مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد پارادایم “سازماندهی” در اداره عمومی – امرالد ۲۰۱۸

Public administration is a critical context due to demanding clients, barriers to equity and intrinsic organizational complexity. This complexity derives from the dual character of the public sector, that is to be both a means of delivery and also an element of societal self-governance. In this way, public administration has to contain the unresolved value conflicts and moral ambivalence of society, at the intersection of conflicting needs and alternative definitions of the common good (Hoggett, 2006). A specific element of the conflictual nature of public purpose is represented by the tension between an ethic of care (as a compassionate concern for the individual) and an ethic of equity (as a responsibility towards all cases equally), and by the tension between universalism and particularism (for instance, the impartial treatment of individuals may produce discriminations towards groups). Furthermore, public administration routinely faces the paradox of dealing with increasing demand amid decreased resources. This, in turn, creates a range of management challenges (Pokharel and Hult, 2010). The bureaucratic framework is a way to address such tensions: the standardization of procedures is the answer to the complexity of organizational processes as well as to the need for transparency in public administration. Following Du Gay (2000, 2005), the original Weberian meaning of bureaucracy, as a particular kind of moral institution, in which principles of impartiality and fairness are paramount, need to be rediscovered. “Public bureaucracies are a vital resource, the epitome of what Weber called substantive rationality rather than instrumental rationality. As such it is perhaps the one place where questions of technique and questions of value stand a chance of being integrated” (Hoggett, 2006, p. 177). Conversely, in public bureaucracies, there are risks of ambivalence due to the partially suppressed value conflicts, the absence of transparency, moral corruption and the predominance of an organizational model based on rigid prescriptions and routinizations. Therefore, in contrast to the ideal of impartiality, there is often uncertainty about what public officers should primarily do, feeling frustrated by the constraints of procedures, which if on one hand want to protect transparency, on the other may make their activities rigid, inefficient and unresponsive. “A typical mechanism for legislative conflict resolution is to pass on intractable conflicts for resolution (or continued irresolution) at the administrative level” (Lipsky, 1980, p. 41). The result is a further dilemma between public administration bureaucratization – as an answer to its unresolved conflicts – and the need to focus on a more processual view of the organization, as a way to improve service quality. Reforms of public administration have been high on the agenda of OECD countries for the past 35 years in order to face this dilemma. An essential component of ‘New Public Management’ principles is the idea that citizens are viewed as customers of the administration (Korunka et al., 2007). The increased focus on the concrete and existing needs of customers brought profound shifts in public administration (Schedler, 1995, Martin and Fraser, 2002). One key issue is the shift in the perspective of service organizations to viewing customers as active co-producers rather than as passive users. Following Toffler (1980), consumers may be better named as ‘prosumers’, i.e. the crasis between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’, since production and consumption are not separable phases in service delivery.