Abstract
It is an occupational hazard in the study of organizations that we tend to view them as static arrangements, as though what is observed and reported today tells us all we need to know about them. But organizations are dynamic rather than static phenomena, being constantly affected by adjustments to meet the effects of fading past arrangements or approaching new arrangements. Simple “snapshots” taken at a particular moment in history are never likely to reveal all the relevant nuances. This article comments on this problem as it affects non-departmental public bodies often described loosely as “agencies”, by (a) drawing attention to some relevant theoretical contributions to the political science and organization theory literature, and (b) giving some examples of changes in the style of agency formation and operation over the years, mostly drawn from the Australian public sector.
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Notes
“Agency” is a contested term, with broad and narrow meanings. It is used here, in the more restricted sense, as a class name for “non-departmental public bodies/NDPBs”), referring to all those public organizations which are not formally part of mainstream government departments or local governments. Another term sometimes used with similar intent is “quango”. But it is important to note that, in the broader usage, “agency” also covers departments (see also note 10). It is the narrower sense of the word “agency” that has given rise to the process term “agencification” as used in much debate about the suggested rising use of NDPBs in the new public management (NPM) period of the late 20th century, as discussed in Wettenhall 2005b. On the classification of administrative bodies generally, see the Symposium on “Organizations in Public Management” in Public Organization Review, vol.3, issue 3 (Thynne and Wettenhall 2003).
“Agencification” has been used in a quite different sense by Farazmand (2002: 142). In this sense, it relates to subsidiarity in the rising globalization of the economic environment. In critical perspective, it dramatizes not only the increasing dependence of third world countries on the new structures of global capital but also the reduction of nation states everywhere, their administrations, and their own private sectors as they transform into “subservient agents of globalizing corporate capitalist elites”.
As part of his “pendulum” explanation, Flinders (2004: 885–886) notes that opposition parties frequently attack governments for creating agencies and commit themselves to abolishing them, only to maintain them and create new ones when they come to office themselves. On the same phenomenon in Australia, see Wettenhall 1988: 195–196, 2005a: 91.
On the importance of the language we use, Weick adds (p.44):
Whenever people talk about organizations they are tempted to use lots of nouns, but these seem to impose a spurious stability on the settings being described. In the interest of better organizational understanding we should urge people to stamp out nouns. If students of organization become stingy in their use of nouns, generous in their use of verbs, and extravagant in their use of gerunds, then more attention would be paid to process and we’d learn about how to see it and manage it.
The idea of process involves impermanence. The image of organizations that we prefer is one which argues that organizations keep falling apart and that they require chronic rebuilding... The fact that this unfolding is problematic, must be engineered, and can be bungled needs to be kept uppermost in organizational theorizing.
The work of Paul Nutt and his associates is, however, also worth noting. In one major thinkpiece, Nutt (2004) identified several organizational states relating to propensity to change (routinised, protected, professional, buffeted, proactive), and explored the sets of circumstances which lead organizations towards resistance to change, ability to cope with externally imposed change, and even capacity to provoke change from within. Whether leaders of organizations are more likely to promote change from within in times of cyclical general administrative reform activity is not clear.
On the Australian public enterprise experience generally, see Wettenhall 1983, 1987, 1990, 1996b, 2006b. Across the nation, agencies were so prevalent that for much of this history around 75 per cent of the total (states and Commonwealth) public sector workforce was employed outside the several public services.
For some case studies, see Collyer et al. 2001.
Also known as “statutory corporation” if corporatized, that is, given the legal status of a body corporate or corporation sole, and now as “statutory agency” if staffed under the provisions of the Commonwealth’s Public Service Act. This category has not so far appeared in the other Australian jurisdictions.
There are, however, fairly numerous examples of structures which operate on the fringes of departments and have more autonomy than regular branches or divisions of departments, and yet have less than full statutory authority or company status. Some of them have been called “non-statutory bodies”, and they may eventually become statutory authorities. They are reminiscent of what Flinders (2004: 893) describes as the area of “non-statutory ‘soft-law’ governance” in Britain.
In Victoria, which had thousands of agencies, some of them very big and strong, the inquiry showed that a single individual with strong views could be influential in these matters: headed by Sir Henry Bland (1974), it attacked that state’s use of agencies on the grounds that they made the machinery of government very disorderly and were insufficiently accountable, and urged a full return to ministerial departments. There was some movement in that direction, but a critical political scientist argued seriously that autonomy from the formal state apparatus produced a democratic virtue of a different kind: each agency faced its own client group in a fairly direct manner (with that group often represented on its board) and this facilitated a greater degree of public participation in management than the ministerial/departmental system could provide (Holmes 1976: 40–43).
The first group came under the Financial Management and Accountability (FMA) Act, the second under the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies (CAC) Act. For the purposes of the FMA Act departments (ministerial and parliamentary) are also classified as agencies, as are the few executive agencies created after 1999.
Whether this “Uhrig” mood has extended to the public sectors of the Australian sub-national jurisdictions is an interesting question that deserves further research; at the point of this writing, it is also unclear whether it will carry over into the actions of the new Rudd Government in the Commonwealth. It will be obvious that none of the developments so far summarized supports the view expressed by some “agencificationists” that Australia exhibited a significant rise in the number of agencies through the NPM period: see discussion in Wettenhall 2005b.
This is a problem of serious on-going concern (Wettenhall 2006a), and reflects Ian Thynne’s recent observation (2006: 173) that the field of statutory bodies can usefully be divided into those that are executive agents of government and those that need to be distanced from it because they are checks on it in one way or another.
Much of the relevant discussion in the literature relates to agencies with commercial functions. There is a tendency in agencification studies to ignore such bodies. However, they share many of the characteristics of agencies with non-commercial functions, and they present many similar relationship problems and issues.
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Wettenhall, R., Aulich, C. The Public Sector’s Use of Agencies: A Dynamic Rather than Static Scene. Public Organ Rev 9, 101–118 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-009-0072-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-009-0072-0