ABSTRACT
One final topic deserves inclusion in a book on strategy in public services organizations before we turn to some concluding reflections in the final chapter: the search for ‘best practices’ in strategic management – possibly one of the main concerns of practitioners (and the consultancy industry). Osborne and Gaebler (1992) wrote a highly cited bestseller (Reinventing government: How the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector) that provided a set of ‘tenets’ or principles for good government that later came to be placed under the umbrella of the doctrinal paraphernalia of the NPM (see Chapter 6). But their argument is not so much ‘ideological’, rather it relies heavily on the logic of the ‘best practices’: they claim to have found throughout the USA highly innovative organizations – permeated by the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, as the subtitle of their work suggests – that represent models or patterns for the rest of the public sector, in the USA and elsewhere. Some key questions arise: are those cases really cases of ‘best’ performance? And even admitting they embody the ‘best’ performance levels available, what can be extrapolated from those cases that would work also elsewhere? These are important questions of wider implications. Whilst many have questioned the
extent to which the specific cases to which Osborne and Gaebler make reference were actually cases of best performance (see also the previous chapter), and even more sharply it has been questioned whether the doctrines they have drawn from those cases are actually helpful ‘always and under all circumstances’ to improve the public sector, the key underlying issue remains. Strategic management – and management more broadly – is for an important part concerned with the search of ‘excellence’ – the ‘best’ practices – and their replication elsewhere. What can be learnt from a case of ‘excellence’ (Peters and Waterman, 1982) or ‘success’ (however gauged) to be applied to other organizations, in other circumstances, with the purpose of replicating the successful outcome? We will address this topic from the point of view of the more general theme of the ‘best practices research in public management’: a strand of research addressing the question of how to identify and extrapolate a ‘best practice’ from one case (‘source site’) and make it work elsewhere (‘target site’) to reproduce its outcome – a strand of research of which the practices for managing strategically public services organizations is one important category of application. Preliminarily, we note that the extrapolation of practices also relates to two other
issues of central importance discussed throughout this book: first, the issue of contextual differences and how they affect the way in which public organizations are managed; and, second, the very conception of strategic management as both ‘science’ and ‘art and
profession’. As regards the issue of contextual influences on the way an organization forms its strategy, in Chapter 6 our discussion remained somewhat at the meso and the macro level. However, as approaches like strategy-as-practice suggest, strategy also forms at the micro level in the ‘specific’ circumstances in which an organization operates: ‘[T]ime and place are the fundamental elements of contextualization’ (Pollitt, 2012, p. 192) and strategy in a certain sense always takes place in the specific ‘hic et nunc’, the here and now (spatially and temporally determined) in which decisions are made – a given ‘situation’. Thus, the extrapolation process is another aspect of the broader issue of contextual influences that we have analyzed in Chapter 6. Extrapolation also concerns the practical problem of how to replicate a desired state of affairs from one set of circumstances to another one: this problem concerns the very nature of public management, and strategic management as part and parcel of it, as an art and a profession aimed at solving practical problems, a theme we examine in Chapter 9. The ‘best practices research’ explores the issue of whether and how analysts in public
management can address the problem of improving the performance of public sector organizations in one situation (target site) by employing experience acquired elsewhere (source site), a strand of research typified by Osborne and Gaebler’s bestseller. A lively debate on ‘best practices research’ (Bardach, 2004; Barzelay, 2007) has raised the issue of whether current research conventions in public management are effective as regards the identification and supple elaboration of ‘best’ practices. Learning from second-hand experience (the extrapolation problem) is more complex than simply ascertaining whether a given practice is effective in the source site (the evaluation of performance problem which has been addressed in the previous chapter). Extrapolation is the process of learning from vicarious experience and designing practices fitting the (new and diverse) circumstances to which the practices are to be applied. Researching ‘best’ practices involves at least two crucial problems: the identification of
cases that contain a best practice; and the extrapolation of the practice, i.e. the way by which experience acquired elsewhere can be employed in the target site. The problem of the best practices research may then be deconstructed into two problems:
The search of excellence problem; and The extrapolation problem.
