What influence the diffusion of administrative reforms? The public management literature often conceptualizes the global spread of administrative reforms from an neo-institutionalist perspective. (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). The doctrines of NPM, to illustrate with perhaps the most widely studied case in the last two decades, were seen as diffusing slowly over the years from pioneering countries through international organizations and global media to polities around the world (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). The reform was gradually institutionalized, and the encompassing values and practices became one, if not the only one, legitimate way for managing government operations.
Questions have been raised in the management literature, however, about this rather neat and simple model of diffusion, which places much emphasis on the role of structure over agency. It is argued that a more active role may be assigned to the agents in their response to institutional pressures and quests for legitimacy. Agents, for example, may vary their strategic responses to institutional pressures based on their dependency on the institutional environment (Oliver 1991). They may actively enact on the organizational environment to change the criteria of legitimacy for survival (Weick 1995), or create, consolidate or even disrupt their choice of institutions (Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca 2011). Is this stronger role of organizational agency applicable to the diffusion process of administrative reforms? How may the standard diffusion model of administrative reform in public management incorporate the possible influence of agents?
We argue that such diffusion process depends on the compatibility between the reform features (with its supposed results and embodied values) and local organizational as well as societal cultural contexts. Through looking into the adoption of NPM practices in government agencies from 4 later-reforming polities, Hong Kong, The Netherlands, Romania, and Sweden, our analysis found that such adoption varied positively with a creative agency organizational norm, as well as an embedded societal culture which is consistent with the underlying values of NPM. Agency’s management autonomy related significantly with the extent of adoption only when it was mediated by an organizational norm of creativity, and such a relation was found only in the more mature democracies in our selected cases. The findings highlight the important role of local government agency in affecting the global diffusion of administrative reforms.
References
DiMaggio, Paul J., and Powell, Walter W. 1983. The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147-160.
Meyer, John W. and W. Richard Scott. 1983. Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality. Beverley Hills, Sage
Oliver, Christine. 1991. Strategic responses to institutional processes. The Academy of Management Review, 16(1): 145-179.
Pollitt, Christopher and Geert Bouckaert. 2011. Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis – New Public Management, Governance, and the Neo-Weberian State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weick, Karl E. 1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Lawrence, Thomas B., Roy Suddaby and Bernard Leca. (Ed.) 2009. Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
