Abstract
Has New Public Management really been rolled out homogenously across the board? Drawing on research into the viewpoints and practices of a particular category of senior civil servants in France (those in charge of local welfare policy), this article takes a critical look at this assumption of convergence towards NPM. Behind a discursive convergence that remains superficial and partial, the reality tends more towards heterogeneous and contextualized appropriations of New Public Management benchmarks often leading to new forms of bureaucracy. In a context where the position of public officials has been weakened, ‘management’ seems to have been adopted as a source of professional legitimization. By adopting this very useful managerial posture, these civil servants find comfort in perpetuating the myth of convergence.
Points for practitioners
This article presents the results of a comprehensive study into the viewpoints and management practices of the roughly 500 senior civil servants in charge of local welfare policies in the French departments. How do they relate to the managerial vocabulary and management tools, given that their sector is characterized by contradictory reactions to economic and managerial rationales? The renewal of public management to which they contribute cannot be equated to an importation of methods that have shown their worth in the private sector: it seems above all to meet the new requirements on which their professional legitimacy must be built today.
Today, the field of public policy across the world largely reflects the impact (Bouckaert and Halligan, 2010; Hood, 1991; Mathiasen, 1998; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000) of the principles, values, instruments and practices of New Public Management (NPM). This package of doctrines, government technologies and steering instruments introduces a new public policy benchmark (Jobert, 1994) and encourages reforms designed to increase the efficiency, control and transparency of public policy, while reducing its costs through tools inspired by private business management (Jones and Thompson, 1999). France, sometimes seen as a more reluctant country (Hood, 1996, 1998; Kickert, 1998; Lane, 2000), particularly in the areas that are held up as examples of its ‘social model’, has not been spared these reforms (Guyomarch, 1999) – either at central government level (Bezes, 2001, 2009) or on the local government level (Kuhlmann, 2010). This is evidenced by the recent changes in the management representations and practices of senior civil servants in charge of local welfare policies in France, which we have empirically observed and that inform the debate in this article.
However, all this does not necessarily point to the triumph of a coherent doctrinal package. Some argue that seemingly convergent transformations belie reforms with very different purposes and effects (Brudney et al., 2009; Ferlie et al., 1996), that the actors can appropriate them in a highly differentiated manner, and that the introduction of new managerial methods can paradoxically contribute to the emergence of new forms of bureaucratic control (Bezes, 2001, 2007, 2009; Hood, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998). These findings are among the main lessons drawn from the constructivist and neo-institutionalist approaches to technologies and instruments of government (Hood, 2007). In this perspective, the convergence towards NPM thus appears to be above all a myth, a shared and socially constructed belief (Pollitt, 2001, 2002). It is therefore necessary to question the very substance of NPM, to reveal the mythical character of its supposed general, homogeneous, uniform, cross-sector and transnational expansion (Goldfinch and Wallis, 2010; Hood, 1996, 1998; Pollitt, 2001, 2002) and criticize approaches that tend to take this myth as an objective assessment (Osborne, 2010; Osborne and Gaebler, 1993).
Building on the critical work of Brunsson (1989), Pollitt (2001, 2002) has injected an essential contribution into this debate, hinged around three main arguments. First, the assumption of convergence towards NPM would imply that all public policy actors are adopting its rationale and practices. It implies that, whatever the behaviour they show at the outset, they all reach the same conclusion. But these concepts are ambiguous: what aspect of NPM are we talking about? How do we avoid confusing public management and NPM? And which behavioural indicators serve as a basis for studying this convergence? Viewpoints? Practices? The motivation of the reforms? Their outcomes? All this is likely to fuel endless controversies. Second, Pollitt shows that studies that confirm the existence of a convergence movement are mainly based on an analysis of the viewpoints of the actors. But if we look at the practices they actually implement, then the study of the convergence becomes more complex and tends rather to disprove this assumption. Third, these discussions themselves fuel the myth of the existence of a unique NPM and the convergence of the actors towards the new practices it contains within it. If this myth exists it is due in part to the ‘advantages’ it offers to the elected officials, civil servants, consultants and researchers who build it up and fuel it by treating it as an ontological reality.
