The Neoinstitutional Analysis of Change in Public Services
Titel:
The Neoinstitutional Analysis of Change in Public Services
Auteur:
Fernandez-Alles, Maria De La Luz Llamas-Sanchez, Rocio
Verschenen in:
Journal of change management
Paginering:
Jaargang 8 (2008) nr. 1 pagina's 3-20
Jaar:
2008-03
Inhoud:
The purpose of this article is to analyse how neoinstitutional theory can explain change in public services. In fulfilling this objective, the article faces two challenges. The first is to present neoinstitutional theory as a theory that explains how change takes place. The old institutionalism ascribes a predominantly deterministic role to institutional pressures and a merely passive attitude to organizations. It posits that organizations are rigidly trapped into blindly accepting institutional demands in order to secure the social support of their stakeholders. Managers are thus denied any discretion in managing the institutional context, specifically when confronted with coercive institutional pressures, usually in the form of regulations. Thus, the inertia of organizations and their inability or reluctance to change have traditionally been linked with this theory. The second challenge is to analyze change in public service organizations, which have some idiosyncratic characteristics since they operate in strong institutional contexts and weak technical environments. The classic measure of performance profit, which is traditionally missing in public organizations, meant that their managers had to deal more with pressures for legitimacy than for efficiency. The greater public visibility of the organization's internal activities means that public services face a wider range of stakeholders with a greater variety of interests than a typical company does. It is, therefore, more difficult to understand the complex process of change in public service organizations. This article seeks to provide a theoretical approach that aids in understanding how change occurs in public sector organizations by analyzing the roles played by stakeholders and institutional pressures in this process, paying special attention to the way public organizations act to obtain and demonstrate, simultaneously, both legitimacy and efficiency.
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