Explanatory Frameworks in Recent Studies of Public Management Reforms

Transcription

1 Explanatory Frameworks in Recent Studies of Public Management Reforms Autoria: Leonardo Secchi Abstract This paper shows the results of a survey of articles that sought to identify the explanatory framework used by scholars when studying public management reforms. More than 900 recently published articles were analyzed in six prestigious scientific Journals in the field of public administration. In order to perform the analysis the research adopted the 4W1H framework, verifying the emphasis on dependent and independent variable such as content (what), actors (who), phases (when), institutions (where) and styles (how). The screened articles were categorized according to the causal nexus between independent and dependent variables. Then the findings of this survey were compared with the findings of a multi-case study of public management reforms in Barcelona, Boston and Turin (the empirical research that originated this paper). The general conclusion is that the knowledge recently produced in the field has neglected a key policy variable: the temporal/phase dimension. However, the empirical data and the conclusions of the multi-case study point out that the temporal/phase dimension in policymaking studies is fertile and relevant to understand causal relations between the 4W1H variables, and should be reconsidered in studies of public management reforms. Introduction Case studies and multi-case studies have insistently been criticized of collectively lacking cumulative relevance. The fragmentation is also appointed as one of the crucial problems for the mutual construction of knowledge in the field of public administration, especially when dealing with public management reforms. We have engaged in one more multi-case study on public management reforms aware of this potential downside. It was a policy-making study that sought to compare 15 cases of innovation in public management policies (PMPs) and in the design of programmatic organizations (DPOs) in three analytical units: the municipal governments of Barcelona, Boston and Turin. The research adopted an inductive methodological approach and had descriptive and explanatory aims. The description of cases was guided by the five conventional variables of policy-making studies: contents (what), actors (who), phases (when), institutions (where) and styles (how), the 4W1H framework. These variables were also used in the explanatory phase of the research, resting on the empirical findings in the field to arrive at the formulation of hypotheses about the relationship between the five variables. This multi-case study generated two hypotheses 1) the content of a policy can influence the phase in which conflicts are more intense; 2) the policymaking style can influence the phase in which conflicts are more intense. In order to avoid the isolation of our findings, and collaborate for the mutual construction of knowledge in the field we engaged in a survey of articles in the field of public administration in order to identify the explanatory framework used by scholars when dealing with public management reforms. More than 900 recently published articles were analyzed. Using the same variables as in our empirical analysis (4W1H), the screened articles were categorized according to the causal nexus between independent and dependent variables that they employed in their methodological/theoretical design. The research questions that guided this survey were: Are our empirical findings specificities to the studied units and cases? What are the explanatory frameworks most employed by researches on public management reforms? Are the explanatory frameworks emerging from 1

2 our data detached from the explanatory frameworks in vogue in the academic fields studying of public management reforms? And the research problem was: How does the explanatory framework emerging from our empirical analysis relate to the explanatory frameworks employed in recent studies of public management reforms worldwide? The hypotheses emerged from the analysis of the empirical data, and the results of our study compared to the explanatory frameworks favored by other scholars in recent publication are discussed ahead in this paper. This article brings the results of this survey, making the results of our findings aggregate with the knowledge already produced by other scholars in the same field of investigation. Public management reforms as a policy issue Public management reforms are inspired by organizational and relational models. In recent years, New Public Management, Entrepreneurial Government and Public Governance have worked as a source of values, doctrines and justifications for reforms in the bureaucratic model of organization and management. The research that generated this article used a policymaking approach to study public management reforms. In this sense, public management reform is a shortcut term for an intertwined and fairly coherent set of policy changes in management practices and public service delivery. Public management reforms are carried out by changes in institutional rules and organizational routines in several dimensions or functions of a public organization. In order to elucidate our analytical approach and defend our choice of studying changes in public management as policy change we will retrieve the basic concepts of policy, and then explain why we have considered the management of public organizations as a policy area. Considering public management as a policy area is a perspective susceptible to criticism. The administrative and management sciences regard management activities as predominantly a technical activity, for both private and public organizations. In general, public policies are identified with sectors of public intervention. The traditional policy areas or sectors investigated in policy research are education, health, welfare, transport, culture, national defense, national economy, among others. Due to its technical density, maybe because of its distance from constituent issues, and maybe because there have always been other academic fields concerned with the issue (public administration and management sciences), public management has virtually been deemed a secondary issue in the policy sciences. In the last three decades this scenario has started to change. Feeling the impact of large waves of public management reforms carried out around the world, public management policies have changed and innovations in the design of programmatic organizations have been politically formulated, implemented and assessed within a policy-making conception. Public management is a policy issue because it involves principles or guidelines to activities involved in facing public problems. If public organizations are public, in means and in scope, then the performance of these organizations is relevant for the collectivity. Public management is predominantly a regulative policy, because it shapes the behavior of public and private actors regarding decisions on the employment of public resources and their relationship with the public administration as a whole. This classification is anchored in studies by Lowi (1964), which became an obligatory reference to understand concrete policies in a more analytical form. 2

