Paradoxes of Modernization: Unintended Consequences of Public Policy Reform

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1 Oxford Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-10 of 55 items for: keywords : Teaching career manorg manpub Paradoxes of Modernization: Unintended Consequences of Public Policy Helen Margetts, Perri 6, and Christopher Hood (eds) Item type: book acprof:oso/ This book explores the unintended and unanticipated effects associated with modernization projects and tackles the key question that they provoke: Why do policy-makers persist in such enterprises in the face of evidence that they tend to fail? The book first discusses what is meant by modernization and unintended consequences, placing public policy reform within more general intellectual and social trends. It presents eight case study modernization projects. Their architects promised faster trains, a more efficient and reactive health service, a more motivated public service, better performing local government, enhanced information for prospective US university students, reduced rates of child malnutrition in developing countries, and a free, open, safe, interconnected cyberspace for people to conduct their social and political life. Each case provides a neat story with a paradox that varies the modernization theme and tackles the question: Why was the project pursued? The conclusion categorizes the cases in terms of their outcome, from success to disappointment, and suggests some strategies for a more balanced version of modernization for current and future policymakers. The Paradox of Performance-Related Pay Systems: Why Do we Keep Adopting Them in the Face of Evidence that they Fail to Motivate? David Marsden acprof:oso/ Page 1 of 7

2 This chapter analyses the case of pay for performance in the British Civil Service since the 1980s, which progressively moved from a 19th-century classified pay system (in which pay rises came either from promotion to a higher grade or from incremental progression on a given grade) to one in which a fifth or more of pay was obtained by discretionary bonuses. It is argued that the intended consequence or perhaps more correctly, anticipated consequence of performance-related pay to improve the motivation of public servants has proved elusive. When a policy is the result of decisions by many actors, it is not clear whose intentions were paramount. In contrast, the unintended or unanticipated consequence was that, although performance appears to have improved in several cases, it did so by other means than motivation. Notably, it came about because of the emergence of processes facilitating convergence between goal setting at the individual and organizational levels. These have supported a renegotiation of performance standards and priorities at the individual level. What if Public Management Actually Works?: The Paradoxical Success of Performance Management in English Local Government George Boyne, Oliver James, Peter John, and Nicolai Petrovsky acprof:oso/ This chapter examines the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) regime in English local government, a scheme introduced in the early 2000s to improve performance across local authorities. A paradox lies in the fact that even though the CPA was a classical performance management system, overall it was a success, whereas most other performance measurement systems have failed or have been replaced quickly by systems of performance review. The scheme worked by improving the information environment for stakeholders, incentivizing poor performers to improve and make a substantive difference to local authority performance overall. This result is surprising, particularly given some contradictory elements of the incentivization under the CPA, such as a context where deprivation beyond local authority control influences public service outcomes and an asymmetric electoral response to performance electoral punishment for low performance, but no corresponding reward for high performance. Yet the system actually Page 2 of 7

3 worked, in spite of a volume of commentary and research on public management reform that says otherwise. Modernization, Balance, and Variety Helen Margetts, Perri 6, and Christopher Hood acprof:oso/ This chapter asks three kinds of questions about the risks of unanticipated and unintended consequences arising from modernizing reforms. How do we understand and classify these risks? How should we best explain these outcomes, when they do arise? And can our explanations suggest anything important of a prescriptive character about how policy-makers might work to contain at least some of these risks? It presents a synthesis of what can be learnt from these case studies that might help to develop answers to these questions. The Drive to Modernize: A World of Surprises? Christopher Hood, Helen Margetts, and Perri 6 acprof:oso/ This chapter begins by presenting the rationale behind the writing of this book. It then discusses the meanings of modern, modernity, modernization, and modernism ; the notion of unintended effects of human action, and the lessons that can we can learn from examining paradoxes of modernization in public services. Page 3 of 7