This article takes up these critical discussions by drawing on research into the viewpoints and practices of senior civil servants in charge of local welfare policies in France. Behind a superficial and partial convergence towards a managerial vocabulary, we observed heterogeneous and contextualized appropriations of the New Public Management benchmarks, often leading to new forms of bureaucracy. In a context that leads to their weakening, these public officials seem to primarily adopt ‘management’ as a source of professional legitimization. By thus adopting a very useful managerial posture, they find comfort in perpetuating the myth of convergence.
Micro-sociological, constructivist and qualitative approach to the managerial conversion of senior civil servants
Directors in charge of local welfare policies in the Departmental Councils.
Survey methodology: national questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and observation of practices on the ground.
Verbatim: the need for management.
Verbatim: amateurism, tinkering, fantasies and disillusions.
Verbatim: reorganizations and power games.
Verbatim: management as a posture.
Why question the attitudes of these actors towards management? First, because the Departmental Councils are today faced with particular budgetary and financial constraints. They are indeed largely dependent on state hand-outs to finance policies essentially defined by national legislation. And they also have very little leeway for self-financing: in the French centralist and Jacobin tradition, the fiscal autonomy of local authorities remains very limited despite the fact that they are required by law to balance their budgets. This ‘squaring of the circle’ can create conditions conducive to the implementation of managerial methods that set out to streamline the resources used. Representing more than half of the expenditure and human resources committed by these local authorities (Amar and Mikou, 2013), local welfare policies are particularly affected. Second, this intermediate elite of the welfare system emerged in the context of decentralization in 1981 and has not yet been the subject of any scientific investigation. Sociological knowledge of France’s local senior civil servants has only made any real headway in recent years (Bachelet, 2006; Biland, 2012), but is not very accurate with respect to the subpopulation of interest here. Third, these directors are intermediate public actors, ‘local elites’ (Genieys and Hassenteufel, 2001) of the ‘welfare department’ (Lafore, 2004) who play an essential role in the evaluation, design and methods of implementation of the welfare policies decided at national level – but researchers have generally overlooked them to focus instead on the national elites. Fourth, and finally, these actors are caught up in contradictory rationales and legacies. On the one hand, the local civil service has historically been able to play the role of a ‘Trojan Horse’ thanks to which it was possible to trigger the ‘modernization’ of the civil service in France; it is in fact the most recent effect of the civil services, the most flexible in its statutes, the most open to executives from the private sector, accessible by means of competitions that apply the managerial benchmarks that are widely present in the training centres for local senior civil servants (Biland, 2008). On the other hand, these directors steer welfare policies that need to be applied by professionals in the field who are considered to be hostile to managerial and economic rationales (Bouquet, 2006; Chauvière, 2005).
Do these specific public actors perceive themselves as managers? And what is management in their opinion? Answering these questions makes it possible to examine a ‘macro-sociological’ phenomenon (the assumed global and international convergence towards NPM) on the basis of a ‘micro-sociological’ study (on a localized specific population at subnational level in each French department). This approach, which may seem inappropriate for the study of such a phenomenon, is, however, relevant if we take into account the methodological imperatives that make it possible to consider seriously the viewpoints and practices of the actors. For example, Pollitt (2001, 2002) claims that a part of the academic literature only studies the convergence of viewpoints because it is the most efficient approach in terms of the research undertaken and the safest means to obtain quantitative results on a large scale of observation. In this case, it suffices to collect elements that reveal viewpoints (texts, laws, regulations, books, speeches, etc.) and to study them using textual and lexical analysis methods. This type of study often confirms the assumption of convergence. The low methodological cost could therefore explain the overrepresentation of research tending to that side of the scientific debate. The qualitative study of the customs and practices of the actors in the field, which is more time-consuming and resource-intensive, often leads to more nuanced and critical conclusions. But the accuracy and deepening of observations then automatically imply a reduction of the observation spectrum.