3 Despite the regulatory predominance, public management issues deal with constituent, distributive and redistributive aspects as well. One example of the public management of constituent implications is the change in institutional rules regarding access of bureaucrats and societal actors to the public decision table. One example of redistributive effects of public management decisions is the creation of performance measurement and management control in order to identify organizational inefficiencies and reallocate budget resources from one sector to other. One example of the distributive implications of public management is the creation of a new organizational unit to respond constituents demands. The changes in public management are active policies, in other words they cannot be considered non-policies, non-decisions/non-actions in the sense of Bachrach and Baratz (1963) and Dye (1972). This is to say that an effort for change is contradictory to the maintenance of the status quo. It is nevertheless important to observe that innovations in public management policies and in the design of programmatic organizations can easily become symbolic (Gustaffson 1983) or rhetorical (March and Olsen 1983; Battistelli 2002) when politicians and public officials strive to enhance the public perception of the administrative organizations using public management reforms as a vehicle for that aim. Innovations in public management and in the design of programmatic organizations as policies have many technical elements, but also political connotations. Strongly technical elements are the policies that deal with financial management, management of internal and external communication, policies of procurement and contracts, auditing methods, and some elements of organizational design. Elements with strong political implications are the policies for human resources management, and policies for performance evaluation. Other political aspects that spark general interest and imply direct effects on a wide range of citizen groups are the choices regarding the design of programmatic organizations (organizational design, privatizations, marketization, implementation networks). Following Barzelay (2000; 2001) public management reforms are implemented with changes in public management policies (PMPs) and innovations in the design of programmatic organizations (DPOs). Changes in public management are policies and changes in the design of programmatic organizations are policies as well. These changes take place through institutional rules and organizational routines. Figure 1: The content of public management reforms HR management Financial management ICT/E-government Public Management Policies Marketing Procurement Public Management Reforms Organizational design Participation Privatization Design of programmatic organizations Marketization Interorg. implementation 3

