The Transformation of Work in Welfare State Organizations

New Public Management and the Institutional Diffusion of Ideas

Frank Sowa, Ronald Staples, Stefan Zapfel, Frank Sowa, Ronald Staples, Stefan Zapfel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351619943
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How has New Public Management influenced social policy reform in different developed welfare states? New managerialism is conceptualized as a paradigm, which not only shapes the decision-making process in bureaucratic organizations but also affects the practice of individuals (citizens).

Public administrations have been expected to transform from traditional bureaucratic organizations into modern managerial service providers by adopting a business model that requires the efficient and effective use of resources. The introduction of managerial practices, controlling and accounting systems, management by objectives, computerization, service orientation, increased outsourcing, competitive structures and decentralized responsibility are typical of efforts to increase efficiency. These developments have been accompanied by the abolition of civil service systems and fewer secure jobs in public administrations.

This book provides a sociological understanding of how public administrations deal with this transformation, how people's role as public servants is affected, and what kind of strategies emerge either to meet these new organizational requirements or to circumvent them. It shows how hybrid arrangements of public services are created between the public and the private sphere that lead to conflicts of interest between private strategies and public tasks as well as to increasingly homogeneous social welfare provision across Europe.

Chapter 1
Managerial control of public sector IT professionals via IT systems

Clive Trusson

Introduction

This chapter explores the role played by IT systems comprising multiple information and communication technologies (ICTs) in placing public sector IT professionals under increasing pressures from managerialism (Fournier, 2000). It does this by reference to a case study of a group of public sector IT workers who might expect to have discretionary control over their work: a hallmark of professions. Specifically, it discusses how IT systems play a central role in managerial processes of rationalisation and control over the work of IT professionals.

In 1988, Shoshana Zuboff (1988, p. 388) wrote: “Technology makes the world a new place”. As we now survey the ‘world’ of public sector work some three decades later, we can reflect upon how ICTs have slowly but surely made that ‘world’ a new place. Having first introduced ICTs in order to achieve efficiency benefits, the managements of local and national government bodies have become increasingly dependent upon ICTs for ensuring that public services are provided in the most cost-effective manner. This imposition of ICTs upon the public sector workforce has inevitably impacted upon how these workers, including professionals, perform their duties. Of specific interest is how forms of managerialism associated with the logic of the market have apparently been inscribed within these new ICT-enabled ways of working (e.g. Carvalho, 2014).

The profession that has been at the forefront of making this ‘world’ a new place are highly skilled IT technicians, now employed in large numbers by public sector organisations to oversee the IT systems that enable public services to be provided. It is these public sector professionals who are the subjects of this study. As reported on in this chapter, they have not been immune from the ICT-enabled managerialist agenda that aggrandizes a commercial-professional standpoint. The case study serves to illustrate how the technical-professional concerns (Spence & Carter, 2014) that have traditionally accorded status to these managed professionals are susceptible to being undermined by the ICTs imposed by managers. An argument is presented, supported by an inductively developed model, that a range of different ICTs are imposed upon IT professionals that in combination serve to undermine their professional status by operating as mechanisms that serve the managerial purposes of managers seeking to rationalise and control the practices of professionals.

The chapter straddles different streams of academic literature. First, in line with this volume, it relates to the literature on the transformation of public sector work through the diffusion of managerial ideas and practices of marketised service provision, commonly referred to as ‘New Public Management’. Second, it relates to the literature that is interested in the relationship between managers and professionals (e.g. Abbott, 1988; Spence & Carter, 2014; Hodgson et al., 2015). Third, it relates to the literature concerning the impact of ICTs on professional work (e.g. Ford, 2015; Susskind & Susskind, 2015; Russell et al., 2015). At the interchange of these discussions are the issues of autonomy over decision-making being wrested from public sector employees with special knowledge and skills (Derber et al., 1990) and the managerial desire for the technological capture and control of such know-how (Reich, 2000; Ford, 2015).

In this chapter, these streams of enquiry are engaged in through a study of organisationally situated IT professionals as exemplars of ‘managed professionals’ (e.g. Noordegraaf, 2015; Russell et al., 2015) working in the public sector who to a great extent have their labour process imposed upon them. ICTs, typically selected by management, are an integral part of these pre-defined processes, both enabling them and structuring them with a managerial objective of optimising efficiency, productivity, control and consistency. Through analysis of qualitative data consideration is given to how ICTs used by these workers in their everyday work of investigating and resolving IT service incidents (also) serve a managerialist agenda that upholds a commercial/market logic (e.g. Carvalho, 2014), such that this logic impacts upon the concept of ‘professional’ work as primarily having an agenda with a contrasting technical, service quality logic.

