Topic 1: Global Reforms and Transformation: Dynamics and Outcomes

The dynamics of administrative reforms of the last 25 years that have characterized major changes in
the governance and administration of the Global Administrative Reforms and Transformation & 361
public sector around the world have had many dimensions and produced significant transformation in
the ways systems of government and public administration have traditionally worked for a long time.

This brief section addresses four components of this global trend of big turns (my own term, see
Farazmand, forthcoming):

First is the phenomenon of globalization of corporate capitalism;

The second relates to the sweeping privatization of the state and public administration and other global
administrative reforms in that line;

Third is the massive transformation, or rather, re-transformation of governance and public

administration in both theory and practice.

Fourth is the trend of disappointment and a turn away from these transformations, with still a search for
new models as well as a return back to the good old ones in governance and administration

Topic 2: Globalization and Global Reforms

The 20th century was a witness to several trends of administrative reform around the world.

First came the big structural reforms of the post-World War II on nation-building followed by institution-
building in the 1960s, both motivated by the necessity of the time — postcolonialism and national
independence movements — and structural capacity-building for governance and administration in a
new world characterized by Cold War dynamics.

The capitalist world led by the United States and Europe launched the following:

 massive programs of aids,

 technical assistance programs,
 and projects that were intended to deter the appeals of socialism
 and the growing global power of the USSR,
 to westernize the third world countries,
 and to maintain culturally and institutionally similar, or replica of, capitalist models of
government
 and administration with the private sector playing a key or dominant role.

The postwar nation-building and institution-building

 coincided with the global quest of multinational corporations

 Now mainly controlled and dominated by the United State
 To enter into financial agreements with the states through which cheap labor and resources could
be secured along with the state-led market opening to international or foreign imports.

As a consequence, nationalization became a key policy tool in developing countries with a massive
growth of public enterprise management, as was the growth of public enterprise management in
the advanced countries for at least two centuries.

nationalization and public enterprise management gained momentum and grew dramatically during
the 1960s and even the 1970s.

Fundamental role of Governments and public management in the following:

 economic growth
 infrastructure development
 national development
 national income distribution
 redistribution of national wealth.

The state had become a moderator of inequality; so-called welfare state became a powerful institution
of class and income gap moderation.

The Western quest for globalization of corporate capitalism to checked and restrained by global
socialism and the USSR

In West accompanied, they decline and the stagnation of capitalism and continuous rise in
expenditures on arms race. on the one hand, and the growing pressures inwards — for higher wages
and participation in management, emerging power of the women workforce, and unions

New technologies aided them to move faster, and to enter into joint ventures with former enemies,
such as China and later the USSR.

The fall of the USSR gave a golden opportunity to the global corporate capitalist elites to dismantle
the welfare Global Administrative Reforms and Transformation & 363 state, to turn back the
decades of achievements in administrative and social reforms on labor and environmental
regulations, to keep the working class and average people quiet at home, to move out and
outsource jobs to cheap places with little or no regulations, and to exploit new markets in former
socialist countries.

‘‘one market under God’’ (Frank, 2000) -The idea that every one must fend for himself or herself in
the new world.

The ideological underpinning that market is superior to all other forms of social and economic
organization (Lindblom, 2001)

Advancement in technological innovations, almost overnight, also added rapid pace to these
changes, and transformation began to take place, some naturally and others by design.
Globalization has been the transcending force that recognizes no national boundaries, no space, no
time, and no limit in its process of action.

Globalization is a process ‘‘through which worldwide transcendence and integration are taking
place’’ (Farazmand, 1999a, 2004)

The fundamental points of relevance to administrative reform are several, the most important of
which is a globally implemented comprehensive set of reforms that would:

(1) facilitate the process of change and continuity in world capitalism toward a more cohesive and
well-coordinated global organization of corporate capitalism;

(2) shrink the size and reduce the functions of the state and governments worldwide, whereas at the
same time, expand the role, functions, and scope of activities of the business–private sector
dominated by the corporate organizational arrangements;

(3) position the societies or countries for favorable operations of the global corporate capitalist
systems by deregulations of environment, relaxation of labor laws, and deregulation of workplaces;

(4) dismantle the welfare administrative state and replace it with a corporate welfare state that
supports and promotes, both politically and financially, the corporate sector;

(5) establish a system of global corporate dependency through ‘‘agencification’’ of national

economies and promotion of the so-called subsidiarity concept through outsourcing and contracting
out functions around the world; and finally,

(6) establish a global corporate hegemony with concentrated global power centered in the West,
especially the United States and Western Europe, with Japan as a key ally. Yet, interglobalization,
rivalry, and competition are also developing via Western Europe, Japan, and now China which also
has entered this new era of capitalist globalization

The close correlation has already been established between globalization and its demands for
sweeping structural reforms around the world (see Farazmand, 2002b,d; Korten, 2001; Mander &
Goldsmith, 1996 for more details).

Sweeping privatization has functioned as an instrument of implementing the goals of global

corporate capitalism.

Topic 3: Sweeping Privatization

sweeping privatization and contracting out have been the most important and structurally
comprehensive administrative reforms that have been carried out worldwide.

Privatization reforms have been in at least three forms: tactical, pragmatic, and systemic.
Tactical privatization and contracting out is not a new idea, and in fact it has been used by almost all
governments worldwide, from local to national levels for thousands of years. It is a way of getting
things done through other private or nonprofit organizations.

Pragmatic privatization is applied to areas in which governments decide where and what areas to
privatize on pragmatic grounds and for the reasons of efficiency, effectiveness, and economy, as well
as for matters of priorities in policy and performance.

Pragmatic privatization is applied to areas in which governments decide where and what areas to
privatize on pragmatic grounds and for the reasons of efficiency, effectiveness, and economy, as well
as for matters of priorities in policy and performance.

All these together with other reform served as an intellectual arm of corporate globalization;
together, they serve as a driving engine of globalization of corporate culture.

Two fundamental forces of change: one internal and the other external.

Internally, the initial policy design of the Reagan and Thatcher regimes in the United States and the
Great Britain set the whole motion of massive privatization in the early 1980s, because Reagan and
Thatcher are the key governmental instruments of initiating and implementing by design the
privatization policies to achieve the goals of the globalizing corporate power elites.

Foreign aid and other economic and technological exports accompanied the new conditions of
structural reforms.

External forces to reform were also reinforced by a host of other international and globalizing
institutions such as the United Nations and its strategic organizational entities, namely, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and the World Trade Organization (WTO),
and others that have systematically pushed for fundamental structural reforms of the public sector
with privatization and devolution as a key condition for technical assistance and financial aid.

In 1980s were structural adjustment programs (SAPs) supplemented by the words good governance
and public–private partnerships of the 1990s that have entered the new millennium.

Today, a true transformation has taken place in governance, administration, and public
management.