4 PMPs are guidelines to public management action transversally affecting all areas of public service delivery. Changes in PMPs affect practices in the areas of human resources (HR) management, financial management, performance management, information and communication technology (ICT), public marketing, and procurement (Barzelay 2001) i. Decisions on the DPOs are related to organizational design, the activities that public entities decide to provide, methods of public service delivery and relationships that public entities establish with the market, networks and other governmental agencies (Barzelay 2000). New Public Management, Entrepreneurial Government and Public Governance movements have dedicated a great deal of emphasis to changes in the design of programmatic organizations. Innovations in the design of programmatic organizations comprise changes in the organizational design, privatization, marketization, participation of non-state actors in decision-making and interorganizational policy implementation. The delimitation of our survey of articles followed this framework. In other words, we focused our attention to that recently published scholarly production dealing with one or more innovations in public management policies or in the design of programmatic organizations. The details of the research design and strategy are presented in the next section. Research design In order to answer the research questions and the research problem we have devoted energies to analyze the recent scholarly production of public management reforms in the fields of public administration, policy analysis and local government studies. Taking as reference the studies by Hill and Lynn (2005) and Forbes and Lynn (2005) we screened more than 900 articles in six scientific Journals trying to grasp how these articles organize their hypotheses or analytical frameworks. Forbes and Lynn (2005) analyzed 193 non-american empirical studies concerning management reform and new models of governance. Before this study, Hill and Lynn (2005) performed a very similar analysis of over 800 American empirical studies published in scientific journals. The main goal of Hill and Lynn (2005) was to verify to what extent American based research is using new analytical tools and strategies inspired in the horizontal models of governance. Forbes and Lynn (2005) aimed at identifying the differences and similarities of analytical tools and strategies used by American and non-american based researches. The analytical strategy of both studies were the same, relying on the identification of dependent and independent variables and then classifying each single empirical research according to the type of causal relationship they employed. In our analysis we focused on verifying whether the recent publication in the field is concerned with using, building or testing similar explanatory frameworks to those we used in our research. In other words, the first step was to verify whether in some way they use the five variables (4W1H) as independent or dependent variables. The second step was to verify what sort of causal relations is privileged. The third step was to compare the explanatory frameworks emerging from our data with the ones available in the recent literature. Some final comments are made to understand similarities or discrepancies. For the selection of the scientific Journals two criteria were adopted: the impact factor of the Journal ii, and the expected density of articles focusing on public management reforms. One limitation we had was the unavailability of a few prestigious Journals in the electronic resources of the library system in our University. We also preferred to reject the scientific Journals that had a highly concentrated scholarly publication in one country or region, because we were looking for international publications in public management reforms. 4

5 The selected Journals from this list were: Public Administration Review, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Public Administration, and Governance. Other two Journals were deliberatively chosen, although not included in the Public Administration field of the ISI Web of Knowledge: Local government studies, and Public Organization Review. Local Government Studies was selected because we found it appropriate to have a specialized Journal in local governance issues among the screened Journals in order to have more articles matching with the subject of our research. The Public Organization Review was chosen because of its high density of articles in the area of public management reforms and because this Journal publishes the same themes as our research. Three filters were used to select the articles: the first filter was used to download the appropriate articles from the Journal s website, and the second filter was used to classify or reject the downloaded articles into the table 10 Dependent and independent variables in studies of public management reforms. The third filter helped in selecting those articles with one single causal relation. The criteria to download the articles (first filter) from the Journals websites were: They should be recent publications (from January 2001 through July 2007); They should be descriptive / explanatory articles. We decided to reject opinion papers, survey papers, and those explicitly prescriptive papers, or when the purpose of the paper is to present a new tool or managerial method; They should be empirical or theoretical-empirical studies, even those reporting reforms from 30 years or more ago. The lion s share brings empirical studies from the 90 s and the early 21 st Century. Strictly theoretical studies were discarded; They should be policymaking studies; The theme of the article should deal with innovations in PMPs or DPOs. More than 900 articles were subjected to this first filter. Only 196 papers passed the selection: 37 from Governance, nine from Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 34 from Local Government Studies, 44 from Public Administration, 36 from Public Administration Review, and 36 from Public Organization Review. In the second filter the analysis of the articles was more intense and time consuming. We proceeded to the reading of abstracts, introduction and the conclusions of all articles in order to understand if any or what causal relation was privileged in the study. The second filter used the following criteria to classify the articles: The article should have an implicit or explicit pattern of causal relation for the policy change. If the paper was not able to clearly show any causal relation it was rejected. In the inductive studies the causal relations usually appear in the conclusion of the paper. In the hypothetical deductive papers the causal relation was already explicit in the abstract and introduction of the paper. To this regard we proceeded to the reading of the conclusions to verify whether the hypotheses tested were confirmed or refuted. The causal relation should be empirical, not normative, and use the 4W1H framework. The articles were rejected when they focused on evaluation of impacts, efficiency, productivity, satisfaction, etc. After selection the articles were classified into 27 categories: the 25 categories resulting from the intersection of the five variables (what, who, when, where, how), one category for multiple causal relations, and one category for those articles that did not pass the second filter. For analytical purposes the explanatory framework could have the same variable as both dependent and independent. One example of a single variable simultaneously as dependent and independent variable is the study by Jurkiewicz and Bradley (2003) when they 5

