Bureaucratic management as going back to the future

The search for efficient and effective local government has for many decades been met by adopting management techniques and market thinking from the private sector. What happens with the use and impact these management and... [ view full abstract ]

The search for efficient and effective local government has for many decades been met by adopting management techniques and market thinking from the private sector. What happens with the use and impact these management and markets ideas if there is a major change in the demands from the population? Many local government organisations, especially in metropolitan areas, are in the era of urbanisation struggling to meet the increasing and complex demands for public services from a growing population (Bhatti et al., 2015; Zhang, 2016).  

This paper analyses how three major cities control transformative and complex capacity challenges caused by growing populations. In particular, it extends our knowledge about why they chose to adopt certain control mechanisms to handle the external pressure from a growing population. This is accomplished by a comparative investigation of the dominant control mechanisms in three major cities in Sweden: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo.

The study includes a future scenario where the population is growing rapidly. In order to understand the control mechanisms and how they are employed, the empirical material is based on a case study approach. The study focuses on how significant actors talk about how to control the capacity challenges. In order to understand the governance of this situation, the empirical material is based on interviews with leading politicians and officials, in total 29 interviews, in all the cities. The interview data has been complemented with quantitative data in order to understand the characteristics of the challenges the cities are facing and to make some comparisons.

The main theoretical concepts used to analyze how the cities meet the challenges of a growing population are market, bureaucracy and clan (Ouchi, 1978 & 1979).

The empirical findings show that the three cities challenges have both similarities and differences in volume and configuration of the population. In Stockholm and Gothenburg the major increase in the population comes from the elderly when Malmö’s growth is among the young ones. The problems these cities facing are more ambiguous and complex than “a typical big city challenge”.

From a theoretical perspective the findings shows that the large population growth primarily is managed with the help of increased planning, which includes both changes in the governance of bureaucracy and how the cities work with various market solutions. From a bureaucratic perspective, this is expressed in increased centralization of control functions. The market perspective is expressed in terms of how the cities use external resources. The findings also show that these planning ambitions raise demands for increased coordination of planning.

One conclusion to draw from the study is that local government under extensive transformation due to increases in population’s demands may need a new governance role where extensive coordination of planning becomes more significant. This new role will be further developed in the discussion of the full paper.