The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

Part IIPublic Sector Communication, Organizations, Stakeholders, and Employees

Magnus Fredriksson

Introduction

Organizations acting in public sectors come in many varieties. There are units or directorates in national or federal governments, semiautonomous agencies without legal independence, and agencies with legal independence, as well as local bodies (municipalities, counties, and provinces) and corporations contracted to provide public services (Van Thiel, 2012). The compositions of, and therefore the conditions for, these actors and their tasks and responsibilities vary, both between and within countries.

More recently, there have been strong ambitions to reduce these differences and align the workings of organizations in different contexts. In the wake of a neoliberal turn, politicians across countries and sectors—with extensive encouragement from international organizations such as the OECD, the WTO, and a vast number of management consultancies—have made extensive efforts to transform how public sectors are set up, how they are managed, and how they interact with their environments. The motives for change differ, but it has frequently been argued that reforms are necessary to overcome criticisms about inefficiency, inflexibility, and increasing costs and about a decreasing interest among people in finding work in the public sector (Hood, 1991). Accordingly, extensive efforts have been made to replace the classical hierarchical model of regulation by command and control ...