In some cases, the actual analysis of the viewpoints can have similar methodological consequences. Thus, we studied local officials who certainly make decisions and act effectively on the actual forms taken by public policies, but who do not decide themselves on much of the legislative, policy or strategy orientations. These intermediate players are therefore not the producers of the official viewpoints of the reformers and of the legislation. If we want to study their own viewpoints on the reforms under way and managerial practices that should be implemented, in this case the material to be exploited is not recorded in any official or public text that is already available. This means that the researchers have to put together their own empirical material by collecting the viewpoints of these actors and requesting interviews and observation periods. In the case in point, it is impossible to access pre-formatted data that can be analysed as they stand, which implies a qualitative and costly methodological approach: even staying in the area of viewpoint analysis, a micro-sociological approach is therefore required.
This type of approach is, finally, constructivist by its very essence: as any social reality is a construct, it is necessary to study the process of its ‘manufacture’, which always takes place in specific contexts and institutions (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). This then often leads to subsequent deconstructions, allowing a critical and ‘denaturalizing’ approach of the phenomenon in question – ‘management’ or NPM have already been widely discussed in this light (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Fournier and Grey, 2000).
This helped to build then administer online a solid questionnaire comprising 77 questions that was sent to the 550 actors identified throughout the French territory. After several reminders, the final response rate was 48 percent (N = 247). It was designed to gather information on the representations that they convey of their function, of management and of a certain number of concepts inspired by NPM – such as ‘social performance’. Information on career paths and specific socio-biographical information were also collected on this occasion, to gain a better picture of this population and to check the influence of the profiles on the variation in responses. The empirical material thus collected then underwent significant manual recoding and simple statistical operations.
The survey was then completed by a third phase, longer and more qualitative, of in-depth observation and field interviews to fine-tune and enrich the understanding of the representations of these actors and especially to observe their practices. Two complementary methods of investigation were deployed. First, an additional 63 semi-structured interviews in 14 departments (different from those selected for the first exploratory interviews) were used to test the realism of the findings from the first two phases of the survey. On the other hand, 72 interviews spread over time and in only four departments made it possible to have a richer vision of the practices of the actors studied: these ‘monographic immersions’ led to further interviews, but also especially, when possible, to lasting and repeated observations in various services and with actors situated all along the chain of command (participation in training courses, in think tanks on the implementation of new management tools, meetings with heads of services or social workers, etc.).
Finally, note that the different directors we surveyed hold posts that are politically very sensitive and are bound by a strict duty of reserve. In order to strictly preserve anonymity, we have chosen to give as little detail as possible about the people whose remarks are taken to feed or illustrate our thinking. In the rest of this article, these remarks will therefore be indicated ‘in italics and between quotation marks’ without providing further details of their authors.
Behind a rhetorical convergence: differentiated appropriations of management
On the whole, our survey confirms the existence of a form of convergence of the viewpoints of the population in question. But it nevertheless reveals a certain heterogeneity of the representations themselves (Alcaras et al., 2011).
The viewpoints of these elites of the local welfare state indeed converge towards a managerial notion of their function (see Figure 1). Most see themselves and define themselves as ‘welfare managers’ who seek to have their subordinates adopt behaviours that are ‘modern and efficient’. They adopt terms that are increasingly consistent with the logic of NPM – starting with the new concept of ‘social performance’ (Alcaras et al., 2011). What’s more, over three-quarters of respondents claim that they innovate in terms of the managerial instrumentation of their services and the streamlining of their organization. They implement reforms in their services to start or accelerate these changes (see below), and few put them down to only external constraints: they consider themselves to be the producers of these reforms because they themselves deem them to be necessary. These observations confirm the conclusions of Kuhlmann (2006) on the endogenous production of ‘reforms’ in French local authorities.
– Answer to the question: ‘Do you think your position is essentially…’
However, nuances, criticisms, distancing and sometimes very marked differences can be observed in the representations of management expressed by these actors.
