Alexander Kouzmin

Benchmarking and performance measurement in public sectors

Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably “punch‐drunk” with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)‐driven experiences of systems development and failure.

Crisis Decision Making The Centralization Thesis Revisited

This essay reconsiders the well-known thesis that, under conditions of crisis, administrative decision making becomes centralized. It discusses the theoretical and administrative underpinnings of this thesis and focuses on the role of small groups in crisis decision making, central government intervention in crisis situations, and crisis government doctrines. Using findings from recent comparative case research in crisis management, alternative patterns of governmental response to crises are outlined. These include formal and informal decentralization, non-decision making, and paralysis. This article concludes with a set of hypotheses that outline the conditions for the emergence of alternative structural patterns in coping with crises and a call for more contingent and reflective thinking about crisis management issues.

Managerialism ‐ something old, something borrowed, little new

Of many managerialist panaceas, the most prevalent one today is the assertion that private sector practices will solve the public sector’s “self‐evident” inadequate performance. This managerialist view assumes hegemonic proportions in Anglo‐Saxon public sectors and largely goes unchallenged, notwithstanding serious reservations about the superiority of private managerial prerogatives one would draw from organization theory or, even, mainstream liberal economics, which is largely silent about the role of management and control in economic behaviour. It is a particular brand of economics that underscores the linking of public agency efficiency to managerial ability and performance. In neo‐institutional economics, “rent‐seeking” behaviour is attributed to civil servants, rather than corporate entrepreneurs, and from that ideological perspective of bureaucratic pathology flows a whole series of untested propositions culminating in the commercializing, corporatizing and privatizing rationales, now uncritically accepted by most bureaucrats themselves to be axiomatically true. The economistic underpinning of managerialism and its “New Functionalism” in organizational design hardly addresses the significant structural, cultural and behavioural changes necessary to bring about the rhetorical benefits said to flow from the application of managerialist solutions. Managerialism expects public managers to improve efficiency, reduce burdensome costs and enhance organizational performance in a competitive stakeholding situation. Managerialism largely ignores the administrative‐political environment which rewards risk‐averse behaviour which, in turn, militates against the very behavioural and organizational reforms managerialists putatively seek for the public sector.

The emerging patterns of power in corporate governance – Back to the future in improving corporate decision making

Social institutions are experiencing change in their patterns of power as they are re‐aligned to an increasingly complex world and the onset of the new information economy. Attention has been drawn particularly to the need to improve corporate governance as a means to enhance corporate accountability and improve corporate performance. This paper consequently explores the distribution of corporate power and the processes that can foster higher quality decision making and actions by boards. The paper investigates the fundamental difference between the exercise of leadership, management and political power within an organization and, particularly, the responsibility and power relationships between an organization and its board. The authors assert that if the patterns of power are well understood then some things can be said about the patterns that are likely to emerge and what structures might be more effective than others. The paper concludes by arguing that the manner and style of corporate governance could benefit from some further refinement.

The Commercialization of the Australian Public Sector: Competence, Elitism or Default in Management Education?

Briefly outlines recent developments in the commercialization of the public sector at the federal level of government in Australia. After six years of planning and implementation, debate continues over whether the dramatic changes in practice are achieving the proclaimed ends of enhanced efficiency, economy and effectiveness or are merely subverting equity and the once considered essential traditions associated with Westminster‐derived public administration. The theoretical, ideological and epistemological problems associated with economics being the driving intellectual academic discipline for commercialization are confronted. Within the context of full privatization in Australia yet to occur, organizational development, change and management education and training associated with the commercialization of public agencies are addressed in detail. Discusses a human resource development agenda and a management educator′s cognitive map for facilitating change processes associated with widespread drives for c...

