Abstract
Since the late 1990s social science-based studies have allocated much less attention to public organizations. Based on the sixth Organization Studies summer workshop, this introductory paper suggests a diagnosis of such a decline as well as a research agenda. It lists some fundamental issues still to be explored such as publicness and governance. It also considers how social science-based organizational knowledge might be extended to various empirical objects and fields in public domains and set-ups such as inter-organizational arrangements, hybrid organizations, multi-stakeholder arenas, hybrid organizing, and transnationalization processes, that usually are covered by scholars – economists, historians, anthropologists, management academics, etc. – who are not using organizational theory lenses.
Introduction
Do public institutions and governmental affairs still provide relevant opportunities for the advancement of knowledge in social science-based organization studies? This special issue of Organization Studies raises a question that at first sight might seem trivial.
Academically, public organizations have offered a fruitful ground for the emergence of modern knowledge about organizations by sociologists and political scientists. A pioneering work remains the theory of bureaucracy defined by Max Weber, the emergence of the Prussian state and administration providing a major reference (Weber, 1922). A dense set of empirically based studies and conceptual alternatives developed later in the middle of the twentieth century such as the field research on the Tennessee Valley Authority inspired by the New Deal presidency in the USA and the importance of secondary institutionalization processes occurring at the grassroots level (Selznick, 1949), the study of welfare agencies (Blau, 1955), the research program on the French state public sector (Crozier, 1963), decision-making processes at the dean level in a public university in California (Cohen & March, 1974), or budgeting dynamics on two campuses of American state universities (Pfeffer & Moore, 1980; Salancik & Pfeffer 1974), just to mention a few classics. Such studies were pioneering in developing new concepts and innovative analytical frames, that are still in use today to study organizations, whether private or public, profit or non-profit oriented (Adler, 2009). Those years of foundation of organizational sociology are sometimes considered as a sort of golden age (Kelman, 2005; Thoenig, 1997), public organization studies providing a major source of knowledge creation.
It is also obvious that within the last two or three decades the structure of the government and more broadly the ways to administer public affairs have faced dramatic challenges and changes, at least on the surface. Increasing globalization, recurrent economic and fiscal crises, evolving expectations about public goods, international tensions and conflicts, and new economic and political ideologies have generated much impact upon the bureaucratic model and its reference, the Welfare State. For instance, the emergence of New Public Management has been for several years a topical issue of academic research agendas. Many organization studies scholars have adopted a critical approach. Some denounce the underlying assumptions about human behaviors on which this applied toolbox is based and list their consequences for the provision of public service and the delivery of public goods (Balfour & Grubbs, 2000; Overeem & Tholen, 2011; Rouillard & Giroux, 2005). Others suggest that in real practice the operational solutions such tools are supposed to provide are not enforced, if not enforceable. Such a reform ideology and mindset faces major and lasting resistance in practice, producing unexpected if not dysfunctional consequences on the field (March & Olsen, 1984).
Nevertheless there are also good and non-trivial reasons to raise the question that has inspired the Organization Studies sixth summer workshop. Do today’s public organizations provide value-added scientific knowledge as research objects, both at an empirical level and as springboards for the elaboration of new theories? For instance, should firms and charities, hybrid organizations and informally organized set-ups get much more attention than traditional governmental bureaus and red-tape producers? Some would argue that quantitatively, many more organizations and organizing activities relate to the private world. We would supposedly live in a world in which a larger share of human activity is organized privately; one in which the state has supposedly hollowed out, and in which state organizations have slimmed down. They employ fewer people and manage less money, and thus make less of a difference, compared to firms that would be the real government in today’s world.
Did the organization studies scientific community adopt an exit strategy as far as public organizations are concerned? One symptom of such a transformation of its research agenda comes from the evolution of the topics covered by the participants in the annual conference of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS). While gathering several hundred and sometimes more than a thousand scholars and offering more than a hundred sub-themes of various kinds, no specific stream was set up and dedicated to such a theme during most of the 1990s. Public organizations had simply vanished from the program. The proportion of papers dealing with public organizations submitted to EGOS international conferences declined from an average of 42 percent at four EGOS international conferences held in the 1980s to 7 percent at the four annual conferences held between 1999 and 2002. The few papers covering public organizations were presented in streams that covered specific policy domains such as healthcare or medical services. In 2001 a dedicated sub-theme was offered again. Nevertheless the number of papers submitted and accepted remained quite limited, if not disappointing: 9 in the 2003 conference, 14 in 2004.
The contrast between today and the time of Selznick, Blau, and Crozier could not be blunter. The study of public organizations seems to have shifted from being a common and defining object of organization studies, to being a small enclave in a broader and fragmented field of organization studies (March, 2007b), and an enclave which has shrunk in recent years.
The decision was taken that the Organization Studies sixth summer workshop would be dedicated to the issue of public organizations. Two goals were defined and assigned to its organizers. 1 One was to address the state-of-the-art of organizational studies dealing with public organizations and having strong disciplinary roots in sociology and political science. The second goal was to test how knowledge developed by such a community might be extended to empirical objects and fields in public domains and set-ups such as international relations or inter-organizational arrangements, to name but a few, that usually are covered by scholars – economists, historians, anthropologists, management academics, and so on – who do not not use an organizational theory lense. About one hundred participants registered, roughly a third of them not being core organization studies scholars. Ninety abstracts were sent to the organizing committee. Sixty papers were discussed during the workshop. This special issue presents four that were selected by the review process in use at Organization Studies. Two criteria were considered. Their intrinsic academic quality level had to fit high standards. They should also suggest research agendas and interdisciplinary approaches that bridge organization studies and other subfields. This special issue gives the floor to scholars and papers in line with such requirements: Barry Bozeman (bridging organization studies and public policy), Eivor Oborn, Michael Barrett, and Sandra Dawson (organization studies and public management), Catherine Paradeise and Jean-Claude Thoenig (higher education and research institutions) and Yves Schemeil (international relations, political science).
Our introductory paper successively addresses three issues. We first establish a number of facts that illustrate the decline of research on public organizations over the last two decades, and suggest a number of institutional explanations for it. We then explore some of the scientific consequences of this decline, namely, the neglect of issues of publicness and governance in the field of organization studies. Finally, we elaborate on some of the themes and concepts through which the field of organization studies could reconnect with, and benefit from, the study of the forms and the action of public organizations.