In a general way first of all, there is still a significant (albeit a minority) portion of this population that clearly expresses prudence with regard to ‘modern’ managerial vocabulary. When addressing these issues, some players actually refuse to answer, sneer, use sarcastic formulas, sigh, stop talking, etc. Others are clearly critical or resist this new rhetoric: in this case, they spell out their criticism, recall that public policies were not without rigour and effectiveness before the managerial trend, etc. Thus, in the questionnaire, we wanted to assess how these actors perceive the ‘modern’ concept of ‘social performance’ and compare these perceptions with what they would like it to be (see Figure 2). Clearly, performance is for them only too rarely what it should be. Note that the items most consistent with the spirit of ‘managerial reforms’ are those where the reserves expressed are most significant: see for example the answers for the item ‘streamline expenditure’ or ‘improve the service offering with the same budget’ (Alcaras et al., 2014).
– Compared answer to the two questions: ‘In your opinion, “social performance” is…’ and ‘In your opinion “social performance” should be…’
The research also reveals that the answers and viewpoints of these actors are very heterogeneous in terms of a number of socio-biographical variables (Alcaras et al., 2014). Thus, the individual career paths (previous experience in the private sector or not, seniority, hierarchical level, type of sector of responsibility, type of initial or continuing training, etc.) or personal background (gender, involvement in political, union or associative activities, etc.) influence the representations these actors produce of their function. To give just one example, directors trained in national schools of senior management such as the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA) and Institut National des Études Territoriales (INET) – in which NPM benchmarks are transmitted as part of the training – have very different representations and definitions of management and performance compared with their counterparts with a background in social work who have worked their way up the career ladder through internal promotion.
Thus, our observations only partially confirm the assumption of a rhetorical convergence. The heterogeneity and differentiated appropriations are even more evident in the analysis of practices.
Behind managerialization: the heterogeneity of management practices
All the departmental governments studied are changing their practices and introducing new management methods. The motivations behind these reforms are generally highly convergent and explicitly illustrate a form of managerialism: ‘need for increased control of budgets and human resources’, ‘development of a culture of evaluation and results’, ‘quest for a better management of partnerships’ where an attempt is made to introduce competitive logics and private partners, a desire to ‘improve the services rendered to the user’ in an attempt to involve them in the assistance provided to them and in the evaluation of their satisfaction, construction and implementation of ‘management and performance indicators’, call on external consultants, etc. All the observed Directors therefore now use business and management tools, and seek to innovate in this area ‘to improve performance’, they say (see Box 3).
However, there a many contradictions and differences within this movement according to the cases studied: the timeframes, the processes implemented, the ways in which the change is managed and the strategies of the actors are indeed quite variable from one department (or field of action) to another. The uses of management tools also testify, from one case to another, to a certain distancing, makeshift approach, local interpretations, reappropriations or even amateurism. All this sets the stage for a great diversity of practices, even when the managerial language seems firmly established. We also find that the ‘modern’ management tools are mostly the object of ‘fantasy’: our local elites hope that they will help them solve the many problems they face in everyday life. But in practice, these tools are above all a source of frustration and disillusionment: ‘it does not usually go the way we want. So we adapt it, tinker with it, we do what we can with what we have.’
Let us take the example of the computerization process that is often a crucial challenge of the current managerial reforms. Management IT tools are intended to allow better control of procedures, measurements and monitoring by the managers. But the process of their design and implementation is far from trivial. It calls in fact for a long chain of adjustments and entails a far-reaching cultural reform throughout the organization and work teams. It raises a number of issues that are often very difficult to resolve: the high cost of these instruments on the oligopolistic market of applications that are specific to the welfare sector; difficulty in identifying the needs and expectations of the various actors involved in these projects (management of information systems, suppliers, consultants, directors and staff of the welfare services involved, etc.); limited availability of human resources necessary for the specific development of the software for each sector; need to train staff in the new computerized tools; high expectations in terms of information and steering by the directors entrusted with responsibility for them, prompting frustrations and various sources of discontent (emanating especially from subordinates who see their professional practices turned upside down). The specificity of each sector of intervention and of each policy also requires the acquisition of a range of ad hoc software or adaptations to be made by the company providing the services and computer engineering, resulting in increased financial costs and dependence on suppliers, but also added complexity for cross-cutting services that attempt to nevertheless maintain control of the process.