6 conclude that human resources policies (what/content) can help or break privatization efforts (what/content). If the paper showed a multiple causal relation, in other words various dependent or/and various independent variables it was classified as Multiple causal relation. The operational definition of the variables and some examples of the criteria applied to selected articles are: WHAT: Content of changes in public management policy or design of programmatic organizations. Bozeman and Pandey (2004) give one example of the content as independent variable (political or technical change) in shaping the temporality / time required to make a decision (what shapes when). WHO: Actors, interests, influence, control. One example is the study by Greenpedersen (2001) in which he compares the implementation of market-style reforms in Sweden and Denmark to find that the extension of the reform is dependent on the ideological orientation of the political parties in government (who shapes what). WHEN: The phase of policymaking process, or the order of implementation (position in the schedule), or the time frame (before or after something). One of the few articles using the temporal/phase dimension as a variable is found in the studies by Noble and Jones (2006) where they analyze the influence of four stages in the establishment of a Public Private Partnership on the managerial attitudes and behaviors (when shapes how). WHERE: The institutional context, the culture, the legal apparatus, the country, the City, etc in which the policy change was observed. Comparative studies as Hood and Lodge (2004) for the American, German and British cases, are examples of how the local institution shaped the content of competency reforms (where shapes what). One example of institutional context as a dependent variable is provided by Hanberger (2003), with a study on how actors interests shaped the organizational setting (system model, organizational development model, etc) in implementing IT innovations (who shapes where). HOW: The strategies, styles, and approaches the actors use to formulate, implement, and evaluate policy change. Moynihan (2005) gives an example of how strategies used by political actors (Trojan horse politics) influenced the extent of the reforms (how shapes what). Vann (2004) analyzes the impact of how policy implementers act (more top-down/bottom-up, faster/slower, with technical language/with indigenous language) on how bureaucrats will deal with IT change (reluctant or collaborative to changes) (how shapes how). Coding the articles within these categories was not an easy task. Most of the studies do not use explicit independent or dependent variables. The analytical categories used for the variables are highly heterogeneous, and only a few used the same analytical categories as we did in our empirical research. The classification of the studies within an explanatory framework was further complicated by fuzzy aspects of some analytical categories. Examples of these problems of classification, and the criteria we had to adopt in order to overcome these difficulties are: When talking about participatory decision making as a variable, it was hard to classify whether it belong to a Who variable (the actor involved in a decision) or how variable (the policymaking style) or what (participation as a type of policy). In order to classify this sort of study, we attempted to understand the meaning conferred to participation by the scholar (closer to Who, How or What). Some scholars would regard changes in PMPs and in DPOs as institutional changes. Nonetheless we decided to classify changes in PMPs and DPOs as policy/content 6

7 changes, and thus peculiar to the What variable. This decision was taken in order to make our findings comparable to the findings in the literature, regardless of the name researches give to their variables. Results and discussion As already described this research compare the explanatory frameworks emerging from our empirical data with the explanatory frameworks mostly used or confirmed in the recent academic production of public management reforms. In order to do so, we accessed more than 900 articles in six scientific Journals trying to grasp how these articles organize their hypotheses when they used one or more of the 4W1H variables. Two filters were prepared to select the articles. The articles that passed the first filter were recent publications dealing with public management reforms in a theoreticalempirical fashion. Only 196 articles got through. Figure 2: The filters used to select the articles st filter: public management reforms 2 nd filter: explanatory framework using 4W1H 3 rd filter: unilateral causal relation The second filter was set up to reject those articles that had no implicit or explicit explanatory framework using the 4W1H variables. After the second filter, 88 of the 196 articles were selected. The files rejected that did not overcome the second filter totaled 108. The third filter was the least important, but it was used to separate those articles using multiple causal relations from those using a clear unilateral relationship between variables. In other words, the articles using more than one variable as independent or using more than one variable as dependent were discarded. This criterion was used to ease the construction of the table of frequencies and make the results comparable to the results we had from our empirical study. 21 articles had multiple causal relations, and 67 articles had one single prominent explanatory framework. The frequencies of the 67 articles with one explanatory framework are shown in table X below: Table 1: Dependent and independent variables in recent studies of public management reforms Dependent Variable (Y) Independent Variable (X) What How When Where Who Total What How When Where Who Total

