Abstract:
The paper considers empirical data drawn from organizational
change of a large Australian public sector organization in the
context of debate about reform of public sector organizations. It provides
an ethnographic account of new public management that confounds
propositions drawn from literatures both sympathetic and antithetical to
this reform process. Empirically, we find that sedimented bureaucratic
principles and innovative 'enterprising' freedom produce new power
games around contradictory and unresolved dualisms. Neither reform
hopes nor liberal anxieties are supported: instead, we identify continuing
points for pressure in the organizational politics of bureaucratic reform.
