Enacting public management reform : Practices of politicians and public managers

Public sector reforms are driven by decision situations that can be described as strategic. At the same time, reforms open the field to a plethora of new strategic options. Thus, reforms deliver a fruitful context for the study of strategic decision making. It has been argued that public administration is working in a pluralistic context, which means that its diverse stakeholders may cherish incompatible expectations and requirements towards the administration. A rationality has been defined as a specific way of thinking, speaking, and acting which creates a logic meaning in itself. We see it as a logic of acting, a logic of arguing, and a logic of perceiving and interpreting the wold as it is in an organization. Rationalities are usually guided by external systems of reference such as the legal system or the political system. In organizations, they are re-constructed by social groups within the politico-administrative system (communities of meaning) such as politicians or public managers. Since by specialization, these communities of meaning may develop their own terminology and interpretation schemes, there is some potential for irreconcilable differences. In this paper, we will analyze the rationalities that shape the perceptions, interpretations, and decisions made by politicians and public managers in a situation of reform. We re-coded more than 60 interviews taken in the public administration in Switzerland over a time period of 10 years. Interviewees were members of parliaments, members of cabinets, and public managers, and all the interviews were about their roles and perceptions in reforms on 'outcome-oriented public management' (the Swiss version of the New Public Management). We will argue that all the interviewees felt that they were confronted with multiple rationalities, and that they developed different practices to respond to this situation. As a general rule, we expect to find that politicians will tend to reduce their decision rationality to a monorational one, in that the political rationality dominates all decisions. In contrast, we expect that public managers will have to develop practices of dealing with multiple rationalities on the long term, that is, practices of tolerance and exploitation. Our research will contribute to the theory of strategic decision making in pluralistic contexts (Denis / Langley et al.) as well as to a practical understanding of multirational management in the public sector.