In actual fact, more often than not, the IT and managerial remedy therefore remains in a fairly advanced state of incompleteness (see Box 4). The computerized decision-support systems certain directors enthuse about for a while are often paralysed or underused. This often results in irony and weariness from them, and then they often try to keep the ‘good old tools’ to which they are accustomed, rather than suffer the paralysis caused by the lengthy roll-out period and the complexity or dependency of a manifestly oversophisticated computer system that is too difficult to operate.
Under a semblance of homogeneous viewpoints on the need to take advantage of the increasing capabilities of information technology to improve the performance of the organization, we therefore observe various practices that are in place which depend on the historical trajectories of each departmental administration, which produce different adaptation processes based on the reality on the ground that the actors face.
Behind the ‘modernization’ of governments, the emergence of new forms of bureaucracy
These practices that are part and parcel of path-dependency rationales lead, if not to inertia, then at least to the reconfiguration of institutional power relations and often to forms of neo-bureaucracy that are a priori improbable. Managerialization, which should (according to the sycophants of NPM) help transform governments into ‘fully-fledged’ companies driven by performance and the satisfaction of user-client needs, thus often produces the opposite effect (Bezes, 2007; Hood, 1998).
Take the example of service reorganizations that seem central, recurring and widespread throughout the Departmental Councils (76 percent of directors responding to the questionnaire said they had personally participated in restructurings of this type). The reasons behind them vary, but in general, the stated ambitions betray a managerial rationale and economic rationality. They are even often presented as the heart of managerial reforms and as the necessary condition for implementing a modern and efficient management, as ‘without an effective organization, it is impossible to target performance’ or ‘to embody the tools’. Indeed, ‘what is the point of carefully defining a “blueprint” or a “strategic plan”, to have dashboards or sophisticated computer tools if subordinates do not feel compelled or at least encouraged to follow or take inspiration from them regularly, or to measure the gaps between the objectives and results?’ Reorganizations are often also the opportunity to introduce new services and/or new terms that are very much inspired by a managerial vocabulary: ‘controlling’, ‘internal audit’, ‘observatory’, ‘assessment mission’ or ‘evaluation unit’. In some cases, they are also opportunities to pool resources, cut operating costs and streamline the use of human resources.
But in actual fact, these reorganizations draw also (and sometimes especially) on rationalities other than managerial, mostly political and bureaucratic. For example, they offer an opportunity to respond to an internal social conflict reflecting a professional frustration in direct connection with users; to regain authority over them; to mark the change or rupture related to the appointment of a new ‘Director General of Services’; to accelerate human resource management (promotions, side-lining, team building), etc. In short, they are mostly triggered by bureaucratic and political considerations related to instruments of control and power in the administrative organization. The following example perfectly illustrates this type of phenomenon. It appears that the latest reorganizations aim in many departments to challenge a previous movement of ‘territorialization’ of public policy. Advanced about ten years ago in the name of efficiency and proximity to users that these policies must meet, territorialization aimed at organizing social services on micro-territories broken down at infra-departmental level to better take into account the variability and multiplicity of local situations. But in the eyes of many actors studied here, what it actually did was lead to excessive empowerment strategies of welfare policy actors who work in the field – resulting in a loss of power of the ‘central’ authorities of the Departmental Council. This, in any case, is the diagnosis formulated by many directors: they no longer want to be mere ‘resources’ solicited according to the needs and decisions taken by their subordinates in the territories; instead they want to take back power and regain authority over their teams in the field (see Box 5). The current reorganizations are therefore designed to bring about a reshuffle in the power games of local actors and in bureaucratic control.
All these observations thus support the theses evoking the emergence, under the mask of NPM, of new forms of bureaucracy and bureaucratic control (Bezes, 2007; Gualmini, 2008). The managerial conversion processes thus reveal new monitoring devices, surprising phenomena of re-centralization, very inventive and varied juxtapositions of bureaucratic and market regulations, etc. – the concrete forms being very diverse depending on local configurations. All this does not argue in favour of the assumption of a convergence of practices towards an unequivocal NPM. In a neo-institutionalist perspective, we should rather be talking about strategies adapted to each context (and therefore necessarily heterogeneous given that they are marked by contingent properties), pursuing multiple and complex goals, largely dominated by political and bureaucratic concerns rather than by the motivations of managerial efficiency or economic rationality.
