Are programme resources related to organizational change?

Abstract. This article joins two public policy approaches often employed separately: the analysis of changes in programme expenditure, and of organizational change. The first section reviews a series of alternative propositions about their relationship: organizations constricting programme innovation, or promoting efficiency or inefficiency; programme changes causing fission or fusion in organizations; increasing programme expenditure by replicating service delivery units rather than re-organization; and the place of symbolic and ad hoc political priorities. After considering problems of analyzing programme and organizational changes empirically, the article examines changes since 1945 in two major policy areas of British government, health and social security, and trade and industry. The empirical evidence emphasizes the dominance of political priorities, symbolic as well as programmatic: the capacity of organizations to grow at the base, by replicating service delivery units while formally remaining unchanged at the top, and of organizations growing at the top, by formal re-organization, while programme budgets and service delivery units are unaffected by symbolic reshuffling.     

GROUNDING GOVERNANCE IN DIALOGUE? DISCOURSE,PRACTICE AND THE POTENTIAL FOR A NEW PUBLIC SECTOR ORGANIZATIONAL FORM IN BRITAIN

Drawing on debates about the nature and significance of quasi‐autonomous government organizations, this article asks what happens when trends towards agency creation by government and trends towards stakeholder participation in policy processes come together. Issues are considered through an examination of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, one of a series of new regulatory bodies set up in Britain after 1997 and given the task of providing national guidance on treatments and care for people using the health service. The analysis points to the emergence of a new form – the dialogic intermediary organization. Such an organization, while maintaining close and informal links with government, attempts to build legitimacy for its activities through multiple and potentially competing engagements with diversely constituted publics. The potential theoretical and political importance of dialogic intermediary organizations, and some implications for their fuller empirical study are briefly explored.