"Reinventing" in the Public Sector: The Critical Role of Value Restructuring

Abstract

INTRODUCION The interesting question is no longer: Can or will the public sector change? Clearly it is changing in more fundamental ways than at any time in the last half century. Lan and Rosenbloom (1992) speculate that we are in the middle of a half-century cycle of change that has occurred since the country's founding with major administrative shifts occurring in the 1830s with the Jacksonians, the 1880s with the progressives, the 1930s with the New Dealers, and now in the 1990s with the and quality management movements. Agreement about an unusual amount and scope of change is widespread (Ingraham and Romzek, 1994; Levin and Sanger, 1994; Gore, 1993). Thus the interesting questions have become (1) How much will the public sector change? and (2) How can that change be best managed to provide a better end state? While both are important questions, this article examines the second. An implicit assumption in this article is that organization and systems change can be managed to some degree. Not all people would agree. Greek tragedies are littered with protagonists who tamper with fate and are crushed by it. Modern day science is occasionally reminded by Mother Nature that small improvements for man in the short run can lead to long-term disasters in everything from fossil fuels to the control of great rivers through levee systems. While this article does not adopt this fatalistic perspective, it is humbled enough by it to assert that planned or intentional change is only half the equation and that natural environmental and systems forces are the other half. This article will begin by briefly examining the nature of organizational change in order to adopt a working definition of the term reinvention which has gained such currency but is loosely used. Also, a brief discussion of values will identify the types of values which will be addressed in this article--changeable organizational values (not non-changeable organizational values, higher-level social/Constitutional values or lower-level personal/professional values). Next, five elements necessary for a successful organizational change/reinvention process will be discussed. The focal point of the article is one of those five necessary elements: the critical role of fundamental values restructuring. It will be asserted that changes in organizational values have a powerful effect on organizational effectiveness and are critical to the reinventing process. Deep understanding of past values (such as by comparing stated values with the actual values embedded in the informal organization) is hard work but is critical for consensus building necessary to adopt and align with new values. The National Performance Review (NPR) will be the example used in the section on reexamination of specific values. THREE LEVELS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE A leading expert on organizational change, Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Kanter et al., 1993:14-17) points out that it is highly complex and occurs at multiple levels. First, organizational change occurs at the macroevolutionary level in which broad environmental forces affect entire industries. These cycles are often long but the shift from one cycle to the next may appear abrupt when wholesale adoption of new-style practices takes hold. Thomas Kuhn (1962) noted that scientific revolutions occur when anomalies are too numerous and can no longer be supported by past theories. He noted that new theories arise, are generally disputed and disdained at first but then eventually win acceptance because they explain what was inadequately explained in the past. In organizational terms, innumerable factors shift over time and organizational practices slowly change to adjust to new realities. The new practices are at first disdained but are adopted over time. This cycle equates to Lan and Rosenbloom's (1993) fifty-year cycle. Second, microevolutionary change occurs as a part of the organizational life cycle. …

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