Varying Costs to Change? Institutional Change in the Public Sector

Abstract

Many scholars have argued that social programs are marked by a logic of “increasing returns” that makes change difficult. Yet over the past decades, reformers across industrialized countries have introduced substantial administrative reforms in these services, even as entitlement reform remains politically difficult. This paper explains these shifts by breaking apart the logic of “increasing returns” into three distinct “costs to change”: technical, political, and expectations. Decreases in a particular type of costs produce different logics of institutional change—back end, informal, and front end—that privilege the state, professionals or private, or political actors in distinct ways. I support these claims by reexamining three cases that were considered exemplars of stability but that ultimately had major entitlement reform: health care in the United Kingdom and United States and welfare programs in the United States. I show that even before radical reforms occurred, reformers introduced distinct logics of administrative change that underpinned later changes.

Managerialism Redux?

“…A number of detailed studies have documented such layering and ‘marbling’ in a variety of countries and sectors (e.g., Hyndman et al., ; Kettl, 2015; and Pollitt and Bouckaert, ). Other scholars, not necessarily using the Thelen/Streeck/Mahoney categories, have arrived at very similar vantage points from within different conceptual frameworks (e.g., Andrews, ; Gingrich, ; Lodge and Gill, ; Lynn, ; Ongaro, ; and Pollitt and Bouckaert, ).…”

“…What we have actually witnessed, over the past four decades, is not the successive replacement of one model by another, but rather a complex and unstable process of layering, displacement, drift and the general hybrid co‐existence of different doctrines and styles. The precise mix is often determined by the national, sectoral or local contexts (Gingrich, ; and Pollitt, ). Change is ‘complex and contradictory’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997, pp.99‐103).…”

Does organizational adaptation really matter? How mission change affects the survival of U.S. federal independent agencies, 1933–2011

“…There are at least three reasons why adaptation at the level of individual organizations is unlikely to be effective. First, the process of developing and implementing change always incurs a wide range of transaction costs (Barnett & Carroll, ; Gingrich, ). Change proposals usually generate resistance, which “tend to generate short‐run costs that are high enough that organizational leaders will forego the planned reorganization” (Hannan & Freeman, , p. 931).…”

Varieties of institutional systems: A contextual taxonomy of understudied countries

“…Finally, while national institutions typically change slowly, research shows that institutional change does occur (Gingrich, 2015;Taras, Steel, & Kirkman, 2012;Berry, Guillén, & Hendi, 2014). As such, older typologies can become outdated as the institutional profile of nation-states shifts over time (Hotho, 2014;Hall & Gingerich, 2009).…”