The assumption of a massive and unanimous convergence of all public actors towards NPM is therefore not the easiest to validate when faced with such observations in the field. Paradoxically, however, this idea continues to circulate widely despite its lack of scientific soundness, including in the field of academic publications. So it must have another status, that of a myth: a story or fable which one can believe (it must be plausible for those who believe it) but there will never be proof – a non-falsifiable proposition in Popper’s sense. This track, already followed by the number of critical theories in the social sciences (Bezes, 2000; Desage and Godard, 2005; Meyer and Rowan, 1977), deserves to be treated with the utmost seriousness. It makes it possible above all to link the practices of the actors to the representations they call up in order to implement them, while giving meaning to the persistence of beliefs that are difficult to verify.
The utility of a myth: management as a legitimation tool for weakened actors
The myth of convergence, which can be maintained by both its supporters and its opponents (Goldfinch and Wallis, 2010), therefore seems to be a reality. Pollitt (2001) has shown that it is useful for a myriad of actors (politicians, senior civil servants, consultants and academic researchers) who each have specific interests to maintain because they derive personal benefits in their practices – in terms of power, position, legitimacy, material or symbolic compensation.
Thus, the actors we studied generally see themselves as ‘managers’ and in their practices call quite widely on a variety of instruments, imputable in varying degrees to the trend towards NPM. Eighty-six percent of directors surveyed by questionnaire stated that they had personally contributed to the design and implementation of new management tools (mainly dashboards and new computerized decision-making systems). But do they actually believe that they are ‘welfare managers’? Isn’t it rather a case of finding in this definition a posture that is very convenient for them to ‘convince’ themselves and others that they are in a management function? When seemingly consensual viewpoints suggesting conversion to managerial rationales hint at a variety of meanings projected behind the new managerial vocabulary; when observation shows that their managerial practices are in fact very singular, heterogeneous, and of a rather fragile consistency; when one realizes that the daily use of management tools is often done in a way that is admittedly amateurish and makeshift in nature; when IT management tools and decision support tools are mostly the subject of fantasies and then frustrations; and so on, it is difficult not to consider management as a posture.
But what is the point of such a posture? Primarily to respond effectively to various constraints which these public actors face in their everyday work. When converting to management, they pretend more or less to adhere to managerialism. But whether their belief is sincere or not, that is not the point: they know or at least they hope that this belief will be useful to them, because the internal and external environments in which these directors move are elements that push them in this direction almost spontaneously. On the one hand, the external environment is characterized by a world where the managerial culture now affects almost every area of our lives (Gaulejac, 2009), where there is growing suspicion of the phenomenon of bureaucracy and public services (Van de Walle and Bouckaert, 2003), and where budget constraints are real (Borins, 2012; Hood, 1994). In such a context, management along with the accompanying vocabulary and tools, appears as a guarantee of professionalism and seriousness. Can we be credible in executive positions in the current environment while acting as if this culture did not exist? On the other hand, the internal environment is greatly influenced by a kind of need for managerialism arising from various sources. The higher authorities (local and national) to which these local elites are accountable obviously formulate high expectations in this regard. But a managerial posture may also be very useful with regard to the subordinates when it comes, for example, to neutralizing interpersonal and power relations in the services. After all, management tools and managerial attitudes are always assumed to be neutral, devoid of any ideological foundation. Ultimately, this posture allows these actors to give an outward appearance consistent with the image of the ‘manager’ they know they have to give of themselves today to demonstrate their ‘realism’, their pragmatism, professionalism, and to give the impression that they make responsible and lucid use of the management tools ‘as is the case in the private sector’. This is probably one of the best strategies to gain professional legitimacy when it is needed.
