Céline Donis

Post-crisis learning in public agencies: what do we learn from both actors and institutions?

ABSTRACT Post-crisis learning is a challenge for public organizations, and especially for agencies which handle health and environmental risks. This article investigates how the Belgian Food Safety Agency settles mechanisms for drawing lessons from crises while ensuring day-to-day routine. The framework by Crozier and Friedberg is used as a guideline to consider both the actors and the system, both strategic games and institutional constraints. The article helps in understanding the institutional logics underpinning how the public organizations learn from societal risk and crisis. Centralization and openness appear to be guiding principles, resulting from the learning games. They also generate tensions that the actors’ games manage by defining new rules for cooperation. Both the practice (through our case study) and the theory (combining actors and institutions) broaden the lens of policy analysis for what policy-making at organizational level concerns.

New Ways of Working: From Smart to Shared Power

This chapter questions the relevance of the concept of smart power in organization studies and, specifically, in the study of new ways of working (NWOW) implementation. NWOW embrace a broad set of organizational practices, ranging from spatial and temporal flexibility to self-management. Beyond such set of (somehow traditional) work practices, the singularity of NWOW seems to lie in its governance epitome, valuing a peculiar philosophy of management, i.e., a more democratic way of managing organizations. The smart power approach could play a key role in the effective implementation of NWOW. However, drawing on existing studies, we report some paradoxes making NWOW a piece of what may be seen as old-fashioned management practices and organizational pattern that, far from constituting a promise for alternative modes of governance, also constitute new attempts to discipline employees. Claiming organizational rules need to be appropriated by actors in order to become effective, this chapter argues a smart power perspective is not relevant at the microlevel, where traditional approaches of power and agency are more complete. While considering innovative NWOW, smart power approach seems well relevant to analyze meso-regulations and, especially, governance issues.