Bureaucracy as an issue in Third World management: An African case study

Organizational theory has been of surprisingly limited value in illuminating the problems of public sector management in the Third World. One reason for this is the ideal-typical bias of most studies of Third World management. This has led to an emphasis on assumed optimal performance criteria to the detriment of an understanding of how Third World organizations actually perform. The case of public sector administration in Liberia is used to illustrate this theme. The major role of administrative incorporation in the stabilization of the Liberian State is established, and consideration given to the ways in which the span of administrative employment and the extent of its popular impact were maximized through the elaboration of an idiosyncratic bureaucratic ideology. Central features of the Liberian bureaucracy are discussedthe over-definition of its external boundary; the weakness of its internal boundaries; the relative insignificance of specialized expert knowledge to bureaucratic roles; and the idiosyncratic nature of the bureaucratic career. While Weberian standards did not apply in the Liberian instance, it cannot be assumed that the latter was therefore a ‘failed bureaucracy’; for the Liberian administration was arguably effective in relation to certain goals, even if these were not ones which would have applied in the ideal-typical case. These goals were essentially political and must be understood in relation to political constraints, rather thanas is often suggested in studies of Third World managementas ‘cultural’ phenomena. Attempts to improve public sector managerial performance in the Third World need to give as much attention to operational issues as to conventional targets.     

Bureaucratic Power and Public Policies: a Test of the Rational Staff Maximization Hypothesis

This paper tests the staff maximization hypothesis that bureaucratic power is positively related to labour inputs to the production of public sector goods and services. The context of the test is the staffing policies of three groups of British local authorities in three time periods. The relationship between bureaucratic power and changes in authorities' staff is estimated while controlling for the influence of local party politics, central grants and conditions in the environment of the local political system. The results of the statistical analysis refute the staff maximization hypothesis.     

When Politics Matters: The Impact of Politicians' and Bureaucrats' Preferences on Salient and Nonsalient Policy Areas

For three decades, the “politics matters” literature has found that political ideology is an important explanation of public policy. However, this literature systematically fails to include the influence of the bureaucracy. In fact, it is almost impossible to identify a single study in this literature that controls for the influence of the permanent bureaucracy. In this article, we investigate whether politics still matters when bureaucratic preferences are taken into account. We do this in a simultaneous test of political and bureaucratic influences on public budgets, a policy measure often studied in the “politics matters” literature. We find that political preferences trump bureaucratic ones in policy areas salient to the public but not in less salient areas. This might be comforting news from a democratic perspective. However, as public budgets represent an easy case for political influence, it is food for thought that political preferences do not always prevail.     

Public sector reform in Sub‐Saharan Africa: what can be learnt from the civil service performance improvement programme in Ghana?

This paper focuses on public sector management reform ‘best‐practice’ case experience from Sub‐Sahara African (SSA). Given that ‘best‐practice’ is a relative concept and often debatable, the paper uses the Ghana Civil Service Performance Improvement Programme (GCSPIP) experience as rather a ‘good‐practice’ case with the view to sharing the outcome and lessons to encourage collaborative‐learning. It seeks to share the outcome and lessons learnt by the Ghana civil service reform with future public service reformers and to contribute to the literature. The paper concludes with an adaptable three‐dimensional framework. The framework argues that successful future public service reform (PSR) should consider three broad issues: first, are the ‘critical success factors’, including wholehearted political leadership commitment; wholehearted bureaucratic leadership commitment; thoughtful synergistic planning/preparation; patience for implementation and evaluation; capacity to convince; neutralise and accommodate reform‐phobias and critics; sustainable financial and technical resource availability and conscious nurturing of general public support. Second, is the need for reformers to appreciate the concerns of the public and the civil society scepticism of public ‘institutions’ and its ‘operatives’ and finally placing any reform programme in a country‐specific context, including understanding its history, culture, politics, economy, sociology, ideology and values. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Control versus Bureaucratic Values: Reframing the Debate

The literature on political control of bureaucracy reveals that bureaucracies are highly responsive to political forces. This paper argues that the political control literature misses evidence from other academic literature that bears directly on this phenomenon. Specifically, researchers need to consider the values of the bureaucracy in any effort to assess the degree of political control. An empirical test is presented using a data set from public education. Results show bureaucratic values to be far more influential in explaining bureaucratic outputs and outcomes than political factors. These findings suggest that a reinterpretation of previous empirical research is urgently in order.     

