Abstract
This chapter assesses the practical opportunities that are available to reformers to better calibrate budget flexibility and control. It articulates the role of ‘rule variability’ as the institutionalized capacity to vary the way rules are applied within basic rule sets and explores this approach in the evolving context of the regulatory relationship between central finance agencies and spending departments. The chapter examines two conventional role types for the central finance agency (‘command-and-control’ and ‘facilitator’) and two quite radical role types (‘sanctioned rule-breaking’ and earned autonomy as a form of ‘responsive regulation’). The chapter appraises each role type in terms of its capacity to optimize flexibility and speculates on the potential for a distinct ‘rule variability’ approach to budget flexibility.
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Notes
- 1.
That is, formalization (the reliance on rules and procedures), specialization (the delineation of functions that require expertise), standardization (the completion of work activities in a consistent manner) and hierarchy (the vertical differentiation of decision-making authority). A similar observation could be made of large private sector organizations, regardless of their for-profit or not-for-profit status.
- 2.
This is salient in two respects. First, arguably this observation was the key revelation residing in Max Weber’s premonition of the ‘rationalization’ or ‘iron cage’ of social life (Weber 1946). Second, were bureaucracy to be likened to a type of ‘genetic coding’ that resides in large-scale organizational behavior, it should not escape our attention that even within respected contingency-based approaches to organizational design, ‘bureaucracy’ serves as the instructional basis for the range of organizational types (see, by way of example, Mintzberg 1998).
- 3.
Tempered, of course, by the role of reputational risk for Wikipedia contributors, that is, that the need for rule-breaking must be proposed and justified in ways that are acceptable to other contributors within the Wikipedia community. This too has its equivalence in traditional public bureaucratic structures, especially the way public service ‘professionalism’ socializes officials and creates expectations about how they are to behave in their roles.
- 4.
In practice, of course, many regulatees are not individuals but rather organizations, especially corporations. As a result, and while acknowledging that individual motivations are mediated by more complex factors such as structure, culture, and prior socialization processes, responsive regulation is commonly applied to organizations as well as individuals.
- 5.
As noted earlier, this has parallels with the notion of ‘negotiated discretion’ in which the CFA’s relationship with spending departments is contingent on a range of relational characteristics (reputation and competency) and issue salience (nature and priority of policy and financial matters) (Thain and Wright 1995: Chap. 10).
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Di Francesco, M., Alford, J. (2016). Calibrating Budget Flexibility and Control: A New Role for Rule Variability. In: Balancing Control and Flexibility in Public Budgeting. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0341-7_6
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