ABSTRACT
As with organizational change management in general, academic and practitioner interest in the management of organizational change in public services has never been higher. It is not difficult to see why. How public services are organized and what they provide in terms of order and opportunity makes these services lightning rods for shaping key aspects of the relationship between citizen and state and in maintaining the social cohesion of civil society at large. Little wonder, then, that when political parties in advanced liberal democracies seek to convince the electorate that the future they offer will be distinctive from and somehow better than that which went before, their plans for reforming public services become touchstones for that ‘better’ society. However, the gulf between the promise of change in public services and its delivery can be frustratingly wide for even the most self-assured of political leaders. In 1997 the United Kingdom Labour Party swept to power accompanied by the soundtrack of a vacuously anodyne, yet persuasively catchy, pop song titled ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, and a determination to demonstrate its credentials for change by reforming, or ‘modernizing’, the United Kingdom's public services. Yet a mere two years later, much of the initial optimism that underscored Labour's ambitions for public services and their recipients appeared to have dissipated, as the then prime minister, Tony Blair, made all too clear in a speech to the British Venture Capitalists Association in July 1999: ‘You try getting change in the public sector and public services. I bear the scars on my back after two years of government’ (quoted in Seldon, 2005:423).
