Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

56 Public Management and Administration
senior positions. The device of a Senior Executive Service (SES) has become
a commonplace since the late 1970s in the US. The SES concept aimed at
developing a pool of senior managers who can be transferred readily between
positions and departments, who are trained for senior management, and who
can develop an SES identity rather than a departmental one. Greater emphasis
is now placed on policy advising, general management and professional skills
rather than experience gained from specific duties. The aim is to improve overall
efficiency by improving the service’s management capability. At all levels,
personnel changes have improved flexibility. It is now easier to re-deploy or
even sack staff. Inefficient staff can now be dismissed quite quickly, with
protection against arbitrary or politically motivated dismissal.
Flexibility in organization
One aspect of organizational flexibility is disaggregation, which means splitting
large departments into different parts by setting up agencies to deliver services
for a small policy department. This really starts in the UK, with the Next Steps
initiative of the Thatcher government in 1988. The basic model specified in the
report was to set up a separate agency responsible for the delivery of services
which it does on a quasi-contractual basis with the relevant policy department.
To some extent this is not new; the practice of dividing large departments into
smaller segments was accepted in a number of countries such as the United
Kingdom, New Zealand and the Netherlands and has been established in the
Scandinavian countries for decades (Peters, 1996, p. 31). Once such delivery
agencies are operating under explicit contracts there is no particular reason why
they should be in the public sector at all or for its staff to be public servants.
However, despite appearing in Hood’s list, disaggregation is not required
by the public management reform process. In other countries, as Holmes and
Shand argue, ‘such organizations have been established on a case-by-case basis
reflecting some focus on disentangling service provision, funding and regulation’
(1995, p. 569). Given the overall policy goal of flexibility and allowing
managers to design their own organization, within limits, the requirement for
Next Steps agencies in the UK goes against this. Holmes and Shand are critical
of the UK structural reforms, arguing there needs to be a system-wide assessment
of the policies themselves and whether they are achieving their goals.
Structural changes, ‘such as imposing service-delivery agencies separate from
policy departments, or even the compulsory tendering of local government
services, do not do this by themselves’ (1995, p. 566).
A shift to greater competition
Introducing competition is a feature of public management. It is argued by proponents
that if services are ‘contestable’ they should be put out to tender. The