8 The first impression that this distribution gives is that the most used analytical frameworks are the institutional variables shaping the content of public management reforms (20 articles), and the actors/interests shaping the content of public management reforms (13 articles). This evidence is not surprising. The institutional and actor-centered approaches of research enjoy momentum in political sciences and the public administration fields. The institutional factors (Where) as independent variables were particularly strong among cross-unit or comparative case studies that, persistently, arrived at conclusions that the type, extension, and style of policy change vary according to the formal and informal institutions where these policy changes occur. The Who variable as explanatory to the type and extension of public management reforms was particularly present in those studies departing or arriving at working hypothesis that leadership and interests matter. In these studies the actors and their interests are considered as determinants of the type, chances of success, and dissemination of innovations in PMPs and DPOs in public organizations. As expected, the What variable was by far the most evoked dependent variable. In 47 of the 67 categorized articles with one prominent causal relationship, the content of public management reforms was used as the explained variable. This is absolutely normal given that scholars researching public management reforms want to understand what makes the reforms work, and what shapes the accent of the reforms. Using content as a dependent variable the scholars implicitly want to understand the public management reforms, control them, and augment the chances of reproduction of reforms/innovations in different contexts. The most striking finding in this survey of explanatory frameworks is the scarcity of scholars using the temporal/phase dimension as an independent or dependent variable. Only two articles that privileged the When variable were found in recent publications on public management reforms. This record leads us to believe that the policy cycle, order of implementation, time frame, or the time required to implement/decide are categories which are largely neglected in recent studies of public management reforms. Traditionally the field of implementation research is the champion of the temporal/phase dimension in policy studies. These studies, for example, are concerned with issues like the gap between the formulation and implementation of a policy change, and how the anticipation of problems in policy formulation could avoid the resistance to change in the policy implementation. The downturn in the volume of theoretical-empirical research on policy implementation is, however, acknowledged (Mackie 2004). In commenting on this downturn in the field of public administration, Mackie (2004) presumes that this is due to an abundance of knowledge on implementation problems and the implement-it-anyway behavior fostered by the NPM wave. This lack of studies using the temporal/phase as a key variable in studies of public management reforms is lamentable. The When variable was definitely the most inspiring variable emerging from our empirical data. The two strongest hypothesis generated in this research had the temporal/phase as a key variable: 1) the content of a policy can influence the phase in which conflicts are more intense (What shapes When); 2) the policymaking style can influence the phase in which conflicts are more intense (How shapes When). Scholars using the policymaking approach of research acknowledge the limitations of the policy cycle as a theoretical and practical framework (Regonini 2001; Capano 2005). It is argued that the policy cycle is much more complex than the clear-cut phases of agenda setting, formulation of alternatives, formal decision, implementation, evaluation and termination. The downturn in the use of the policy cycle and its phases as an analytical tool for policy analysis is primarily justified with arguments of reductionism and sterility. Regarding reductionism, we argue that the policy cycle is an ideal type, and as such it is an analytical 8