Where Have All the Public Organizations Gone?
Compared with the added value generated in the middle of the twentieth century, knowledge contributions made by public organization studies have become much less influential and visible during the last three decades.
The Decline of Public Organizations in Organization Studies Journals
What has been the quantitative importance and visibility of the topic of public organizations in the field in recent years? To answer this question, we selected three major journals covering the field of social science-based approaches of organizations: Organization Studies, Organization Science, and Administrative Science Quarterly. These journals were selected in the assumption that they are an accurate proxy of the trends or state-of-the-art in organizational theory. They were reviewed at three moments: 2001, 2006, and 2011. The specific years and five-year period between them is not the result of any particular statistical criterion, but rather the intention of having three homogeneous moments of comparison within the last decade.
This dataset was tested to find out whether or not each paper was written on a theme related to public organizations (public organization related – POR – in Table 1). In order to do so the title, abstract, and contents of the papers were reviewed to provide a perspective on the number and proportion of papers published in the field which are related to public organizations, and their proportion of the total number of papers (TP) published by all three journals. In addition, taking in consideration the total number of articles published in those years, we identified how many of the authors in these journals came from or are affiliated with business schools. “Business schools” included both those with this name (BSA) and others that are considered management school affiliated (MSA). All other academic institutions were classified as “Other affiliations” (OA) due to their wide variety. In a few exceptional cases in which none of the former categories applied, the NA label was applied. The results are summarized in Table 1 and presented below.
Articles relating to public organizations, published in three top journals, and affiliations of authors.
We also considered the editorial boards of the three journals sampled. In this case, the purpose was to investigate whether their members are employed by academic institutions that deal specifically and on a regular basis with public issues such as organization, policy making, and management practices and theories. The “School” is the observation unit used since it provides the opportunity to obtain specific information regarding the board members’ affiliations. Once affiliations were checked, the institutions’ websites were visited in order to test the next criterion: whether or not the School has at least one department, center, institute, or research group devoted to the study of public issues (organization, public policy, or public management phenomena). Using this criterion, each school received a Y (for “Yes”), an N (for “No”), and only occasionally an NA label in the database, indicating the information was not available. If, for example, an academic institution such as the Warwick Business School (WBS) has a Local Government Centre (LGC) which “is an expression of the University of Warwick’s growing interest in governance, public policy and public management” (www.wbs.ac.uk/faculty/research/lgc.cfm), any member of the editorial board of the three reviewed journals affiliated to WBS would be considered as being employed in an academic context dealing with public issues (PIAC in Table 2). With this second set of data, the share of members of the editorial boards employed by Schools dealing with public issues was obtained (PIAC/No. of M). This information is summarized and presented in the Table 2.
Editorial board members’ interest in public organization issues.
The data presented suggest two main observations. First, public organization studies-related papers are a minority. Business and firm-related papers are, if not hegemonic, at least a majority. And second, in terms of board members and affiliation of authors, it is not easy to generate a strong conclusion, since several authors or members might be part of schools with units specialized in public organizations. Even with the very broad approach used in Table 2, in the best of the cases, less than half the members of editorial boards might be close to public organization-related “environments.” The ratio of business/management authors related to “other” affiliations possible goes as low as 1.6 and as high as 4.6. Such proportions are logically closer to the finding that in general about 10 percent of papers presented in these journals in 2001, 2006, and 2011 are related to public organization issues. This pattern of affiliation of organization studies scholars, and its correlative effect on research agendas, concurs with the emergence of business schools, their massive hiring of organization scholars, and the development of instrumental and policy-oriented curricula inside public management institutions. For instance, paper-givers at the OS sixth summer workshop came first and foremost from professional management schools (business and public administration), whereas those from the social sciences were not even half as numerous. 2
What has happened at the level of dedicated top scientific journals evidences a kind of self-sustaining process. Social science departments experienced challenges after the end of the 1960s that weakened them quite dramatically. In some countries the crisis or collapse of disciplines like sociology became quite a concern (Horowitz, 1994). Some of their scholars became militant advocates of moral causes. Tensions grew inside the profession that induced lack of cohesion, political activism, epistemological dissensus, and mistrust from steering academic authorities, if not a lack of goodwill to allocate dedicated resources. A steady decline of registered students was under way in many countries.
At the same time, some of their leading and promising organization studies scholars started to migrate to business school positions. What they considered to be much better working conditions (salaries, career prospects, resources, human climate, social status) made a difference. Among them were some very visible scholars who had extensively published on public organizations. This transition was clear quite early on in the 1970s and in the 1980s in countries such as the USA and Great Britain. In other countries such as France, Italy, and Switzerland, the trend was slower to start. But the next generation did imitate their masters ten or twenty years later. A peak was reached around the year 2000. In Germany, business schools were set up later than in other countries, management and organizational theory being taught by departments of economics with a quite normative orientation and not always very solid or deeply rooted in sociology.
Little by little, organization studies scholars have helped business schools to widen their portfolio of social science specialists: beside organizational behavior scholars (often trained as psychologists), they could now consider recruiting a full range of faculty members covering political science issues and anthropology, as well as philosophy and ethnology. In some cases, for instance in the UK, some business schools even appointed faculty members whose distinctive skills and contributions were explicitly dedicated to expressing critical epistemological stances toward neo-capitalism and business policies.
One should mention the fact that in a few countries such as France and Germany, and despite fewer positions and career opportunities being offered by sociology or political science departments, universities and national research centers remained quite active and have been able to keep a relevant academic force working in the field of public organizations. Nevertheless, funds allocated by public authorities and foundations for research in this field decreased a lot compared with the 1960s and the 1970s. Public organization-related programs became less easy to fund, unless included under the study of specific policy domains.
The migration from social science departments to applied professional schools was not a neutral trend for academic professions and for the research agendas of sociology and political science. Business schools built up their own PhD programs and started to train junior faculty by themselves in the field of organization theories. Their agenda was centered on firms, and the issue of publicness was almost completely forgotten.
