ABSTRACT
Sifting through the debris of ‘ruined hopes’ precipitated by the disintegration of an ill-starred initiative by the US Economic Development Agency to provide permanent employment opportunities for minorities in the city of Oakland, California, Pressman and Wildavsky's (1973) seminal study on public policy implementation concluded that ‘the apparently simple and straight-forward is really complex and convoluted’. The same might reasonably be said of efforts to initiate and manage change in organizations generally and those involved in the delivery of public services in particular (Randall, 2004). Indeed, a striking feature of the literature on contemporary organizational change management is the extent to which it mirrors aspects of the earlier public policy implementation literature, both in its preoccupations regarding the efficacy of top-down and bottom-up change management processes and in the wide range of variables it identifies as significant in shaping the management of change. Similar trends are also detectable in the current volume. In this final chapter we consider the limits to directly comparative analysis in the study of organizational change management and discuss their implications for students and practitioners of change in public services. We then examine the extent to which change management in contemporary public service organizations has an international dimension, before offering some concluding observations.