4 Modernization Dreams and Public Policy Helen Margetts acprof:oso/ This chapter does not attempt to verify the validity of the claims made for modernization, nor to develop the theory of modernization, but rather to discern from them analytically some meaning of the word that may be used to identify characteristics of a modernization reform, characteristics that might prove to be associated with surprise, disappointment, and other unintended or unanticipated consequences. It draws out from the most basic and earliest discussions of the term modernization three possible candidates for the characteristics or pillars of modernization reform: efficiency, integration, and specialization. It then looks at the work of analysts, proponents, and critics of three broad types of modernization: social modernization emerging from societal trends, such as changes in belief and value systems; state-centred modernization, where the state drives social change; and modernization of the state itself, geared at creating a more efficient and productive state. The final section considers whether the three characteristics of modernization (efficiency, integration, and specialization) have survived the analysis and how they might be used to classify a reform as modernizing and be identified as possible sources of paradoxes of modernization discussed in this book. When Forethought and Outturn Part: Types of Unanticipated and Unintended Consequences Perri 6 acprof:oso/ To expect to find a theory to explain the causes of all and only unintended or unanticipated consequences is no more reasonable than hoping for a general theory of misfortunes. Yet something useful of a general character can be achieved by developing clear conceptual Page 4 of 7

5 frameworks of definition, classification, and typology. Such frameworks can enable structured comparison, better measurement, and clearer questions with which to distinguish the different kinds of puzzles for which theories and explanations are required. This chapter offers part of such a general framework. First, it considers some key strands of research of unintended and unanticipated consequences in the social sciences, and identifies some limitations in these bodies of work. Then the key terms of surprise, anticipation, intention, and welcome are examined, that go to make up an initial, coarse-grained typology. This tool is used to consider similarities and differences between the cases examined in other chapters in this volume. The chapter concludes by identifying a key conceptual and theoretical issue for further work in the next generation of research in this field. Ranking US Public Affairs Educational Programmes: Searching for Quality, Finding Equilibrium H. George Frederickson and Edmund C. Stazyk acprof:oso/ Approximately every three years US News and World Report publishes its rankings of master's degree programmes in public affairs. As part of its America's best graduate schools series, the most recent US News rankings of public affairs programmes appeared in Earlier rankings were published in 2004, 2001, 1998, and What were the intentions of those introducing these rankings, what form did the rankings take and what intended or unintended effects did they have? This chapter begins by considering the background, rationale, scope, and methodology of the US News ranking programme, and what those who introduced it intended and anticipated the rankings would do. It then describes a general theory of academic rankings, setting out the book's findings in the context of that theory, and considering those findings in the light of what effects were anticipated or intended by those who introduced the rankings. Page 5 of 7

6 Et in Arcadia Ego: From Techno Utopia to Cybercrime Jeanette Hofmann acprof:oso/ Cybercrime is one of the many unforeseen consequences enabled by the unprecedented extent of freedom the internet offers, shaped by the stress of both the internet developers and the techno-utopian group of early users on autonomy and freedom. This chapter addresses the question of whether such mischief could not have been foreseen in the early stages of internet development by exploring the dominant orientations of two groups who significantly contributed to the understanding of the internet. The first section explores the technological history of the internet, focusing on the engineering community that developed the internet in the 1970s and 1980s and the revolutionary design philosophy that inspired its architecture. The second section describes the ways in which the early users of the internet in the 1990s used the characteristics of the technological network to inspire a utopian vision of the internet, their belief in the internet as an ungovernable and anarchic space, and their response to pending government regulation. The subsequent growth of the internet and the diversification of users and usages were clearly beyond the imagination of both the developers and the early academic users. Both groups argued in a context of conflicting visions. They defended their concept of autonomy against more traditional understandings of organizing and regulating data communication. The third section of the chapter describes cybercrime as an unforeseen, yet increasingly dangerous way of making use of the internet. Happy Surprises?: The Development of the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web Yorick Wilks acprof:oso/ Page 6 of 7

7 This chapter discusses the unintended and unexpected benefits that have arisen from the development of computing technologies and most specifically the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Semantic Web (SW). It starts by setting out what different kinds of unintended consequences have been exemplified in modern computer technology generally; and more specifically, in the development of the internet, the WWW, and the SW. The second section looks at the story of the early days of the internet and the WWW, while the third looks at the SW and its relation to various developments in computer science. The fourth section examines the intentions of Tim Berners-Lee in developing the WWW and the SW, examining the hypothesis that we may have piggy-backing levels of the unintended: first the internet itself, as it has become, may be regarded as unintended through the development of the WWW. If the WWW is itself unintended, there is now a myriad of popular and totally unforeseen consequences piggy-backed upon it, many of them of socially profound and transformative. The good news is that if the WWW as we have it now is, in any way, unintended, should be regarded as a Good Thing. Page 7 of 7