Instituties, tijd en evolutie

Al sinds halverwege de jaren negentig zien we allerlei veranderingen in de verzorgingsstaat. De laatste discussie op dit front is die over de versoepeling van het ontslagrecht. Alhoewel vanuit de problematiek van participatie goed te begrijpen is dit soort veranderingen niet simpel te verklaren. Ze brengen althans de institutionele benadering in de sociologie in de problemen. In deze benadering is een uitgangspunt dat beleidsverandering vaak niet optreedt terwijl de omstandigheden dat op zichzelf wel noodzakelijk maken. Theorievorming heeft zich op deze 'beleidsinertie' gericht, maar die blijkt nu meer en meer tegenfeitelijk

Veroorzaakt crisis verandering?

Wat is de relatie tussen crisis en verandering? Die vraag staat centraal in het project 'Institutional Crisis and Reform' van Paul 't Hart en Arjen Boin waaruit de drie proefschriften voortkomen die hier worden besproken: Cast in Concrete? van Kuipers (2004), Leadership and Institutional Reform van Noll (2005) en Crisis and Change van Resodihardjo (2006). De vraag komt voort uit een inzicht dat centraal staat in de historisch-institutionele benadering in de sociologie; het inzicht dat verandering moeilijk is en bepaald wordt door 'path dependency' (vgl. Pierson, 1994). Daar waar verandering wél plaatsvindt is een breekijzer nodig – crisis. Crisis dwingt beleidsmakers tot een snelle reactie en crisis vermindert de legitimiteit van bestaand beleid. Dit gezamenlijk – zo stelt de 'crisishervormingsthese' (Resodihardjo, 2006, 2) – stelt beleidsmakers of 'policy entrepreneurs' in staat om beleidsverandering door te voeren

Managing 'mixedness': Understanding the effects of public sector reform in human service organisations

Our government is confronted with many unintended effects of policy programs. In order to address these problems, a large number of public sector reforms have been implemented over the past decades. These reforms formed a reaction to implementation problems rather than to problems in relation to policy content: more and more, policy makers seem to have recognised that not so much the provisions that were offered, but the process of policy implementation generated its own effects and was an important source of problems. At times, high expectations existed as concerns the effects of policy sector reforms. Time and again, however, reform outcomes did not live up to expectations. How come? These reforms were mostly aimed at human service provision: the softer sectors of the public sphere in which interaction between citizens (in their role as clients) and the state takes place, as in the field of education, the police, public assistance, health care, etc. Human service provision is of a fundamentally mixed nature: general regulations are applied to individual clients. In day-to-day business, implementation problems are the result of inherent dilemmas in human service provision. We argue that these reforms do not live up to expectations, because they cannot fully cope with the dilemmas that originate from the fundamentally mixed nature of human service provision. In this paper we make a start with combining insights from implementation theory with research on public sector reform. We argue that this link has been missing so far in discussions on public management and public sector reform. The inherent ‘mixedness’ in human service provision needs to be acknowledged in order to better understand the effects of public sector reform in organisations that provide ‘human services’ . This paper is structured as follows. First, we build an argument as to why human service organisations have a inherent ‘mixed’ nature. We discuss three levels on which this ‘mixedness’ is observable: on the level of the organisational environment, the level of the organisational structure and on the level of individual service provision. Second, we briefly discuss the rise and characteristics of reform trajectories in the Dutch public sector. We link the ideas and features of these reform strategies to the unique nature of human service provision in order to explain why these kinds of reform do not result in their expected outcomes.Session 4: Public Managemen

The rise of new knowledge types and their trailblazers, and the management of value chains

In this article, the authors argue that there is no such thing as the knowledge society. Like many others authors, they claim that the fundamental transformations of our time can be typified as the end of the national ‘industrial society’ and the move towards some kind of global society dominated by the production and use of knowledge. They argue, however, that these transformations not necessarily produce a convergence of national and regional socio-economic structures. In industrial society two types of knowledge were dominant: ‘technical knowledge’ and ‘social knowledge’. In our time, the growing diverseness of individual and group identities produced by reflexivisation, globalisation and the advancement of information technologies calls for the development and application of a new type of knowledge: ‘cultural knowledge’. They analyse the consequences of the increased significance of cultural knowledge in the economic sphere in terms of the division of labour, and subsequently conceptualise three different types of knowledge societies: ‘the techno-cultural’, ‘the socio-cultural’ and the ‘socio-technical knowledge society’. Finally, they will portray three ‘categories’ of trailblazers of the knowledge societies, new professionals that perform ‘meta business functions’. These trailblazers directly or indirectly create new value chains by linking or destroying existing ones, and breaking up others in to pieces in order to create new combinations. These professionals, in other words, actively manage value chains

Application of FTA and the perceived impact on employment policies: the case of nanotechnology in the Netherlands, Germany and Portugal

In this paper we will analyse the usage of FTA to support decision-making in employment policy relate to specific occupational groups. The examples can be better understood if one focus on the nanotechnology and its implications on some sectors (clothing, bio-medical engineering, micro-electronics). When this is done will be clear which occupations will engage a restructuring process (engineers, specialised technicians, qualified machine operators, quality controllers) and what policies are being designed to cope with it. This means toward which extend social partners have driven specific policies on these issues (focused in their sectors)