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Post Bureaucracy and the Politics

Better Essays

Post bureaucracy and the politics of forgetting
The management of change at the BBC,
1991-2002
Martin Harris
University of Essex, Colchester, UK, and
Victoria Wegg-Prosser
Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the imputed “fall” and subsequent
“reinvention” of the BBC during the 1990s, relating a managerialist “politics of forgetting” to the broader ideological narratives of “the post bureaucratic turn”.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, combining case study analysis with long-term historical perspectives on organisational change.
Findings – The paper shows the ways in which public sector professionals …show more content…

Some scholars working in the
Foucauldian tradition of organisational analysis have argued that market-oriented policies and managerial discourses may act to “capture” and fix the ways in which the world is seen by public sector professionals (for a full review see Trowler, 2001;
Doolin, 2002). But there is now a very substantial body of work which shows the ways in which these discourses have been contested and “displaced” by public sector professionals (Kirkpatrick and Lucio, 1995; Kitchener, 2000; Trowler, 2001; Doolin,
2002; Farrell and Morris, 2003; Kirkpatrick et al., 2005). A recurrent theme in these critiques is that the new forms reflect not the “end” of bureaucracy but a complex, and often highly unstable, bifurcation of the bureaucratic form which devolves operational responsibility whilst attempting to extend the controls exercised by senior management (Farrel and Morris, 2003, p. 134). A growing number of scholars have argued that the “epochalism” promulgated by the anti-bureaucratic turn has produced a highly restricted, caricatured and an historical view which detaches analysis from the relevant organisational contexts, interests and social choices (Reed
and

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