And the actors that we studied need strong sources of legitimation with regard to their internal and external environments – specifically because they are responsible for local public services. The fact of the matter is that, while public services once embodied a certain ‘nobility’ in France, they now face a climate of growing suspicion towards them. This feeling is particularly true of local authorities, less valued in the Jacobin legacy than the central governments. Similarly, welfare services are increasingly suspected of generating assistanceship or abyssal deficits. Subordinates of such a director then see him sometimes as the one who ‘wants to introduce a neoliberal rationale and, in order to save public resources, could prevent them from doing their job properly’. His counterparts in other public policy areas often consider the welfare sector as beneath them, spendthrift and unmanageable by essence. His superiors at the local or national level ‘put pressure’ on him to cut budgets which are among the highest in the French public accounts. In such a context, these directors need a legitimacy that their former administrative and regulatory organization can no longer grant them. They can therefore expect to find it in the managerial posture suggested to them by the move towards NPM. Actual management practices, in turn, can be relatively independent of this posture: most of the time they are produced endogenously by actors who are capable, however, of resisting them, appropriating them and cobbling them together according to their needs, and who also know that management tools and IT tools are not neutral. The managerial posture serves above all as their fulcrum to conduct risky professional reshuffles in an uncertain and turbulent environment, and sets them on a quest for legitimacy that is never fully achieved.
The fact is that the ‘manager’ is defined by a professional posture that embodies control, performance and rationality in his organization (Boussard, 2008) and that this posture is largely dependent on the professional rhetoric which he cleverly uses to maintain his position, his power and his role in the organization. The manager thus plays a role: what matters to him, is not so much the policy itself, nor its consequences or effects, but the reputation and authority it gives him, the symbolic effect it produces to his advantage. Managers are somehow by essence ‘hypocrites’ in their professional behaviour (Brunsson, 1989; Feldman and March, 1981): for them, managerial innovation is a way to gain credibility, regardless of the actual effects of the managerial measures rolled out.
The headway made by managerial rationales independently of the actual practices that they may mask would then be explained by a mimetic process (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991) in an endless quest for legitimacy. In this theoretical perspective, the uncertainty created by the incessant public service reforms (in the name of efficiency and rationality) leads to the weakening of a growing number of professions. The professionals concerned can therefore seize management as a means of legitimizing their function in a context where those very values carried by management are particularly welcome. This paves the way for a complex, autonomous and self-maintained dynamic that creates, as a not necessarily desired side effect, a mimetic dissemination of managerial postures that keep up the illusion of managerial convergence it needs. Thus, the managerial reforms create uncertainty, disqualification and vocational fragility that lead some players to adopt, through mimicry, managerial postures that will offer them security, but that will call for further reforms – and so on.
Thus, neither the practices nor the viewpoints seem to converge in a smooth and consistent manner. Certainly, the senior civil servants that we observed claim that they are managers, use terms from the managerial vocabulary, implement public management practices and mobilize management tools. But everyone adds their own meanings and rationales and often presents rehashed bureaucratic practices under the ‘new clothes’ of management (Hood, 1991). Nothing therefore suggests a broad and smooth movement of convergence to a new benchmark of monolithic and unequivocal public policy. What converges above all, are the postures of players who play professional roles by decking themselves out in the suitable accessories and who join a mimetic movement that is observable in ‘measures’ (Foucault, 2001) that inextricably mix viewpoints and practices that are hinged around myths that they help consolidate. Work on the managerial conversion of public actors, like the political and media viewpoints on the ‘necessary reform of the state’ or the lobbying work done by think tanks and consulting firms specializing in management (Nathan, 1993; Saint-Martin, 2004), are therefore not actually based on any empirical knowledge and do not actually build on it. They contribute above all, in their own way, to the dissemination of the myth of ‘the’ managerialization, assumed to be exogenous and homogeneous, by acting as if ‘managerial principles could claim a form of universality that would justify their application to other welfare situations, regardless of their national, institutional and professional contexts’ (Robert, 2007: 8). However, in actual fact, what we are seeing is ‘a series of’ heterogeneous managerializations, opportunistic managerial postures produced endogenously by actors whose rationales are rooted in specific configurations. The purpose of a study like the one we have just presented is not really to dispel the convergence myth – because myths are not afraid of scientific rebuttals – but above all to understand how these myths can be exploited by the actors, how these myths are constructed, transformed and handed down over time.