Advancing the theory and practice of public sector reform through the analysis of social mechanisms

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, a strand of research works in public management has systematically resorted to the analysis of social mechanisms (basically as defined in Hedström and Swedberg, 1998 and Gambetta, 1998 – more on defining issues below) to improve our understanding of the dynamics of public sector reform processes. This chapter appraises the adequacy of the analysis of social mechanisms as conceptual building blocks for an improved theoretical understanding of organizational reform processes in the public sector. The main questions can be formulated as follows: are social mechanisms ‘adequate’ building blocks for a form of theoretical understanding of public sector reform processes, complementary to other theories used to study such processes? And if so, how can they be employed for bettering our understanding of the dynamics of reform processes: what is the ‘added value’ of the analysis of social mechanisms? And finally, in a more prescriptive fashion, how can such knowledge be used for public sector reforms to be ‘successfully’ carried out by policy-makers? The key thrust of the research agenda outlined in this chapter, which is aimed at improving our understanding of the dynamics of public sector reform by resorting to the systematic usage of social mechanisms, lies in identifying developmental patterns (Van de Ven, 1992) of public sector reform processes: patterns that can be understood in terms of concatenations of social mechanisms, which may be manipulated – triggered of defused – so as to achieve desired public sector reform goals. In terms of methods, this work is partly theoretical-speculative and partly it proceeds by revisiting already published works (e.g., Ongaro, 2006, 2013; the Special Issue of Governance guest edited by Barzelay and Gallego, 2010a,