9 tool to turn into simple terms what is meant to be complex. It is a tool for synthesis. As for sterility, our empirical findings enable us to claim that the temporal/phase dimension is still fertile and interesting hypotheses can emerge, with theoretical and practical implications in the field of public administration. Conclusions One of the objectives of the research that originated this article was to confront the explanatory frameworks emerging from our empirical data with the explanatory frameworks employed in the recent studies of public management reforms. An important finding was that only 88 out of more than 900 recently published were: a) dealing with public management reforms, and b) expressing a causal relation (unilateral or multiple) between the 4W1H variables. The lion s share of the 900+ screened articles adopted research strategies of descriptive single or multiple case studies, and/or were purely theoretical/normative, and/or using other sorts of variables (outcome studies, evaluations of efficiency, productivity, satisfaction, etc). The survey of articles in six prestigious scientific journals in the fields of public administration and public organization studies demonstrated that institutional and actorcentered approaches enjoy popularity among scholars studying public management reforms. The content of policy change is generally used as a dependent variable in these studies. The most striking finding in this survey was the lack of use of the temporal/phase as a key variable. This lack of studies is lamentable. The temporal/phase variable was definitely the most inspiring and was present in the two main hypotheses generated in the data analysis of the empirical research. Besides using temporal/phase dimensions in the policymaking studies of management reforms, we strongly recommend the utilization of middle-range comparative researches. While on the one hand single case studies are considered poor in their external generalization capacities, on the other hand extensive surveys of one or few dimensions of policy change are deemed reductive and descriptively thin. The blueprint may lie in the very middle. References Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1963) Decision and non-decisions: an analytical framework, American Political Sciences Review, 57(3), Barzelay, M. (2000). The new public management: a bibliographical essay for Latin American (and other) scholars, International public management journal, 3, Barzelay, M. (2001). The new public management: improving research and policy dialogue. Berkeley, New York: University of California Press, Russell Sage Foundation. Battistelli, F. (ed.) (2002). La cultura delle amministrazioni: fra retorica e innovazione. Milano: Franco Angeli. Capano, G. (2005). Processo di polica pubblica. In Capano, G., & Giuliani, M. Dizionario di politiche pubbliche (pp ), Rome: Carocci. Bozeman, B., & Pandey, S. K. (2004). Public management decision making: effects of decision content. Public Administration Review, 64(5), Dye, T. R. (1972). Understanding public policy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Forbes, M. & Lynn, Jr., L. E. (2005). How Does Public Management Affect Government Performance? Findings from International Research. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 15 (4), Green-pedersen, C. (2002). New Public Management reforms of the Danish and Swedish Welfare States: the role of different social democratic responses. Governance, 15 (2), 271-9

10 294. Gustafsson, G. (1983). Symbolic and pseudo policies as responses to diffusion of power. Policy sciences, 15 (3), Hanberger, A. (2003). Democratic implications of public organizations. Public Organization Review, 3 (1), Hill, C. J., & Lynn Jr., L. E. (2005). Is hierarchical governance in decline? Evidence from empirical research. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 15 (2), Hood, C., & Lodge M. (2004). Competency, bureaucracy, and public management reform: a comparative analysis. Governance, 17 (3), Jurkiewicz, C. L., & Bradley D. B. (2002). Making privatization work: utilizing a scorecard model of human resource strategy. Public Organization Review, 2 (4), Lowi, T. J. (1964). American business, public policy, case studies, and political theory. World Politics, 16 (4), Mackie, R. (2004). Local government management development in Scotland: a study of public policy and its implementation, Local Government Studies, 30 (3), March, J. & Olsen, J. (1983). Organizing political life: what administrative reorganization tells us about government. American Political Science Review, 77 (2), Moynihan, D. P. (2005). Homeland security and the U.S. public management policy agenda. Governance, 18 (2), Noble, G. & Jones, R. (2006). The role of boundary-spanning managers in the establishment of public-private partnerships. Public Administration, 84 (4), Reference missing: author name and empirical research that originated the article. Regonini, G. (2001). Capire le politiche pubbliche. Bologna: Il Mulino. Vann, J. L. (2004). Resistance to change and the language of public organizations: a look at clashing grammars in large-scale information technology projects. Public Organization Review, 4 (1), i In the original contribution by Barzelay (2001, p.14) he enumerates the areas of public management policy: expenditure planning and financial management, civil service and labor relations, procurement, organization and methods, and audit and evaluation. We have added ICT and public marketing as areas of public management policy using the understanding that they are increasingly areas of interest and change in public organizations. ii The Web of Science ISI Web of Knowledge databanks provided the impact factors and they correspond to the average number of times the articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in The list of Journals and impact factors were gathered from the academic area of Public Administration. 10