The Changing Face of Public Sector Employment

While it is easy, and almost a national sport, to criticise the traditional model of public sector employment as being too generous, there is a rationale for its distinctiveness. The career service model that endured for most of the last century was aligned to the bureaucratic form of public administration of that time. As public administration was 'transformed' into public sector management through the importing of private sector techniques, so too has public sector employment been varied in pursuit of greater efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness.     

Do Australian public sector employees have the type of culture they want in the era of new public management?

New public management theory proposes that public sector organisations should be managed more like private sector organisations. It is therefore expected that public sector managers will have preferences for an organisational culture that will reflect the culture of private sector organisations, with an external rather than internal orientation. The current research investigated the idea that managers' perceptions of ideal organisational culture would be different to the bureaucratic model of culture (internally oriented), which has traditionally been associated with public sector organisations. Responses to a competing values culture inventory were received from 925 public sector employees. Results indicated that the bureaucratic model is still pervasive; however, managers prefer a culture that is more external, and less control focussed, as expected. Lower level employees expressed a desire for a culture that emphasised human relations values.     

Linking action training to bureaucratic reorientation and institutional reform

This article explores the use of action-training methods in a highly centralized and control-oriented public sector. It focuses on the Technical Assistance and Training Programme for Departmental Development Corporations (PATC-CORDES), an innovative programme in Peru initially supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Successive sections review a particularly influential alternative to conventional classroom training proposed by Honadle and Hannah (1982); provide relevant background; describe PATC-CORDES organization and objectives; examine its training activities; assess the resulting institutional impacts; and posit important insights from the case study. The PATC-CORDES experience demonstrates that action-training methods can produce positive results in agencies that are part of a rigid public sector and, more importantly, that such methods can be linked to bureaucratic reorientation and institutional reform. Perhaps the most interesting and controversial conclusion is that recruitment of central administrators to lead training exercises can be a useful tactic for bureaucratic reorientation. The article is based on review of documents, reports, and evaluations prepared by persons working for USAID/Peru, PATC-CORDES, and departmental development corporations (CORDES); extensive interviews with political leaders, managers, and professionals in these same organizations; analysis of Peruvian legislation; and other references cited in the text.     

PRODUCTIVITY, SOCIETAL WELL-BEING, AND PUBLIC POLICY: AN INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

The assumption that bureaucratic rationality and efficiency promote democracy is examined briefly from several theoretical perspectives. The efforts of the new conservativesu1 and new corporatists to impose private sector and business forms on the public sector as a way of achieving greater public sector productivity is reviewed. The contribution of this symposium and its specific articles to understanding the ethical and practical consequences of these efforts is presented.     

Managerialism, Politics and Legal Bureaucratic Rationality in Immigration Policy

Against claims that public sector reforms have made the functions of managers similar to those in private firms, critics of the managerialist model point to constraints on public sector managers that make their decisions on resource allocation and policy development different from those affecting corporations. Through an examination of policy formulation, program management and decision-making in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, this article demonstrates that managerialist program planning, outcome orientation and performance measurement have been introduced, but that this has not precluded an expansion in non-market oriented routine, non-discretionary decision-making involving bureaucratic legal rationality within a legislative and regulatory framework. While some clients have been defined and assessed in terms of economic criteria, they access departmental processing not in terms of market signals, but according to their compliance with the Migration Act and Migration Regulations. Managerialism has not occurred at the expense of classical administrative practices, rather managerialist and legal bureaucratic forms have both grown and influenced political calculations on policy-making.     

