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

Institutional change and corruption of public leaders: A social capital perspective on Indonesia

Incidents of corruption by local public leaders have increased in Indonesia in the era of a decentralized democratic regime, in which regional governments enjoy greater power and autonomy to manage regional resources. Previous research suggests that the shift of formal power from the central government to regional governments resulted in new actors at the local level becoming involved in corruption. Building on ideas from social capital theory, the current study attempts to complement previous work by analyzing the shifts of public leaders’ corruption behavior under the decentralized democratic government. We suggest that besides formal power relations, informal relations are important for initiating and sustaining corruptive transactions, and corruption requires a different social capital base in different institutional settings. The objectives of this paper are (1) to organize current knowledge on institutional change and corruption, (2) to extend current thinking on public leaders’ corruption in Indonesia and beyond, and (3) to suggest a framework for future empirical study. We present an empirical study on the link between institutional change and corruption, based on a unique data set of real corruption cases as they were reported in Indonesian public newspapers. Based on this first exploration—which indicates that indeed the nature of corruption networks in Indonesia has altered since decentralization—the proposed theoretical framework is deemed of value for further empirical investigation