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This research report presents the results of an international mail survey on the implementation strategies of innovative and modernizing public organizations in Germany, Great Britain and the U.S. The aim of the survey was to discover country-specific differences in the implementation of administrative modernization in various areas of modernization.
The survey was undertaken in 1996 among former quality award participants of German, British and American national quality awards. The data collected include organizational level responses from 400 different well-performing public organizations. A first data analysis shows that British public organizations are the most managerialist ones, American public organizations take a medium position and German public organizations are behind in most modernization areas. For most modernization strategies, the Anglo-American hypothesis proved to be a valid assumption, which means that British and American implementation strategies are more similiar than German and American strategies of administrative modernization.
The study starts with an extensive discussion various theoretical and methodological issues in the context of comparative 'New Public Management'. The following chapter is devoted to empirical issues involved with the use of quality awards as a source of empirical data. In accordance with the structure of this study, a two-level comparative analysis, the study proceeds to analysize contextual macro-level variables before it jumps into the empirical subgroup analysis of the survey data on modernization strategies. Last, but not least, the study concludes with hypothesis testing and by producing some tentative qualitative and quantitative country-specific profiles of administrative modernization.
The research report is written in English. A modified German version of this research report will be published in early 1998 in the series 'die innovative Verwaltung' by Raabe-Verlag, Stuttgart et al.
Here, it will be argued that administrative modernization in the sense of the NPM is a global process but local in implementation. This amounts to the hypothesis that administrative modernization is 'culture and institution bound'. Tue institutional contingency approach taken in this study reflects the need to examine the nature of the multiple environmental conditions that structure how public organizations implement 'administrative modernization '. An environmental contingency model of administrative modernization strategies allows to reason on the NPM from "outside to inside" (Koiman and van Vliet, 1993:59) and to link two rather isolated concepts to each other: the governance concept with an interactive perspective on governing and the NPM concept with an orientation on the internal functioning of public organzations.