Government revival and public sector employees' agency

Elvira Periac (), Sébastien Gand () and Jean-Claude Sardas ()
Additional contact information
Elvira Periac: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Sébastien Gand: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Jean-Claude Sardas: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: In the Public management debate on a post/beyond New Public Management phase, there has been a stream of research on public sector employees. Our paper investigates the role of public sector employees in the actual "government revival". Strategy as Practice appears as a particularly relevant framework to analyze how the study of the micro activity of public sector employees can enlighten our understanding of the making of the public policy strategy making. Our research question is: how do practitioners, middle managers but also employees without a managerial role, individually and as groups, contribute to strategy-making of public policies? On the basis of an in-depth case study in a public administration in charge of the implementation of environmental public policies, we argue that not only middle managers' agency is crucial to strategy-making but also that of employees. We also propose a complementary understanding of strategic agency as regulated and organized by the group through "areas of discussion". On this basis, we suggest that the way public sector employees operate in a context of government revival might be key to the reconfiguration of public action, and thus to the reconceptualization of public services.

Keywords: Strategy as practice; Agency; Public Management; Environmental policies; Areas of discussion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-07-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://minesparis-psl.hal.science/hal-00969332v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://minesparis-psl.hal.science/hal-00969332v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00969332

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().