Neo-Weberian State Research Articles

MENYINGKAP IMPLEMENTASI DAN DAMPAK MODEL NEO-WEBERIAN STATE DALAM REVOLUSI BIROKRASI INTERNATIONAL

This research uses a literature review (SLR) study to investigate the application of the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) model in global bureaucratic reform, with an emphasis on economic, social and health issues. This research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the implementation of NWS, critically evaluate its success and provide recommendations for developing government governance and community services. This research applies a five-stage approach by Transfield to review the literature on the implementation of the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) over the past few decades. This review combines results from qualitative and quantitative research that has been published between 2021-2024 in various European countries. The results show that the Neo Weberian State (NWS) can increase efficiency in public services and overcome global challenges, despite facing internal obstacles, limited resources, complex regulations, and shortcomings in accountability and transparency. This research emphasizes the importance of adaptation according to context, capacity building, simpler deregulation, and strict supervision to ensure the effectiveness of the Neo Weberian State (NWS). The participation of government, civil society and the private sector is considered very important in creating new and creative public service solutions. This research outlines how the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) model faces broad challenges in carrying out bureaucratic reform. The NWS improves the quality of public services, addresses internal constraints, and emphasizes contextual adaptation, capacity building, modest deregulation, and strict supervision, which are critical to governance and public services. Although it provides a solution for solving problems in the current era of revolution, additional research is still needed to fully understand its impact and design more effective implementation models.

Neo Weberian State: From Practice to Theory and Back to Practice

Neo Weberian State: From Practice to Theory and Back to Practice

The Neo-Weberian State in Italy: Understanding the Influence of Populist Government, EU Administrative Reform Support Policy, and Digitalization

The Neo-Weberian State in Italy: Understanding the Influence of Populist Government, EU Administrative Reform Support Policy, and Digitalization

Building Resilience, Agility, and Trust: The Neo-Weberian State as a Referential Model for Brazilian Public Administration

The paper explores the challenges and potential solutions for enhancing Brazilian public administration through the lens of the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) model. It discusses the historical context of Brazil’s public administration, highlighting the coexistence of different administrative mechanisms and the need for a stable, resilient, and agile bureaucracy to address contemporary societal challenges effectively. The article advocates for a paradigmatic shift toward a more coordinated, inclusive, and socially driven public sector, emphasizing the importance of hierarchical mechanisms and public service ethos in safeguarding democracy and resisting illiberal political agendas. By analyzing the trajectory of public administration reforms in Brazil and comparing them to global challenges, the essay underscores the NWS’s potential to bring legitimacy and effectiveness to state actions, ultimately aiming to restore trust in public administration and strengthen democratic governance in Brazil.

France: Which Prospects of Hybridization for the Neo-Weberian State in the Homeland of the ‘State-in Majesty’?

France: Which Prospects of Hybridization for the Neo-Weberian State in the Homeland of the ‘State-in Majesty’?

Balancing Continuity and Change: Japan’s Pursuit of a ‘Small and Strong’ State Within the Neo-Weberian State Framework

Balancing Continuity and Change: Japan’s Pursuit of a ‘Small and Strong’ State Within the Neo-Weberian State Framework

New public management marketizers versus Neo-Weberian state modernizers? Institutional configurations of social impact bond utilization among 18 OECD countries

ABSTRACT Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), a New Public Management (NPM)-style commissioning model, contain elements of other reform framings, widening their appeal and potential for variation in differing reform contexts. This study implements a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), seeking configurations explaining SIB uptake across 18 OECD countries. The two high-utilization configurations produce an Anglo-American model of NPM marketizers and a European model of Neo-Weberian State (NWS) modernizers, whereas the four low-utilization configurations include exclusively NWS modernizers and maintainers, suggesting SIBs as a fertile case study of public management reform tools adapting and trajectories merging in differing national administrative cultures and contexts.

Canadian Public Sector Reform: Moving Towards a Neo-Weberian State?

