MA Course 2

Organisational Culture and Managerialism

Wow heavy title, but essentially in two parts (in reverse order). Managerialism is the wayin which public sector organisations like ours have been forced to adopt some of the practices and trappings of the private sector - finacial control, the idea of best value, performance indicators and the breaking down of organisations into ever smaller units.

In our case we seem to have gained some of the freedoms and power of a private company whilst retaining much of the baggage of the public sector. We are expected to be fully traded (we get no direct money from council tax, we can only raise money by selling our services. Great except that we aren't allowed to make a profit or carry money from one year to another. Also a real private company is responsible only to it's shareholders and customers (if it wants to stay in business). We have to be responsible to the council tax payers who concerns are generally with getting as much as possible for no cost. Hmmm...

Worse, a private company knows how well it is succeeding by its turnover and how much profit it makes. We have to jump through expensive, time-consuming hoops to show that we are spending money wisely. And we get CPS and Ofsted inspections - and we are one of the few departments that is supposedly fully trading with the commercial sector. I guess that's managerialism at it's worst.

We also looked at various organisational cultures, both the writers that examined them and the types of culture they identified - power cultures, role cultures (silos, that's us) person cultures and task cultures.