As a theoretical development, consideration is given to how management-imposed ICTs used by public sector IT professionals might be alternatively associated with either the rationalisation of the professional experience or the rationalisation of their professional expertise. This theoretical contribution is supported by an inductively developed model that illustrates how management-imposed ICTs diminish the extent to which public sector IT professionals enjoy autonomy in their work. With reference to studies of other professionals working in the public sector it is further theorised how this model might be adapted to illustrate how ICTs operate as control mechanisms serving managerial purposes.

Before reporting the study, a brief commentary is presented to contextualize it. First, this serves as a reminder that ICTs have been central to the managerialist agenda of new public management initiatives; and second, it informs that those ICTs have typically been implemented across the public sector as an element of widely diffused service-oriented ‘best practices’. This is followed by an outlining of the methodology for the study. The findings of the study are then reported on and discussed, giving particular consideration to the implications for understanding the changing nature (or transformation) of managed professional work in public sector organizations. Specifically, this discussion reflects upon how ICT-enabled managerial controls imposed upon this group of professional workers impact upon core defining traits of professional work, specifically autonomy, authority and the acquisition and use of expertise. As a theoretical contribution an illustrative model is presented to show how a collection of different ICTs (i.e. rather than ICT as a singular entity) combine to assert the authority of management, operating from a commercial-professional logic, over the work of professionals, trained to operate from a technical-professional logic (Spence & Carter, 2014).

Context of the case study: public sector service-oriented IT professional work

In contemporary society, IT is intrinsic to government-funded public service provision as well as wider business practices (Greenhill, 2011) and as such the use of ICTs – often complex technologies that require intensive training and skilful operation – is part-and-parcel of the everyday experience of many workers, including those who would claim to be working in specific professions. Given the ubiquity and socio-economic importance of IT (Carr, 2003; McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2008), the IT profession can be said to have played a vital role in the success of the neoliberal political agenda associated with new public management (Harvey, 2007). As such, we might understand the professional domain of IT to be intrinsically symbiotic with the techniques of efficiency-focused managerialism (Derber et al., 1990).

Public sector IT professionals are a distinct body of workers who develop and support ICTs used by other public sector employees and the public, recast as customers or service users. It is their technological expertise (Larson, 1977) and ability to use professional inference in responding effectively to circumstances (Abbott, 1988; Broadbent et al., 1997) that affords them the authority to practice and the trust and obedience of service recipients (Weber, 1947; Johnson, 1972; Starr, 1982) such that they can lay claim to professional status. Accepting that defining features of professionalism are contested (Broadbent et al., 1997), the performance of work investigating, and resolving IT service incidents that occur across complex governmental IT infrastructures particularly resonates with the assertion that professions perform socially significant work (Brock et al., 2014).’

In this study, focus is applied to public sector IT service professionals in the UK who support operational IT systems and are managed in accordance with the ‘best practice’ managerialist guidelines for managing IT systems as customer-oriented services: ITIL (formerly – but no longer – an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library). These ITIL guidelines that have been globally adopted through processes of diffusion and institutionalisation have their origins within the UK civil service during Margaret Thatcher’s third term of government (Cartlidge et al., 2007). They can be identified as compatible with – or indeed exhibits of – the new public management discourse. Specifically, they explicitly commodify public sector workers as ‘people assets’, such that their ‘productive capacity’ might be measured ‘in units of cost, time and effort’ (Cannon, 2011, p. 382), and promote the use of ICTs, within defined processes, as mechanisms of innovation, productivity and efficiency (Dutta & Mia, 2011) that inevitably assert control over practice.

The case study: methodological approach

The study reported on here is of public sector IT professionals working across several teams that provided and supported IT services for a county council (i.e. a local government authority) in the Midlands of England employing 12,000 people. It is referred to in this case study as Midshire County Council (MCC). Significantly, the IT management at this authority had implemented ITIL ‘best practice’ for managing IT services (e.g. Cannon, 2011). In public sector contexts, such as MCC, ITIL endorses an internal market approach, casting the IT systems users (i.e. other MCC departments and individual employees, and local authority-controlled schools) in the role of internal customers who receive IT services according to service level agreements (SLAs). As such, the MCC management not only confidently espoused IT service management ‘best practice’ (i.e. ITIL) but had also sought to organise work accordingly, imposing various ICTs – as advocated by the ‘best practice’ – upon their IT professional workforce.

Data were collected across three IT service support teams at MCC, all of which had responsibilities for investigating, diagnosing and resolving IT service incidents across a wide range of IT systems that supported the services provided by MCC. Table 1.1 provides further information on the three different teams visited for the study and Table 1.2 details the number of IT professionals interviewed and observed investigating, diagnosing and resolving IT service incidents.