Recent turbulence in governing environments has reinvigorated big questions in the field about the efficacy of various public governance approaches. This article examines the applicability of the Neo Weberian State (NWS) approach to the Canadian case. Our analysis reveals that Canada does not currently meet the NWS requirements. Canada’s decentralized federal system and Indigenous governance dynamics challenge the hierarchy essential to the NWS. As a modest reformer, Canada’s public management reform trajectory has not yielded many of the elements stipulated by the NWS. Canada remains characterized by partial and often asymmetrical incrementalism which we argue points to a hybrid, pragmatic, and negotiated (HPN) approach. Looking at Canada through the lens of NWS raises important questions and considerations for the future directions of Canadian public management, but also identifies further opporutnities to sharpen the NWS approach.

Back to Bureaucracy? The Advent of the Neo-Weberian State in Germany

In this contribution, the emergence of the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) is analyzed with regard to the German public administration. Drawing on the concept of a “governance space” which consists of hierarchy, markets and networks, we make a distinction between four empirical manifestations of the of NWS, namely NWS as (1) Come back of the public/re-municipalization; (2) re-hierarchization; (3) de-agencification; (4) de-escalation in performance management. These movements can on the one hand be interpreted as (partial) reversal of NPM approaches and a ‘swinging back of the pendulum’ (see XX & YY, 2019) towards the public and classical Weberian principles (e.g. hierarchy, regulation, institutional re-aggregation). This resulted in a re-strengthening of hierarchy within the overall “governance space” to the detriment of market mechanisms and networks without completely replacing the last two mentioned. As the NPM has not delivered what it promised and does not appear as an appropriate response to more recent challenges connected to crises and wicked problems, a partial “return of the public” and a move away from the economisation logic of NPM have been observed. On the other hand, and connected to this, Post-NPM reversals and managerial “de-escalation” gave way to hybrid models merging NPM and classic Weberian administration. While there are some well-functioning mixtures of NPM and Weberianism, the hybridization of “old” and “neo” elements has also provoked ambivalent and rather negative assessments regarding the actual functioning of NWS in Germany. For reform practices and future administrative modernization, it can be deduced from our analysis that the NWS is only partially suitable as a model for reforms, largely depending on the context of reform and implementation practices.

Navigating Crisis and Democracy: Analyzing Mexico through the Neo-Weberian State and the TODO framework

This study uses the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) and TODO frameworks to examine Mexico’s public sector reforms and current challenges. Analyzing the trajectory of public administration reforms reveals a historical context of mixed logics, weak institutions, and limited capacity, further aggravated by recent democratic backsliding, dismantling, and austerity cuts. Next, based on the TODO framework, emphasizing turbulent environments, oscillating knowledge quality, domino-falling types of interdependence, and opposing solutions, we analyze the case of the migration crisis at the US-Mexico border as a way to exemplify current challenges faced by the Mexican public sector. The analysis exposes shortcomings in crisis management, highlighting political neglect, strained US-Mexico relations, and prolonged uncertainty for asylum seekers. Overall, the study underscores Mexico’s need to enhance systemic resilience governance. Findings contribute to the study of discourse on governance models, emphasizing the importance of adaptive frameworks for crisis management and democratic governance in the Global South.

Hierarchy-oriented Bureaucracy of South Korea : a type of Neo-Weberian State?

This paper explores the evolution and operational dynamics of South Korea’s bureaucracy through the lens of a Neo-Weberian State (NWS) model. It argues that South Korea’s bureaucratic system, deeply rooted in Confucian hierarchical principles, has uniquely adapted to modern administrative challenges and reforms influenced by New Public Management (NPM) ideologies. We trace the historical trajectory from the Confucian meritocracy of the Choson Dynasty through various significant reform periods up to the contemporary handling of the COVID-19 crisis with a focus on the variation of hierarchy, H1, H2, and H3. This analysis highlights how the Korean bureaucracy has managed to maintain efficiency and effectiveness while integrating market-driven and performance-oriented reforms. The paper also discusses the bureaucratic response to ‘wicked problems’?complex social issues requiring multi-faceted and innovative solutions?demonstrating adaptability in times of crisis. To illustrate this, we examine key case studies, including the rapid implementation of COVID-19 drive-through testing centers, showcasing the bureaucracy’s agility and effectiveness in crisis management.. This paper ultimately supports the view that despite global trends toward decentralization and deregulation, a strong hierarchical bureaucracy can still effectively meet contemporary governance challenges, reflecting a distinctive Neo-Weberian State approach