Organization Studies, Public Policy, and Public Administration
However, the study of public organizations from the point of view of organizational studies faded not only due to the strengthening of the study of business organizations and economic actors. A second reason for the stagnation of added knowledge value generated by social science-based studies is linked to evolutions that have occurred in the way public organization as a field is approached. Social science-based organizational study scholars also moved to a different academic environment, namely, schools specializing in public affairs, policy analysis, and public management, which were created in large numbers in the USA during the 1970s and later in other countries.
Such schools were designed as an alternative to public administration-inspired curricula to train senior civil servants and policy analysts. The purpose was to stand clear of legalistic and formal approaches of the art of administration so as to make room for a massive input of knowledge based on economic and financial analysis. A second goal was to import knowledge that had been developed by political scientists and sociologists on the art of handling political processes and the skills required to design effective policies. A new job market opened up that attracted a new breed of academics who joined applied professional schools dealing with public affairs.
At the beginning, the perspective seemed promising to keep the momentum for the field of social science-based knowledge on public organizations. But what has in fact occurred, bit by bit, in such institutional and epistemic contexts may nevertheless be considered today with some skepticism. As Bozeman explains in this special issue, the public policy tradition brought a high level of fragmentation, where policy scholars became concerned with very specific and differentiated policy fields and topics, seen through a variety of analytical lenses. This fragmentation is expressed, according to Bozeman, in the high level of isolation of policy analysts from neighboring academic fields, who primarily related with people who are expert in their particular policy domains.
Public policy studies, often explicitly separated from the public administration tradition, brought about a different perspective for the analysis of governmental action. The study of governmental decision making became the focus. The definition of policies and public strategies was considered to belong in economic analysis (the high status part of management). Political science or sociological interrogations and concepts were considered a second-order priority, providing mostly a set of instruments to implement such policies and strategies (May & Wildavsky, 1978; Mazmanian & Sabatier, 1983; Pressman & Wildavsky, 1973). Therefore, for many people in the public administration field, priorities changed and a quite schematic vision of public organizations became dominant. The priority was to understand how specific decisions were made, rather than to understand the organizational processes involved in decision making.
This particular way of seeing public policy, mostly dominant in the USA and some countries in Europe and Latin America, lasted for several years. It confined the study of public organizations to the implementation phase, associated with a rational (and often prescriptive) vision of what decision making was supposed to be. Things have changed, though. According to Moore:
This conception of management as policy implementation eventually faded because, in focusing on policy rather than organizations, it left out important questions about how public sector organizations should be developed and used. It was silent, for example, on the issue of how that portion of an organization’s assets that were not engaged in particular new policy initiative should be used. (Moore, 1995, p. 8)
Nevertheless, the damage has been persistent. Policy studies sometimes seem to have a limited capacity to understand the dual nature of public organizations: organizations with objectives and mandates, and apparatuses that pursue and struggle to achieve such objectives, but apparatuses well within a political environment and regime. In democracies, public organizations are required to be effective but also to be strongly under democratic control, and their achievement is always evaluated, at the end of the day, through a political process. This means that public organization acts and outputs are created and evaluated through a plural debate between parties, interest groups, and other social and political actors. Therefore, these organizations often, if not always, receive multiple and contradictory objectives and values, and are assessed, judged, or evaluated by vested interest groups and actors which might be in conflict or in competition.
This scenario implies that the evaluation of public organizations is a complex process, not just a consensual technical and apolitical job. It actually is a fundamental part of the debates and struggles that take place in various arenas among different actors and groups, as Eivor Oborn, Michael Barrett, and Sandra Dawson show in this issue, studying the role of leadership and stakeholders in the development of health policy in the UK. Organizational actors do take into account this reality of partisan, organizational, and intergroup politics, constructing their strategies and decisions not only to rationally implement or achieve formal objectives, but through an understanding and approach of the dynamic political process involved. This more realistic and complex vision of public organizations is becoming more and more part of policy studies, as should have been the case from the beginning (Farazmand, 2012; Kelly & Dodds, 2012; Meier, 2000; Mény & Thoenig, 1989; Pesch, 2008).
A similarly distant relationship as that between organization studies and public policy has been established between organization studies and public administration. The fields of organization studies and public administration remain decidedly separated, or even divorced from each other. In a bibliometric study of both fields presented at the sixth OS summer workshop, Rick Vogel strikingly illustrates the divorce (Vogel, 2011). The two fields have very little in common, to judge by the kind of papers that they cite. To start with, no reference stands among the 20 most cited works in both fields in the period from 2000 to 2010. No large cluster of highly cited publications links both fields. There are only a few brokerage articles which would illustrate a common interest or a possible bridging of both fields. One bridge is the application of a theoretical perspective that stems from the field of organization studies (institutional theory) to a dominant subject in public administration (new public management). Another connection is provided by a more methodological orientation, which is network analysis. One notable fact is that public administration scholars do cite people from the field of organization studies. But the permeability between the two fields is only one-way. As Vogel shows, few highly cited articles in organizational journals relate to major themes of inquiry of the field of public administration. In this respect, what would seem to have happened is that the field of organization studies has left the study of public organizations to public administration scholars, at the same time as it invested in the development of the theoretical perspectives that have become dominant within its space. A sort of division of work has emerged: empirical research on public organizations is done by public administration scholars, with theorization occurring mainly in the field of organization studies, with sporadic feedback to public administration.
One may argue that this separation of the two fields just does not matter. These shifts and transfers of objects and problematics between fields are a normal fact of scientific life. In other words, research about public organizations is still vibrant and quantitatively important. It is just that it is other types of scholars, and under new labels, who perform it. It is therefore not registered in the field of organization studies, but it does exist. However, this separation between fields correlates with particular scientific orientations. The one-way communication between the two fields (public administration citing organization theories more than the opposite), for instance, should be related to the distinctive style of research carried out in both fields. Organization studies, overall, are more theorized in nature, which shows in the fact that some theories (institutional theory again) constitute major structuring co-citation clusters of the field in Vogel’s study. Public administration, on the other hand, seems to be subject- and case-study driven (see also Kelman, 2005). If at all theorized, then it is much more influenced by rational choice kinds of theories than the institutional approach that dominates in the field of organization studies. This division of work is arguably sub-optimal, for both fields and for organization studies in the first place. It prevents the anchoring of the theoretical perspective of major organization studies in the deep empirical investigations of public organizations and public organizing. It also raises the cost of entry into the field for students of new public organization phenomena, by diminishing the probability that one piece of work looking at a new type of organization, or at an old type but with new theoretical lenses, would be published.
