Understanding ’Joining-up-Government’ Reforms in Anglo-Saxon Nations from a Cultural Point of View

Abstract

This paper looks at how culture affects the reform process and how cultural factors play an important role in clarifying administration models. Culture is considered as an important variable that interacts differently from one situation to another and from one place to another, therefore, Anglo-Saxon administrations have experienced several phases and many transformations (public administration, new public administration). Due to many obstacles (economics squeeze, the poor performance), both PA and the NPM have failed to capture the delivery and management of public services in the twenty-first century, which has created momentum for actors to look for efficient public services delivery by creating a more integrated public sector. New public governance (NPG) appeared in the literature as a new model looking towards a more integrated public service, combining several players (private sectors, civil society) working on delivering service in the best possible manner. As a result, Anglo-Saxons countries have proceeded many reforms. The joining-up-government strategy is considered as the latest manifestation of NPG after the negative effects of NPM. Research on Joining up Government (JUG) has a long tradition. It has been used for many years in the field of public administration and was widely welcomed in the mid-1990s in numerous Anglo-Saxon countries as a response to the failure of new public management in the public sector, which was at that time far from being well-coordinated. Consequently, the JUG strategies have been proposed to redress this failure, and to that end, several actors play significant roles in the success of these strategies. But, in return, there is a necessity for a number of cultural arrangements between these players. However, these arrangements are dependent on the dialectic of cultural values that are adopted by those society nations. Geert Hofstede, like many researchers in the cross-culture field, tried to adopt cultural dimensions to explain the differences between the many nations that carry diff erent cultural values. From this standpoint, this paper triesto explain JUG in Anglo-Saxon countries by using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.

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