Table 1.1 Descriptions of the three Midshire County Council teams visited

Corporate Systems IT Service Desk (CSITSD): MCC’s Corporate Services IT Service Desk was situated in an office on the second-floor of a cuboid pre-fabricated block (built in 1962 as temporary office accommodation) annexed to the rear of the Council Headquarters. This IT Service Desk team was a single point of contact for support of IT systems used by all of the County’s service divisions except Education Services (e.g. Social Care; Leisure Services; Environmental Services). When a ‘customer’ contacted the Service Desk they were placed in a queue until a worker became available. When an incident or service request could not be completed or escalated to a second line team (e.g. Desktop Services) within 20 minutes, it was passed to a second-tier worker within the team who could work on the matter without the pressure of dealing with in-coming calls to the ‘single point of contact’ phone-number. The team comprised of ten IT professionals who sat alongside other (specialist) IT professionals in the open plan office space. Most of the team comprised young men who, despite being equipped with headsets, engaged in a high level of social and work-related conversation. The only female workers on the team, Kate and Judy, both older workers, had specific responsibilities for setting up and modifying user access rights to the organisation’s systems, and sat apart from the other Service Desk workers.

Corporate Systems Desktop Services (CSDS): The Desktop Services team were situated on the ground floor to the rear of the main County Council office building, an architecturally impressive 1930s structure. The five workers in the team generally congregated within one room which served as office space, technical workshop where computer equipment could be maintained and hardware store for new computer equipment and spares. As you entered the room, the first thing you noticed was the high workbench with stools for the technicians to sit on. The workbench was littered with computer hardware that was undergoing repair, screwdrivers and other tools. Above the workbench were a collection of manuals and materials for maintaining the hardware. The team were friendly towards each other and, while they worked on incidents individually, supported each other with the technical aspects of the work. They appeared to be highly conscientious as a team and, while they did not face constant interrupting phone calls, they worked assiduously throughout the periods of observation.

Education Services IT Service Desk (ESITSD): The Education Services IT Service Desk was located on the top floor of a converted Art Deco industrial building (built in 1936) in the Northern suburbs of the county’s major city. The team was dedicated to the support of the IT systems provided to support the council’s education services and typically operated by administrators in schools and colleges. The team were self-contained within one room with its own adjoining kitchen area. The team was effectively split into three parts. Three workers took the calls that came into the ‘single point of contact’ phone number and email address and via the Internet. One worker would take the lead on the phones at any given point of the week for a morning or afternoon session. The others would pick up additional calls that came in whilst this worker was handling a call. Calls were directly answered, rather than via an automated call response system. Where incidents could not be resolved over the phone within approximately 20 minutes they would be passed to a specific second-tier worker depending on the particulars of the incident. If the matter related to the SIMS system, then the matter would be referred to one of four specialist workers.

Table 1.2 Data collected at the three Midshire County Council teams visited

The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured approach to access workers’ ‘descriptions, rationalisations and reflections’ on their everyday work experience (Bloor & Wood, 2006, p. 71). In analysis of the fully-transcribed interview data, specific interest was taken in those narrative thoughts that concerned their individual experiences of working with the management-imposed technologies and the labour processes that were enabled by those technologies. Observation data were collected by a single researcher sitting alongside the selected IT professionals and watching what was done in practice, all the while recording in a notebook the small actions taken. It should be noted that the researcher (and author of this chapter) had a professional background working in similar environments and as such was able to interpret those small actions, record the data and later analyse the data from a ‘shared lifeworld’ perspective (Schutz, 1953). The benefits here are similar to those advanced ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The transformation of work in welfare state organisations
• 1 Managerial control of public sector IT professionals via IT systems
• 2 Performance targets as negotiation devices – accounting management in French job centres
• 3 Labour market experts and their professional practices technologies of self-control of job placement professionals
• 4 Managerial doctors: Professionalism, managerialism and health reforms in Portugal
• 5 Accountability requirements for social work professionals: Ensuring the quality of discretionary practice
• 6 Critical perspectives on accounting, audit and accountability in public services: a study of performance management in UK local museums
• 7 Doing meaning in work under conditions of new public management? Findings from the medical care sector and social work
• 8 Marketing without moralising: Service orientation and employer relations in the Swiss disability insurance
• 9 Collective mobilization among welfare professionals in Sweden – the politicisation of caring
• 10 Street level bureaucracy under pressure: Job insecurity, business logic and challenging users
• 11 New managerialism as an organisational form of neoliberalism
• 12 Framing work injury/sickness in a changing welfare state – naming and blaming
• 13 Comply or defy? Managing the inclusion of disabled people in the Netherlands
• Index