How Public Organization Research may Contribute to Social Science-Based Organization Theory
Around sixty people came to present papers at the sixth OS workshop in May 2011. Some of the papers covered well-trodden paths and themes, with the ambition to learn from public organizations and revisit these themes. Among those were issues of leadership, learning, and institutional entrepreneurship. A number of scholars came to continue to deepen the study of managerial reforms and New Public Management, looking at how practices and tools related to the measuring of performance take root in public organizations, or the establishment of new accountability relationships and audit cultures. The study of public professionals, whether at street, middle management, or top policy levels, was also covered by a significant number of contributions.
The issue of publicness and the specificity of public organizations were directly addressed in a number of contributions at the workshop. In this issue, Barry Bozeman strengthens his well-known position regarding the critical role of the concept of publicness, in this case, to help the cross-fertilization between organization studies and public policy studies. Being aware that publicness implies that all organizations are in some sense public (i.e., all organizations are affected or affect in different degrees some kind of political authority), the implications for the study of governmental organizations and public policy are evident. The intersections and interdependence (both economical and political) of firms, governmental organizations, and non-profit organizations are critical elements in understanding the different levels of success or failure of important social and political projects. Cross-fertilizing organization studies, public administration, and public policy becomes an important endeavor in this sense, Bozeman advocates. Public action, the intersection of the agreements and battles among different organizations in a complex society, provides a fundamental arena of study: governance, governability, and governmentality appear in the debate with new strength and urgency. Below, we address these two aspects – publicness and governance – in turn, as two themes that in and of themselves should constitute objects of organizational inquiry and investigation.
Publicness and distinctiveness
The question of what makes public organizations distinct is one that may help us move from a standard organization theory to an extended one (Thoenig, 1998). By extended theory we mean the study of organizing processes and organized set-ups, considering not only single organizations as such but also inter-organizational configurations and arrangements as organized social actors and political dynamics as properties of the contexts in which public organizations operate and are managed.
As defined by the formal status of the organization, publicness remains a questionable and fuzzy criterion. It provides no solid ground. Civil service in the common law tradition as well as public administration in the Roman law perspective do not control in a monopolistic way the handling of public affairs, from law and order, fire protection, and environmental protection policies to education, land use, and social welfare. Hybrid institutional designs and fuzzy legal statuses are common. Some public agencies operate in a market-related manner and even compete openly with private firms. The state acts as a profit-oriented owner. In several sectors, such as social welfare, governmental authorities subcontract collective good mandates and allocate public funds to not-for-profit associations, the latter getting most of their budget from taxpayer money, not from charities or clients-users. Some non-governmental entities such as firms, associations, or citizens play an important role in delivering collective goods, quite often without being formally mandated to do so. The state is far from having exclusive ownership and control of public affairs, from the definition of the issues to be addressed to the design of actual solutions and their implementation. Notions like the state and the public administration have become analytically poor or disappointing. They hide differentiated specific local orders. Action boundaries keep fluctuating. Publicness should not be considered as a given or an axiom but as a problem for inquiry. Classic or golden age organizational theory has in fact partly left the problem unresolved, for instance, by an ambiguous use of the concept of bureaucracy, as will be mentioned later on in this text.
Publicness as a concept defines the fact that government more than market factors influences action-taking and the contexts in which organizations operate (Bozeman, 1987). Whatever its formal status, whether a firm, a not-for-profit association or a state agency, any organization may be characterized by the fact that it is more or less related to some kind of governmental authority, that affects the organization or is affected by it. Publicness therefore is characterized by four main properties: ownership of societal impacts, policy mandates legitimized by governmental authority, multiple and divergent indicators of success and failure, and no spontaneous self-evaluation (Gibert & Andrault, 1984; Mény & Thoenig, 1989).
A single organization or a set of organizations has ownership and is accountable for the generation of societal outcomes. Outputs delivered are legitimized by and referred to impacts they may induce on their environment. Policies are linked to a specific effectiveness mandate usually allocated to them by a third party such as a public authority. Public organizations manage at the same time two different production functions: efficiency and effectiveness (Figure 1).
The distinctiveness of public organizations: two production functions.
Administration efficiency refers to the way resources or inputs such as money or personnel are linked to visible outputs or finished products such as the number of cars manufactured or the volume of oil refined. The purpose is either to minimize the resources used to achieve a certain amount of production or to maximize production for a given amount of resources allocated. The tools available are techniques and procedures such as accounting, cost control, human relations, logistics, and so on. The time horizon is conventionally defined and not a matter for debate. Budget cycles are of one year, productivity is measured by conventional standards such as production, quality, costs, reliability, or failure avoidance (Landau & Chisholm, 1995). From this point of view, public agencies face similar administrative contexts as private firms acting in the market. Inner management looks alike in both worlds. Efficiency is assessed by the organization itself.
Public organizations administer a second production function that private organizations do not: effectiveness. It is assessed by external stakeholders. It refers to the way specific outputs, goods and services, are perceived as linked to policy outcomes and societal impacts they are supposed to generate. No consensual timeframe states who makes such assessments and judgments, when, how, and by what criteria (Jones, 1970). More or less volatile groupings express non-convergent opinions about them, select those that make sense for them, judge, evaluate more or less spontaneously whether specific societal impacts are a success or a failure, and whether they may be attributed to a specific policy endorsed by a specific public institution.
Two types of outcomes are thus generated. A first type is aimed at preventing, if not eradicating, events that otherwise would disrupt society – crime, poverty, fire, water and air pollution, etc. A second type are positive outcomes aimed at addressing aspirations that otherwise, if nothing was done by the government and the state, would not be supplied by civil society spontaneously – cultural development and access to the arts, local economic development, access to job markets, etc. Polities shape and governmental policies legitimize a set of collective norms and actions about societal change to which public mandates and organizations are expected to conform. Exogenous reasons and achievements frame effectiveness. They provide the essence of publicness.
