Public Administration and The Managerialist Fervour For Values and Ethics: Of Collective Confusion in Control Societies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent managerialist discourse on modernizing, reinventing or reengineering the State has often placed strong emphasis on values and ethics as a preferred means (so-called strategy) for large-scale organizational change (Frederickson & Johnston, 1999; Kettl, 2000). Building on a pragmatist understanding of organizational cultures and identities, managerialism presupposes a fusion between rule-value and action, where individual behaviour can be modulated by a flexible set of norms secreted by spontaneous “leaders.” Hence, from this perspective, proper values should lead to proper behaviour in a context of individual autonomy. Building on a syncretism of critical theory (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2000) and poststructuralism (Foucault, 1975, 2004; Foucault & Deleuze, 1972; Hardt & Negri, 2000), this paper intends to discuss the theoretical relevance of the managerialist perspective on values and ethics for the renewal of public administration and, in the larger scheme of things, the renewal of public governance. Simply stated, the paper asks: Does the current emphasis on ethics and values in public administration, most notably in regards to its claims of individual and organizational empowerment, lead to unintended consequences, such as collective confusion (Rouillard, 2003)? Indeed, we state that the managerialist shift in public administration appears as a symptom of a more global shift from a disciplinary society to a control society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.109 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".