A Community of Voices: Using Allegory as an Interpretive Device in Action Research on Organizational Change

Whose Code Have We Cracked? A Critical Response to Murray