Strategic Management Practice and Participation in the Public Sector: Illusion or Rational Instrumentality in Pluralist Approaches to Employment Relations?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For over two decades now the market-based, managerialist paradigm of public sector governance has emphasised the importance of adopting rational and prescriptive managerial techniques of private sector origin. Greater efficiency, especially, has become a driving organisational objective of public sector performance. To sustain such organisational achievement, supposedly, requires commitment from staff at all levels of the organisation. Thus, managerial techniques, which support organisational pluralism and facilitate full participation, and, in the process, the strengthening of human resource (HR) strategies and employment relations (ER), have been supported by governments through policy and legislative requirements. The introduction of formal management and leadership systems, such as senior executive services, have reinforced this approach. Instrumental to the whole process of change has been a reinstatement of the older managerialist technique of strategic planning (SP) as a pivotal organisational activity directed towards enhanced public sector performance. While such planning may be motivated by direct strategic management (SM) practice, wider influences, particularly those that come from the quality management and service, learning organisations and transformational leadership literatures, have been promoted in this regard, especially in individual performance management systems. This article examines the value of SM practice, especially SP, in the public sector as a rational and instrumental approach towards greater organisational efficiency and enhanced ER. First, it considers some of the literature that proposes how SM action through employee participation may contribute to organisational performance. Second, it uses empirical investigation conducted in the public sectors of Ontario, Canada and New South Wales Australia during the 1990s to consider these issues. Finally, it speculates about the practical value of SM practice as a tool, which, purportedly, facilitates improved ER.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".