To assess the level of publicness, it is less important to consider whether or not an organization is owned or controlled formally by the state, and more relevant to check whether it has discretion to define its own criteria of success and its ultimate goals. How the balance between both production functions is achieved organizationally, and with what consequences, are questions open to further research. The political and symbolic capacity an organization has to frame these goals and outcomes, to itself appear as an organization that serves public functions effectively, is another sort of question that matters in this perspective (Demortain, 2004).
Barry Bozeman pinpoints in his article that publicness must be a theory grounded in political theory, dealing with the critical issue of legitimacy of political authority and its relationships with organizations and society at large. This means that politics matters and should not be discarded by organization studies as a matter of principle. In a different but equally decisive manner, the paper by Catherine Paradeise and Jean-Claude Thoenig also illustrates this dimension of publicness: the ambiguity and political definition of the actual and expected outcomes of public organizations. It evidences the fact that the response of public organizations to this political environment is very much context dependent. The quality of the knowledge that universities produce is the basis for both prestige and excellence. But the way in which quality is framed and produced is not set by global standards. It is dependent on what the two authors call the instrumentality of the organization, which itself is a reflection of its relationships with multiple stakeholders, first and foremost funding or appraisal bodies, or governmental authorities.
Unlike other classes of organizations, and because of their effectiveness production function, public organizations are less prone to learn from information collected and to correct errors. External impacts indicators are fuzzy and ideologically loaded, objectives are uncertain, time horizons are controversial and unstable, causal linkages between a specific policy and a specific set of outcomes are not linear and are difficult to establish. Policy evaluation is neither spontaneously induced nor obvious to achieve. The idea of managing an evaluation of effectiveness is an ideal goal difficult to achieve, a utopia. Evaluation and organization are somewhat contradictory. Public agencies as organizations do not, most of the time, evaluate their own activities (Wildavsky, 1979). They do not correct errors and surprises that are generated either by the effectiveness theory that its organizational structure implies or by the societal impact theory implicit in the policy it is mandated to implement. They rely instead on their own inner knowledge to identify the societal needs to be served and effective outputs to deliver them.
Governance
Publicness – as defined here in terms of the ambition and capacity to align administrative efficiency and legitimate action on societal outcomes – is a more rather than less imperative topic of inquiry in the context of governance, since the fragmentation of political authority directly affects and redefines the capacity of public organizations to shape and address societal outcomes.
The rise of governance as a heuristic concept has had fundamental consequences for the study of public administration, public policy, and indeed the interest in public organizations (Argyriades, 2006; Bovaird & Loffler, 2007). It is a commonly held view that the first two have been rethought and redefined by the governance paradigm, which led to the relative domination of public policy over public administration, and that public organization has been marginalized to the point of no longer being considered, by many, as the relevant and important research topic that it once was. Yet, it is one thing to recognize this trend, but quite another to accept it as a permanent fait accompli.
First and foremost understood as the fragmentation of capacity, authority, and power between multiple stakeholders (all assumed to be equally legitimate; Bovaird, 2005), the concept of governance has simultaneously led to, first, an implicit blur of the public/private distinction and, second, a relative marginalization and de-legitimization of the state and its administrative apparatus (Pierre & Peters, 2000). The emphasis on networks, collaborations, partnerships, and horizontal relations between public and private actors builds on the assumption that the relevance and legitimacy of their respective actions do not come from their contribution to the common good or general interest, but rather from their superior expertise and greater capacity to act efficiently in terms of time, cost, and quality. Within this governance perspective, the desired interdependency among public and private stakeholders has all but shrunk public organizations and public service to mere technical instruments, whose actions are limited to service delivery, and whose legitimacy seems to mostly, if not entirely, come from their efficacy, efficiency, and economy – the three Es. Consequently, performance measurement and management become necessary activities to support the three Es, just as they are deemed necessary to increase public trust towards the state and its public service (Yang & Holzer, 2006).
Though international organizations such as the OECD and the World Bank have been heavy promoters of managerialism and so-called “good governance” as the cornerstones of public sector reform on the global scene, others, such as the United Nations, recognize the inherent publicness of democratic governance, by defining it as:
The capacity of a society to define and establish policies and resolve their conflicts peacefully within the existing legal order … This requires institutions based on the principles of equity, freedom, participation in decision making, accountability, and promoting the inclusion of the most vulnerable sectors of society. (UNDP, 2012)
This definition certainly puts the emphasis on democratic imperatives, rather than on managerial doctrine, inasmuch as it builds on basic values and the inclusion of all stakeholders, including the most vulnerable, i.e., those not organized and without access to sufficient resources to carve their own niche in the governance process. Though rather atypical when compared to the bulk of the governance literature (Bovaird, 2005), this perspective put forth by the UNDP underscores the need to retain, and possibly refine and recast, but not forego nor abandon, public organizations and organizing. To the same extent, it questions the commonly held assumption that ideologies have all but disappeared in today’s world, and conceded all of the place and all of the relevance to market perspectives.
The rise of governance as a heuristic concept is not an ontological change, but a normative one. As such, it can certainly be challenged both theoretically and empirically, notably through organization theory and the study of public organizations. Bureaucracies are still very much alive (du Gay, 2000, 2005); elected officials still have voice and are still needed to adopt policies through the legislative process. Accountability, fairness, and transparency remain, to this day, at the core of citizens’ expectations, and are the values being violated by corruption scandals, much more so than vague and abstract understandings of what technical efficiency and efficacy really entail for the public sector. In other words, politics does matter, even within the governance paradigm.
