1.1 Introduction
Reforms possibly represent the most important driver in the process of change in public organizations. The trend of administrative reforms involving European bureaucracies in the last decades mainly concerned the civil service sectors through the adoption of company-like management styles (Emery, 2019). An increased flexibility in public service employment contracts, a greater mobility both within and outside the administration, a strengthening of political appointments, a decentralization of recruitment and training, and an extension of collective bargaining represented the common traits of the reform trends in the UK, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany during the 1980s and 1990s (Gualmini, 2008). Consequently, public employees have begun to face managerial logics based on efficiency, quality of service, openness, flexibility, and speed of execution.
All these changes have produced two relevant effects on the Public Sector.
Firstly, public organizations have become more complex in organizational terms, because of new logics that have not ousted the traditional logics of the Public Administration, based on the criterion of compliance with the law and administrative rules for public officials, but have been added to them. This is congruent with the view of Olsen (2008), who talks about a sedimentation process of reforms, that implies that new reforms complement or supplement, rather than replace, old ones, leading to the coexistence of old and new institutions, even if founded on partly inconsistent principles (Christensen & LÌgreid, 2011). In contrast to the either-or reform approaches, assuming a linear or cyclic development where one reform replaces the previous one (Verhoest & LÌgreid, 2010), Olsen (2008) proposed that reforms are conceived as a compound, based on the idea that previous reforms are modified through the addition of new, different reform measures, leaving certain elements of the structure and culture relatively stable, but strengthening some and weakening others (Christensen & LÌgreid, 2011; Røvik, 1996).
Verhoest and LĂŚgreid (2010) talk about a combination of ârobustness and flexibilityâ in the way public organizations change, where robustness is associated with the concepts of stability, continuity, reliability, predictability, low variance, and regularity, while flexibility is associated with change, variation, adaptability, new knowledge, flexibility, and innovation (Farjoun, 2010).1
Secondly, public and private organizations are minimizing their gaps and overcoming their traditional structural differences in terms of values, culture, and organizational asset. The New Public Management (NPM) movement (Barzelay, 2001; Osborne & Gaebler, 1992) significantly influenced the new trend, assuming that public and private sectors are convergent, according to the principle that management is management, regardless of sector (Lyons, Duxbury, & Higgins, 2006). The primary objective of NPM is to give Public Sector organizations a new orientation by changing the way of working, focusing on performance, effectiveness, and productivity. Consequently, after a long period when much scientific debate has been centered on a number of organizational distinctions between public and private organizations (Perry & Rainey, 1988; Savas, 1982; Spann, 1977),2 such distinctions have been downplayed because most practices and organizational assets become similar in both public and private organizations. At the individual level, sectorial distinctions between public and private are becoming increasingly irrelevant, following a long period when the attitudes and behaviors of employees of public and private organizations were contrasted. The NPM movement is considered as the âage of managementâ based on a new idea of leadership and a new corporate culture. According to this view, various initiatives of HR-based reforms have been undertaken in most European countries, aimed at the renewal of human resources policies in public organizations, taking inspiration from the practices commonly adopted in private organizations.
Starting from these premises, the objective of this chapter is to provide a general overview of the reform processes that have affected the Public Sector over the years. To this end, the chapter is structured as follows. Section 1.2 tries to conceptualize the administrative reforms as a multidimensional phenomenon, resulting from a combination of competing, inconsistent, and contradictory organizational principles and structures, that coexist and balance different interests and values. The succession of reforms is associated to a constant organizational change process involving the Public Sector, with different consequences for organizational assets and administrative apparatus. NPM and post-NPM reforms are analyzed, while in Sect. 1.3 the main organizational consequences resulting from the post-NPM reforms are examined in depth. Section 1.4 deals with a series of reflections on the crisis of the bureaucratic model, traditionally recognized as the typical organizational form of Public Administration. Finally, the Conclusions section summarizes the main issues dealt within this chapter, offering suggestions for the development of future research and for managerial implications.
1.2 Reforms and Organizational Change
Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004) define the term âreformâ as a deliberate and intentional change, marking a distinction from all those changes that suddenly occur and are not predictable. Public Sector organizations are constantly changing due to the continuous succession of administrative reforms acting on the administrative apparatuses and organizational patterns (Verhoest & LĂŚgreid, 2010), although reforms do not always produce total innovation.
A variety of theoretical perspectives have been provided to study the organizational change in Public Administration and, in particular, to focus on its nature and main drivers. The most common frameworks are the Institutional Theory and the Change Management Theories. According to the institutionalists, change is not intentionally implemented to improve efficiency and the organizations pursue their legitimacy by conforming themselves to environmental pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Evidently, the institutional perspective promotes a deterministic explanation of change and focuses on the level of analysis of the organizational field rather than of individual organizations. In contrast, Change Management Theories follow a rational-adaptive perspective to highlight the intentionality of the organizational change process, that results from choices made by the actors involved in the change process (Abramson & Lawrence, 2001; FernĂĄndez & Rainey, 2006; Kotter, 1995).
Kuipers et al. (2014) identify three orders of change, depending on the depth of reform. First-order changes are limited to a part or subsystem of an organization, and generally they occur as an incremental process. These changes concern, for example, the introduction of managerial innovations related to information technology or new accounting systems. Second-order changes involve radical processes of transformation that impact on the organizational level. These are often labeled as reorganizations (Boyne, 2006), or agency turnarounds (Borins, 2002), with a focus on behavioral factors that make possible and support organizational change, such as organizational culture, climate, values, and beliefs. The study on public leadership of Parry and Proctor-Thomson (2003) provides an interesting example of second-order change, highlighting the key role of decision-makers in establishing the values and beliefs among employees that make it possible for decisions to be translated into actions. Finally, a third-order change spans specific organizational boundaries and widely affects many organizations/sectors. Public service reforms provide significant examples leading to a radical transformation of values and ideologies in a society and to the creation of various collaborations and partnerships (Box 1.1).
Box 1.1 Managerial reform of Ital...