Focusing on public value: Something new and something old

This article develops two propositions. First, that the public sector needs new stories that make sense of recent storms of change. Second, that focusing on ‘public value’ helps tell a useful new story. Much contemporary commentary comes from analysts working within a particular field of thought. However, problems of public policy and management are hard to discipline. Public value is not the property of particular political parties, public service institutions, academic disciplines or professions. Public value is defined and redefined through social and political interaction. Such interaction involves politicians, officials and communities. Focusing on public value enables one to aggregate issues for scholarly analysis in terms that should also make sense to citizens and communities, political activists and people responsible for delivering public services. The article argues that: recent agendas for public sector change overlap and that implementation is incomplete; the skills of analysts and activists in the public sector, and in associated sectors delivering public services, need large components of expertise in interpreting ambiguous patterns and the management of complex relationships; and that the cumulative impact of succeeding agendas is to widen the scope of issues in play. Large components in both reform and agendas have involved bringing the public sector firmly under political control. However, the later emphasis on consultation and participation places political executives under great pressure. The more deliberation is promised the more is demanded. There is increasing pressure for the task of exploring for public value to be shared more widely. The article develops its key propositions by exploring three main themes: first, the notion of public value and the emphasis in it on search and interaction as a basis for political and managerial leadership; second, the contested impacts of recent agendas of change in the public and other affected sectors which have widened the scope of issues in play but have left key institutional and policy issues unresolved; and, third, a sample of current and emerging issues in which asking questions about public value may help activists, politicians and managers more creatively focus their attention. Focusing on public value can help communities, service providers and political leaders ask and answer a new and wider range of questions while continuing to learn from recent experience, however complex and contested.     

Prospects for future Australian‐United States defence cooperation

Singapore’s governing elite is less bureaucratic and less separated from private interests than commonly thought. The bureaucracy has little independent strength and the political leadership is entwined with leading members of the business community, particularly the financial sector, to the point that the line between public and private is frequently indistinct. Given that democratic or interest-group constraints are minimal, transparency low and the rule of law in doubt, why Singapore’s activist economic policies have not decayed into a search for private rewards is rather puzzling. This article argues that Singapore’s record of sound government rests on informal governing institutions as well as attributes of the formal government sector. The informal institutions encompass nominally public and private actors in a systematized way, structuring the incorporation of private actors to embed the values of performance-based merit and working with, not against, government. The system of government is, however, fragile and may be showing signs of decay.     

Bureaucratic Behavior in the Local Public Sector: A Revealed Preference Approach

Public sector bureaucratic utility is typically assumed to be a function ofbudget size or government employment. Although intuitively appealing, thereare no definitive direct tests of the assumption. To fill this gap, thispaper exploits data that isolate resource allocation decisions made by localpublic sector bureaucrats. We use revealed preference theory to find thatthe bureaucracy behaves ``as if'' bureaucratic utility is an increasingfunction of employment across government functions and public spending,providing direct evidence justifying the popular assumption in theoreticalmodels of government behavior.     

Revitalize the Public Service,Revitalize the Middle Class

The reinventing government movement of the 1990s reshaped the public sector in significant ways. Creating a government that worked better and cost less was accomplished through streamlined federal middle management ranks and privatized service delivery, which contributed to the emergence of a “hollow state.” Workforce reductions that addressed short‐term economic realities effectively threatened the long‐term sustainability of governmental organizations and the communities they serve. A variety of forces are now ushering in a new era of hollow government, including a changing context for public work, shifting bureaucratic expectations, and reduced capacity for workforce management. The public sector and its employees represent an important contributor to the vitality of our economy and communities. Revitalizing the public sector workforce is critical for revitalizing the middle class, and both represent urgent policy priorities.     

ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: CONCEPTS, ISSUES, AND THE NATIONAL EXPERIENCE

This symposium examines issues related to the links between administrative reform policy and economic development policy. The symposium introduction paper consists of two parts. First, it offers an overview of the background of theoretical and conceptual issues that are important to the connection between administrative reform and economic development. The issues reviewed include the role of government in economic development, the importance of public policy and management to economic development, the contribution of development administration, and the need of administrative reform to remove bureaucratic problems and promote efficiency. Next, the introduction paper provides a brief summary of the research arguments and findings addressed in the following six articles. They include an evaluation of administrative reform in Arab world economic growth, an examination of administrative reform and economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean, a political economy analysis of policy reform in Korea, a study of the implementation of privatization strategies in India's public sector reform, a discussion of the concerns between efficiency and ethics in China's economic development, and the study of administrative and economic development in Mongolia. The implications of the research findings and the need for further study of the linkage between administrative reform and economic development are emphasized in the conclusion.     