Leadership Renewal: Towards the Philosophy of Wisdom

Introduction Leadership belongs more to moral philosophy than to scientific theory. If one analyses Plato’s central problems of the character of a well-governed city; the formation of its leaders; the pedagogy of their sensibility and vision; and the disposition of Callicles and Thrasymachus, it becomes evident that moral values are the central theme. Burns’ (1978) comprehensive study of leadership establishes that there is a difference in kind between the exercise of power and the exercise of leadership and that the difference is a moral one. Burns (1978: 46) concludes that ‘the ultimate test of moral leadership is its capacity to transcend the claims of the multiplicity of everyday needs and expectations, to respond to the higher levels of moral development and to relate leadership behaviour — its roles, choices, style and commitments, to a set of reasoned, relatively explicit, conscious values’. As early as 386 bc, Plato initiated one of the first leadership training centres in the world, an institute he called the Academy, in an attempt to create a new type of statesman, a person who would be able to withstand the unwieldy pressures of office. In the Apology, Plato (1956b) details the origins of Socrates’ humility in defence against the charge of impiety and corruption of the youth of Athens at his trial in 399 bc. In response to this puzzle, at the declaration of the Delphi oracle that none is wiser than he, Socrates replies that he visited a wise man and that after conversing with him, he went away thinking ‘I am wiser than this man: neither of us knows anything that is really worth knowing, but he thinks that he has knowledge when he has not, while I have no knowledge and do not think that I have’ (Plato, 1956b: 36). The Socratic ‘ignorance’ paradox serves as the basis for an understanding of philosophy as the search for wisdom. As a living absolute, the Socratic message is a continual movement of a freeing

Borders in an (In)Visible World: Revisiting Communities, Recognizing Gulags

Duplicity and propaganda constitute much of the emerging discourse on a “borderless” “new world order.” Deconstructing neoliberal propaganda is one issue. Understanding other colluding discourses is another. Postmodern rhetoric has yet to understand its complicity in refusing to acknowledge and critique the totalizing discourse of neoliberalism and there are dangerous currents to be negotiated in the fatuous collapsing of globalized “end of history” posturings with those of “borderless worlds.” This paper explores the implications for public administration of “borderless” identity and community. This exploration questions the privileging of the “borderless” new world order as discourse and practice that eliminates all alternative approaches to public administration, identity and community. Events at the Guantanamo Bay and Christmas Island Gulags demonstrate the purposeful (re)-emergence and persistence of borders. The challenge for public dministration is to escape the illusions and impractical schemes presented by neoliberal interests which benefit from making the visible invisible, borders non-borders, communities non-communities and persons non persons.

Maintaining the rage: from “glass and concrete ceilings” and metaphorical sex changes to psychological audits and renegotiating organizational scripts ‐ Part 2

From a cultural perspective, examines the “glass ceiling”, a putative invisible barrier but one that women experience as a very real impediment when vying for mobility. In the case of ethnic, coloured and aboriginal women, the barrier is more often than not more visible with “concrete‐like” qualities of opaqueness. Argues that traditional images, meanings, expectations, values, assumptions and beliefs embedded in organizations with predominantly male management cultures and psycho‐structures need to be audited and, subsequently, changed. Emphasizes the urgency for cultural change in organizational structures to prevent the further emasculation and marginalization of women and other disfranchised actors in favour of a cultural diversity that accommodates gender, ethnicity and other social differences in action imperative for innovation and globalization. Identifies strategies for obliterating glass and concrete ceilings and achieving gender‐ and ethnic‐based equity in career opportunities.

Inter‐organizational policy processes in disaster management

Discusses the efficiency of disaster management policies and programmes in Australia. Argues that there are long‐standing deficiencies in strategic and operational planning and forecasting approaches. Urges more co‐operation and co‐ordination between the various emergency services. Discusses the development of terrestrial and space technologies which could be used in disaster management.

Designing for cultural diversity in an IT and globalizing milieu

This paper explores the effects of information technology (IT) on the eve of the third millennium, and its ramifications for labour organization, business and culture. IT is conceptualized as a catalyst for a period of seminal change within the global economy. The lack of IT awareness, social diversity and the need to tap the creative synergy of socio‐cultural differences, through the better understanding of IT effects on culture are highlighted. A need for self‐reflection and a critical examination of adopted management models, especially those within embedded ethnocentric contexts of shared beliefs, values and cognitive structures, are also explored. It is argued that organizations need to learn to manage cultural diversity. The need for development of organizational ideologies that build on cognitive structures, culturally sensitized to diversity, is central to a generic strategy for managing increasingly culturally diversified organizations comprising the globalized economy in the third millennium.