But even if one chooses to conduct research within the confines of governance, as herein defined, public organizations remain fundamental units of analysis, and publicness is just as relevant in polycentric organized systems as it is in monocentric authority systems (Brunsson & Olsen, 1997; Thoenig, 1998). A notable share of the papers presented at the sixth OS summer workshop looked at public organizations in contexts of their interactions and cooperation with other types of institutions and organizations, through public–private partnerships or multi-stakeholder arenas. Extending and theorizing this interest for interactions and interdependence develops the perspective of the hybridity and hybridization of types of organizations. In many ways, these research interests extend the issue of organizational publicness, as these interactions and processes of hybridization specifically concern public organizations, and reflect the political contexts in which they are embedded. But whether or not one accepts the assumption that inter-organizational relations between stakeholders are more horizontal in nature than hierarchical, public organizations are still key players in a governance setting (DeLeon, 2005; Hirst, 2000), and any explanation needs to take into account intra-organizational dynamics to be truly satisfactory. In other words, just as administrative reforms over the last 25 years have not created a so-called “hollow” state, but rather a different one, governance as heuristic concept does not come with a relative disappearance of public organizations and publicness, as much as it transforms and reconfigures them. The governance paradigm reinforces the need to bring public organizations and organizing back into the analysis.
Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, for all its distinctiveness from governance, has oftentimes also been considered a contributing factor to the relative marginalization of the state and its administrative apparatus. A closer look suggests a very different conclusion. The common thread throughout his writings is the study of power micro-practices, including public administration. For Foucault, power is not a top-down, hierarchical phenomenon, but rather exists in a capillary way, through the “micro-practices” and instruments of government. Furthermore, these practices are no longer motivated by the desire of an all-powerful monarch to stay in power, but rather by a more subtle and poorly defined governmental rationality: governmentality. Foucault defines governmentality as the “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses … which has, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as it essential technical means apparatuses of security” (Foucault, 1991, p. 102). Government action should be looked at from the angle of its practices, rather than from an institutional or juridical perspective. The most important theme in Foucault’s analysis is power, whether it comes from government micro-practices or from the knowledge associated with them. Thus, the concept of governmentality highlights the need to understand state action as decentralized and fragmented, but nevertheless as a fundamental locus of power. Its appropriate use of governmentality comes with an emphasis on public organizations and publicness, and not with their Balkanization.
An Open Research Agenda
What sort of research agenda would be likely to revive the study of public organizations, in such a way as to show how much there is to gain for the field of organization studies as a whole? What kind of questions relevant to organization studies derive from revisiting the theme of publicness and governance in this way? Below we suggest how to work, in an organization-minded way, on governance and specifically on three traits of modern governance – its emphasis on performance, its close relation to regulation, and its transnational nature – all of which are discussed heavily in public administration, public policy, or political science more broadly.
Performance
Many research questions, most of which are rooted in public organizations and organizing, come from the rise of the contested concepts of governance and governmentality in public administration, public policy, and organization studies. To name but two: how can we, in the case of governance, reconcile in a truly satisfactory way its managerial components, centered on results, to its democratic components, centered on process? How can we find the point of equilibrium where the fragmentation of stakeholders meets the needed coherence of public policies in a given sector, and indeed between policy sectors? There is no doubt then than a more lively agenda, where different actors interact, creating arenas for both struggle and cooperate, becomes critical if one wishes to understand the complex interaction of stakeholders in almost any social or political issue. As Eivor Oborn, Michael Berrett, and Sandra Dawson suggest in the specific case of health policy in the UK, public policies are much more than an orderly set of decisions where different actors simply place their priorities and rationales. It requires strong will from different actors, leaders in organizational contexts, who take chances and interact constantly with a myriad of stakeholders in search for agreement and collaboration, in an always conflicting arena of interests and beliefs. These leaders and stakeholders bring their knowledge, beliefs, and interests in an intricate network that nevertheless is expected, socially, to deliver important services and results. On the one hand, society expects results, services, with quality and efficiency for services that might be critical such as health, transportation, or security. On the other hand, and in reality, there is a mobile and sometimes disarticulated set of organizations, stakeholders, persons, and groups introducing different inputs and objectives to the arena. Without organizations and leaders pushing to generate viable options, negotiate credible agreements, and dealing constantly with the need to produce legitimate and realistic options, public actions becomes impossible. Public action requires the production of public values but, without public managers and public organizations dealing efficiently in complex political contexts, it would be impossible (Moore, 1995).
These challenges cannot be addressed without further developments in performance measurement, be it financial or non-financial (Kelman, 2007). Though the call for additional theoretical and empirical work on performance measurement can hardly be seen as superfluous, especially when it comes to non-financial measurement, public administration as a doctrine needs first and foremost to take into account the absence of a universal, non-polemical, and timeless performance criterion similar to profits for private firms (Frederickson & Frederickson, 2006). That absence signals that performance measurement in governance settings is not so much about the management of politics as it is about the politics of management.
Norms and criteria of so-called “sound public management” do not have a divine or natural origin. They emerge in specific socio-political contexts, and remain invariably subject to time and space/path limitations. Value-for-money (VFM), results-based management, performance measurement, and many others, are conditioned and redefined, if not distorted, by the epistemological impossibility of conducting a value-free assessment of governmental activity. In other words, performance measurement is always ingrained in its own political and ideological basis – some would say bias. For example, regardless of the technocratic claims of the Auditor-General (AG) in Canada, the VFM process remains inherently political (Sutherland, 2003): the AG and the audited public organizations always negotiate the selection of evaluation criteria and benchmarks which serve as the basis of the VFM audit, creating from the start a political, not technical, relationship. A second set of negotiations occurs, and a second political relationship unfolds, once results are known, in an attempt to achieve a common interpretation (though this is not always possible). Finally, performance measurement has to overcome many other issues and challenges, such as ossification, tunnel vision, sub-optimization, measure fixation, symbolic behavior, inappropriate level of quality, and of course rising monitoring costs (de Lancer Julnes, 2006; Greilling, 2006; Yang & Holzer, 2006).
None of this should be understood as an implicit plea against performance measurement and/or management. The point is rather that even a significant trend strongly rooted in managerialism such as the performance movement (Fryer & Ogden, 2009; Power, 2007) can be erroneously understood as justification for the downplay, and subsequent downfall, of publicness and public organizations, when in fact only its publicness dimension can render it truly relevant. Again, politics matters.
Regulating and Organizing
Regulation has become one key theme of study in the field of political science and public administration (Lodge, 2008), notably since Giandomenico Majone developed a theory of the regulatory state (Majone, 1994). Investigating the form and action of regulatory agencies is a first topic that could be of interest for organization scholars. A major area of activity of governmental organizations, regulation is the source of many new organizations – regulatory organizations of all sorts, ranging from agencies with legal personality and with their own budget and staff, autonomous from governments but entrusted with public and legally defined missions, to self-standing legislative or expert committees, in charge with collecting information and establishing standards.
