ABSTRACT
Is the design of public organizations significant? What are the effects of organizational change? Answering these questions requires knowledge about public organizations’ ability for rational calculation, that is, an ability to analyse plans and to foresee the consequences of alternative actions and organizational forms. The answers also require focusing on organizations’ ability to look backwards, to learn from experience and recognize what has actually been achieved via various organizational forms and initiatives. In this chapter, attention is directed towards the latter process. In particular, we will focus on the effects and implications of reforms associated with NPM, the ‘guiding light’ for organizational reforms in the public sectors of many countries in the last two decades, with its emphasis on performance management, structural devolution, market-orientation, efficiency and management models
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we organizational forms.The crux of the problem is formulated by the American political scientist B. Guy Peters, who claims that organizational structure is that aspect of public organizations most manipulated but least understood. Often insufficient resources are allocated to acquire information about various possible organizational forms, their effects on society and the degree to which they have enabled goals to be achieved. A general impression is that effects are often assumed, expected or promised, but seldom well documented through systematic studies. Reform practice is often at odds with rhetoric. Hence we are faced with a paradox, in that those who prescribe NPM reforms and who argue for their legitimacy by promising results seldom examine the effects of their own reforms. Over time, however, people become increasingly eager to know what the reforms have achieved, thus evaluation has become the mantra of our times, just as planning was a buzzword during the 1960s and 1970s.Yet evaluation processes can be instrumentally directed as well as symbolic.
