Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

194 Public Management and Administration
There are, then, several points relating to personnel and career structures; there
will be less need for base-grade staff, greater capability of lower-level staff,
fewer middle managers and, perhaps, greater scope for higher-level staff. As a
result of these changes, there are flow-on effects for the career structures of
public servants. There will be fewer base-grade staff required and more lateral
recruitment of those with experience. Secondary effects include ‘modifications
to supervisory roles, transformation of hierarchical relations, and, at a deep
cultural level, modernization of the nature of authority structures and systems’
(Fountain, 1999, p. 139). The workers will be quite different as Nye argues
(1999, pp. 9–10):
New information technologies are re-organizing work. Speed, agility, and customization
are the best ways to produce value in the consumer marketplace. Large bureaucratic pyramids
turn out to be a less effective way to organize such work than are networks within
and between firms. The knowledge workers who staff network organizations see themselves
neither as labour nor capital. To earn their loyalties, both companies and governments
must appeal to them in new ways. They want government to have the convenience
and flexibility of the marketplace.
These will mean that knowledge workers are more likely to take advantage of
flexible arrangements, as consultants, contractors, and to earn high salaries
without necessarily being career public servants.
The ‘office’ in the Weberian sense also changes. With remote-access technology
there is no necessity for staff to proceed to a central point to avail themselves
of its equipment. Staff may just as effectively work from home, and staff
of welfare agencies who carry out, for instance, home visits need not be out of
contact. Part-time work is facilitated by communications technology. Already,
virtual teams working across disparate locations and home-based working are
well established in some governments. There can be a ‘logical office’ or a ‘virtual
corporation’ rather than an actual one in which location in different cities
or even countries becomes irrelevant to the work carried out (Bellamy and
Taylor, 1998, p. 36). This is not universally welcome as out-workers may have
difficulties in operating logical offices due to dislocation, and miss out on
socialization with co-workers or the vital office politics. However, such
changes are already being implemented in government organizations.
The bureaucratic organization may change dramatically as the result of
e-government. What remains will still be a bureaucracy but one that is quite
different. As Fountain argues (1999, p. 146):
It is certain that a solid core of hierarchy and functional specialization will remain in
information-based organizations. But the control apparatus that required multiple layers
in the chain of command has been greatly simplified, with gains in accountability, through
information technology. With information systems that render employee behaviour largely
transparent, hierarchical authority is relieved of the task of physically observing employees.
In a transparent system shirking is obvious, as is greater output. Hierarchical authority
takes on the more important task of direction setting in turbulent environments,