While organization theory has not yet defined what makes an organization a regulatory organization, scholars of the regulatory state (political scientists mainly) have from the start assumed that a regulatory agency had to be autonomous. In the regulatory state, complex issues of risk or economic matters require large capacities of information collection, treatment, and analysis, as well as a depoliticized approach of the issues at stake. In essence, the autonomy of regulatory agencies allowed just that to happen. In theory, this functional nature of autonomous agencies explains why so many of them have been created in past decades, or since states – European states in particular – have become regulatory states.
Now what does autonomy mean? Majone at times insists on other dimensions, such as discretion or specialization of organizations (Everson, Majone, Metcalfe, & Schout, 1999; Majone, 1997). But Aaron Wildavsky denies that the entrustment of functions to a newly created and formally separate public organization – or “agencification” as it is now frequently called – changes anything regarding the policies applied or institutional power equilibriums (Wildavsky, 1979). Philip Selznick similarly suspects that the form of the agency is not critical:
Regulation is not achieved by passing a law. There must be monitoring of relevant activities, continuous assessment of public values at stake and rule-making sensitive to changing needs and circumstances. In other words, the process of control is intimately involved with the regulated activity. This is why we need quasi-permanent agencies capable of detailed assessment and rule-making. But the form of the agency is not crucial. (Selznick, 1985, p. 365)
There is something organizational about regulation, which does not really concern form or structure, but the capacity of an organization to have a sustained and focused relationship with its environment, comprising those other organizations it is tasked to monitor or place under surveillance. In the field of science and technology studies, David Guston articulates the notion of “boundary-organizations” in a way that speaks to this interrogation. Boundary organizations are organizations that work at the boundary of the social worlds of science and of politics or regulation, drawing knowledge, resources, and legitimacy (Guston, 2001). Daniel Carpenter, studying the US Food and Drug Administration, shows how the policies, the culture, and strategies of that organization reflect its intimate and continuous engagement with a series of equidistant “audiences,” from firms to academics in passing by Congress and patient associations. In a regulatory agency like the FDA, top-level decisions and strategies are wedded and enabled by the work of individual agents, deep down in those services that are tasked with performing field inspections or reviewing industry data. The bottom and the top of the organization are cohesive and collectively defend the quality of the work performed and the overall reputation of the organization to one or the other audience (Carpenter, 2010).
The challenge remains to understand what generically makes an organization a regulatory one. This interrogation about regulatory organizations could bridge the study of public and private organization. “Private bureaucracy” is the term that Philip Selznick chooses to speak about the way in which firms, as regulated organizations, developed new capacities and sensitivities to enforce public standards internally, but also to reinforce those standards through self-monitoring. Such bureaucratic traits as explicit policy, systematic procedure, and the maintenance of organizational equilibrium were thought to be advantageous for firms to transform in that manner. Selznick highlights the challenge of institutional design, or more precisely the production of incentives and resources for firms to organize in this manner and become private bureaucracies (Selznick, 1985).
One small segment of the field of regulation heeded this early call, looking at how private organizations develop managerial plans to achieve public goals (Coglianese & Lazer, 2003; Gunningham 1996). Management-based regulation proliferates: more and more standards are developed to provide firms with generic templates, or principles to establish such plans. Drawing on Barry Bozeman’s concept of publicness, one could say that those private organizations become public in the sense that they incorporate and appropriate forms of public action. The extent to which management-based regulation actually transforms firms into private bureaucracies is an open question. Neo-institutionalists describe how the internal development of such plans induces a turning inside out of the firm, whereby external and public processes and objectives get internalized under the form of new organizational roles and cultures (Power, 2007). But to what extent do such new roles and cultures influence the functioning of the organization as a whole? What sort of political games or conflicts does management-based regulation create inside firms? Are those potential transformations matched by equivalent transformations in the governmental bodies that traditionally regulated those firms? Does management-based regulation improve firms’ social legitimacy and reputation?
Globalization, Transnationalization, Denationalization
A great share of the papers presented at the workshop looked at the form and action of public organizations in relation to the transnationalization or globalization of regulation and governance, in such a way that the transnationalization and globalization of public organizations now appears to be a promising research avenue as such.
Transnational or global governance affects public organizations, and governmental organizations also, in particular ways, for a reason highlighted above: public organizations are tied to political and policy contexts, national or local. As these contexts get tied to transnational or outright global developments, public organizations are affected by a sort of double bind, responding to context-specific constraints as well as transnational ones, embodied by the international standards and policy principles that they also need to implement and enact. Among the papers presented at the workshop, Catherine Paradeise and Jean-Claude Thoenig’s is most explicit to address this dimension, in a way that builds on and speaks to an organizational sociology agenda. The instrumentality of universities – the resources they command, the mode of relationships among parts or groups, the sort of authority and degree of centralization that prevails within them, and so on – explains what global developments towards the formalization of judgments about excellence and quality of research and teaching do. An observation about outright globalization and homogenization is not in order here. These global trends intersect with the ways in which these organizations are shaped by and have shaped their immediate environment, and the particular local order that results from this very political (since very much linked to the ways universities are funded, governed, and controlled) history.
There is much to be done in this vein, for all public organizations are embedded in transnational chains, by which they interact with and are constrained by remote and foreign contexts of organizing and organizational action. In short, what does transnational organizing mean, and what does it do to the organizations involved? One of the advantages of focusing on transnational relations is that governance arrangements – that is, government or policy making beyond the state – can be observed in a perhaps purer form than by staying within the boundaries of a nation-state. And for this reason too, transnational governance studies quickly fell back on studying actors that possibly seemed less prominent in national policy-making systems, from firms to professional groups, in passing by social movements or scientific communities. Most of these actors seem to be organized in networks. The literature speaks of social movements as “transnational advocacy networks” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998), of scientists as “epistemic communities” (Haas, 1992), or “invisible colleges” (Crane, 1981; Demortain, 2011), and of circulating government officials as “trans-governmental networks” (Slaughter, 2004). Policy networks have been seen to extend transnationally too, to form transnational policy networks and communities (Stone, 2004). As this move started to consider each of these networks, it is striking that the organizational focus and sensitivity has vanished. Very little is actually said about how these networks evolve, how the relationships that they are made of are maintained, but also how their organizational capacities and competencies augment. The literature on transnational social movements, while still limited (Smith, Pagnucco, & Romeril, 1994; Zald, 2008), overall takes for granted the processes of resource mobilization by which those networks, that generally span not only countries but also various national cultures, mobilization issues and partners, resist centrifugal forces. Ideas and causes seem to matter much more in this field than resources and modes of organizing.