Neo-corporatist theory and the politics of industrial decline

Abstract. The case of the French textile and clothing industry during the post-1974 crisis period illustrates a number of issues relevant to the debate about meso-corporatism and interest intermediation at the sectoral level in industry. It highlights the importance of attempts to understand the relationships between organised interests and the state in the analysis of the policy process. The pattern of state-industry relations which evolved was crucial in determining the outcome of conflict between state and industry over the management of restructuring during the crisis.
The inapplicability of the meso-corporatist model to this case becomes clear. There was a conspicuous absence of either political exchange or a shared policy agenda, each an important element of corporatist patterns of policy formation, in both the formation and implementation of adjustment policies in the sector. Mutual suspicion and a struggle to control the terms of the debate yielded a low level of co-operation. Eventually the industry was able to appropriate increased public funds on its own terms and to insist on a protective trade regime.
The complexity of the case points to the need to broaden the debate over models of interest intermediation and to relate it to issues in political economy. This is particularly important with regard to the structure of the bureaucratic state and notions of state autonomy.     

Sliding doors in Brussels: A career path analysis of EU affairs managers

This article investigates the revolving doors phenomenon in the European Union (EU). It proposes a management approach that treats this phenomenon as a form of corporate political activity through which companies try to gain access to decision makers. By using sequence analysis to examine the career paths of almost 300 EU affairs managers based in public and private companies across 26 countries, three different ideal‐typical managers are identified: those EU affairs managers coming from EU institutions and public affairs; those who make a career through the private sector; and those who establish themselves in national political institutions. This identification confirms that EU institutions need different types of information and companies need EU affairs managers with different professional backgrounds able to provide it. Rather than observing a revolving door of EU officials into EU government affairs, what the authors term ‘sliding doors’ – namely the separation of careers, especially between the public and private sectors – is discerned.     

Virtual Government: What Will Remain Inside the Public Sector?

Around the world, the public sector is changing in ways which challenge the Weberian or bureaucratic paradigm. If we are to comprehend these changes, we must abandon the binary model of public and private sectors and better understand the non-state public sector. Looking to historical and international examples, this article asks what has to remain inside the state. While acknowledging that there are significant drivers for reform, it argues that the size of government — large or small — should not be a matter of ideology.     

What Do Bureaucrats Like Doing? Bureaucratic Preferences in Response to Institutional Reform

How do bureaucrats respond to administrative reform in relation to their overall administrative goals? The authors test the bureau‐shaping thesis, which holds that bureaucrats’ preferences for certain kinds of roles and tasks motivate their support for bureau reform. Drawing on attitudinal and behavioral data from a survey of English local government officials, the findings underscore how bureaucrats with different interests and motivations sort themselves into job types. Their preferences drive support for reform, which, in turn, strengthens the executive structure of English local government. Drawing on the literature on bureaucratic responses to institutional reform, the authors offer a more nuanced portrayal of bureaucratic preferences in line with the bureau‐shaping model. A key conclusion: political principals need improved empirical awareness of bureaucratic preferences when undertaking public institutional reforms.     

Bureaucratic Roles: Political Loyalty and Professional Autonomy*

Political leaders in many countries have experienced growing problems of capacity in the postwar period, a development leading to an increase in the delegation of authority to public administration and civil servants. This delegation of authority creates a significant potential for discretionary decision-making authority on the part of public bureaucrats. One way of studying how bureaucrats handle this situation is to focus upon bureaucratic roles. Bureaucratic roles traditionally contain both political and professional norms. This article discusses how these political and professional considerations can be defined and how these norms are balanced given the potential for conflict which is present. The discussion is illustrated by measuring the perception of bureaucratic norms and role enactment among civil servants in Norwegian ministries. Results indicate that civil servants appear to have few problems in attending to and balancing both political and professional role norms.