Explaining Autonomy in Public Agencies: The Case of Hong Kong

Abstract

Questions about organizational autonomy have been prominent in recent public administration reform discourse and, accordingly, have become of increased interest to public administration researchers (Verhoest et al. 2004a). As well as recent developments and debates, such as discussion about the benefits of New Public Management (NPM) style ‘autonomization’ and ‘agencification’,² there has been a long-standing focus within public administration on the effects of organizational form on effectiveness, notably in the voluminous literature on ‘public corporations’ and ‘statutory bodies’, which are designed to give them some degree of legal and operational autonomy (Scott and Thynne 2006). Our interest here is in explaining variation in the autonomy of organizations measured in terms of the perceptions of their senior management. We base our argument on a survey conducted in Hong Kong in 2007 of the perceptions of the chief executives of public agencies and the autonomy they exercised.³