In general, one would think that the (slowly increasing) level and quality of inquiry into intergovernmental organizations, as Yves Schemeil points out in his article, should be matched by comparative studies of the different forms of transnational networks, and the way they organize. Transnational organizing matters, for instance, because it extracts the organizations involved from their political and national contexts. It is widely accepted now that states enjoy a much different sort of political and administrative power than they used to, especially in a transnational context in which international organizations, private actors, and transnational networks of all sorts have built up regulatory capacity as well as political authority. This diagnosis underpins the whole of the transnational governance literature, and the governance literature tout court, but has already been heavily nuanced. In short, governmental organizations belonging to particular states continue to play an instrumental role in the international production of rules and the diffusion of policy ideas. But they may be denationalized, in at least two senses. First, their source of legitimacy does not originate from belonging to the sphere of the nation-state – it originates as much from their compliance with widely circulating and universal norms of publicity, transparency, and democracy (Genschel & Zangl, 2008), or with seemingly more technical standards of what organizations should have or look like (Brunsson & Jacobsson., 2000). Second, all the elements that define their policy or regulatory work – the object of this work, their goals, and their constraints and resources – to a great extent transcend national boundaries. They apply or contribute to elaborate international legal frameworks and standards; they intervene on public problems that concern more than one state, and that require international cooperation; the information and knowledge they mobilize comes from a variety of national sources, and much from transnational or international actors. This applies specifically to agencies in charge of the regulation of markets, capitals, and competition, but also of technologies or risks (Sassen, 2007).
Denationalization is one of the ways in which the state becomes embedded in transnational relations, that is in relationships with more and more influential non-state and transnational actors and organizations. But such an observation is only the starting point for further research to answer such questions as what is a national compared to a denationalized state or governmental administration. Are the latter better equipped to deal with and influence transnational developments? What are the similarities and differences between the ways in which traditional state departments deal with interest groups, and the ways in which transnationally oriented organizations interact with transnational interest groups? How does the intensity of relations between a governmental organization and the intergovernmental organization in its sector influence the former’s relation to other parts of the state?
Organization studies conducted within the parameters of denationalized organizations would still emphasize the organizational factors and dynamics of political regimes, such as their federal, regional, and/or unitary form, as well as their centralized/decentralized nature. To the same extent, the study of political-administrative public sector reform, reconfiguration, and/or ‘modernization’ in a denationalized state can hardly generate relevant knowledge without looking at the change and transformation of public organizations, at evolving networks of organizations, at growing horizontality in a (still) vertical and bureaucratic environment, and at all types of inter-organizational relationships in and around the public sector. Key dimensions to that end include, as was the case of a traditional national state, budgeting and resource allocation, e-government, environment, fiscal changes, and civil service reform, including human resource management norms and classification, to name but a few.
Organizational implications for public policy making have to make a distinction between agenda setting, design, implementation, and evaluation, while traditional policy domains and sectors, such as health, education, social programs, security, and regional development, remain just as relevant as before. In the context of denationalized states, their study and analysis may ask for a different sensibility in order to put them in their proper socio-political context, but none of that questions or challenges their relevance. To that end, power phenomena remain a perennial object to be researched and studied, inasmuch as public organizations and public policy are, at their very core, political endeavors. Allocation of roles and responsibilities, distribution of formal authority, resources and constraints, systems of accountability, issues of coordination and coherence, conflict resolution, as well as the dynamic relation between the administrative apparatus and the executive and legislative branches, still need to be taken into account if one is to properly understand the inner workings of denationalized states.
Conclusions
Public organizations remain a frontier for social science-based organization knowledge. Our argumentation is not based on nostalgia for some past golden years. There are many good reasons to invest substantial time and attention in exploring the field of public affairs, management, and governance in more depth empirically and theoretically.
Times keep changing: there is an increasing role for multilevel and supranational action arenas; standard formal organizations are more and more embedded when not diluted in forms of organizing and organized set-ups that do not fit the properties of bureaucratic ideal types, public–private partnerships, etc.
Another major reason is that social science-based organizational theory in general may benefit greatly from a closer look at what is happening today in the real world of organizing processes that handle public affairs. What has occurred in the last years in the field of business-oriented actors when studying the evolution of economies should also occur when studying changing polities. Placing emphasis on and paying attention to scientific issues such as publicness and governance, as we recommend, is a means to understand differentiation and types of organizational constructions dealing with public affairs, to find out whether differentiation matters when comparing public, private and not-for-profit organizational actors, and also gives opportunities for broader general theory advancement.
Another challenge concerns sub-disciplines and domains that are aimed at studying public affairs but are not yet taking advantage of social science-based organization approaches. Our paper and the four papers selected for this special issue provide a series of examples in fields such as international relations theory, public management, and higher education and research. One of the lessons widely shared by the participants attending the sixth OS summer workshop was that what we as scholars already know today is not much compared with what we do not know yet about the real world in appropriate scientific terms, both empirically and theoretically. More scholarly work, more resources, more academic publications, and more social science-based imagination are in great need to renew both fundamental and applied knowledge.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Organization Studies editor-in-chief David Courpasson and managing editor Sophia Tzagaraki for their friendly support and efficient guidance throughout this project (summer workshop and special issue).
We are also grateful to the following colleagues who provided helpful comments on the ideas expressed in this issue: Peter Atteslander, Ivar Bleiklie, Olivier Borraz, François Dedieu, Gaele Goastellec, Lucien Karpik, Grégoire Mallard, Vincent Spenlehauer, Joan Subirats, Peter Weingart, and David Wilson