Design and organizational change in the public sector

Many countries still do not show clear and strong signs of recovery from the global economic downturn that started in 2008, which is causing a structural lack of resources, particularly affecting the public sector. The economic, demographic, social, and environmental long-term challenges call for deep changes, questioning many of the assumptions that have underpinned public services and posing new challenges for institutions, policy makers, civil servants, and communities. While austerity measures were adopted all over the world, societal challenges are intensifying: youth unemployment, elderly healthcare, immigration, social inclusion, and other wicked problems press public institutions with the contradictory request of delivering new services or restructuring the existing ones, achieving higher effectiveness with fewer resources.

As a few studies have pointed out (Ashworth, Boyne, and Delbridge, 2009; Diefenbach, 2009), the usual solution—cutting budgets and trying to make public organizations more efficient by transferring models and practices from the private sector—is limited. Research on organizational management and social studies has a long tradition of binding the competitiveness of an enterprise to its capability to continuously change its culture by overcoming organizational dogmas and pursuing innovation (Drucker, 1995, 2002; Hamel and Prahalad, 1994; Hamel and Valikangas, 2003). While organizational change theories recognize the complexity of the phenomenon of change within organizations and therefore display a systematic and holistic attitude, the managerial practice is characterized by many models and techniques that seem to be derived from a reductionist way of thinking, thereby producing formulas that can be easily synthesized and turned into slogans and procedures applicable to a variety of situations with minimal adaptation. Even if there has been harsh criticism of the fast turnover of these managerial models and techniques that led analysts to describe many of them as fads, the practice still seems to prosper (Collins, 2003; Miller and Hartwick, 2002).