Public Administration Developments in Australia: Lessons an NPM Leader Might Draw from NWS

Australian public administration has undergone dramatic change over the last 50 years through a long sequence of incremental, pragmatic reforms. Australia was a leader of New Public Management in the 1980s and 1990s, subsequently incorporating New Public Governance measures of collaboration and networking. While some critics describe the transformation as ‘neo-liberalism’, the article favours the more neutral term, ‘managerialism’, recognising its liberal aspects but challenging claims of rolling back the role of the state. Reflecting on the overall shift today, the author concludes that the measures were not wrong but were taken too far, and important balances were lost. Looking to the future, the article calls for a major correction including reinvestment in the state, not necessarily as far as adoption of Pollitt and Bouckaert’s Neo-Weberian State but drawing important lessons from that paradigm.

Public administration modernization: regularities of normative concept application

The object of this study is to assess administrative reforms and change from the point of view of theoretical administrative models of hierarchical (traditional) administration, New Public Management (NPM), and New Public Governance (NPG) in Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. Normative models offer a critique of legacy administrative practices; their wholesale implementation is seldom practical or successful. Reforms framed as “modernization” in these countries over the past three decades have generally followed the principles of NPM. Although policy arguments for introducing elements of NPG can be observed in the studied cases, the paper argues that NPG’s rhetorical attractiveness for resolving perceived shortcomings of other models lacks specific implementation mechanisms that would be viable within the existing institutional framework of the studied countries. Factors, such as the relatively small size of Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia, and obvious benefits of EU integration, appear to have moderated reforms to a point that core institutional features have become stable, and are also similar among the three countries: the dominance of hierarchical administrative model with rigid separation of powers structure and strong courts that can adjudicate administrative decisions, with numerous NPM inspired “modernization” measures, including the introduction of various interactive public services. The paper’s findings support the idea that Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia are administrative systems that have stable core governance institutions, and national public administrations modernize various aspects of their operation by introducing elements of NPM and NPG within the executive, but not reviewing the basic setup of these institutions. From this point of view, the findings are in line with the assumptions of the normative model of Neo-Weberian State (NWS)

Integrating the neo-Weberian state and public value

Two thematic areas have grown in significance in the contemporary scientific literature of public governance, public administration and public management over the past 20 to 30 years: the theory and practice of public value, and theorisation of the neo-Weberian state (NWS). In this paper, we argue that, while these two important thematic areas have so far developed in a mostly unconnected way from each other, they both might benefit from integrating each other's perspective into their theoretical frame, and we outline the contours of such a framework. We argue that the NWS and public value might theoretically be combined in three forms of integration of the respective perspectives: the integration of the NWS conceived of as model with an approach to public value conceived of as an addition of value through the actions by public managers; the NWS as an ideal type with public value conceived of as an addition of value through the actions by public managers; and the NWS as an ideal type with public value conceived of as a contribution to the public sphere. The NWS may benefit from integrating the public value perspective in order to develop some of its core components: how it compounds input legitimacy with output legitimacy, and how it integrates the managerial components into a narrative of managerial action for the public purpose. The perspective of public value may benefit from engaging into a dialogue with NWS, if it aspires to be a truly global paradigm for managing public services. Points for practitioners 1. Public managers could and should pursue courses of action aimed at creating public value within the frame of NWS institutions and processes. 2. The adoption of a public value perspective is compatible with an NWS framework and mutually beneficial. 3. The development of the NWS in jurisdictions across the world is strengthened by the integration of the public value perspective, which can lead to matching output legitimacy and input legitimacy.

The neo-Weberian state: From ideal type model to reality?

Public sector reforms have been a feature of past decades. Many of these reforms reacted against hierarchy and bureaucracy to shift to markets and networks. Next to New Public Management (NPM) and New Public Governance (NPG), the neo-Weberian state (NWS) also remained a crucial ideal type, certainly for the Western European practice which is embedded in Weberian public administration (PA). A theoretical and empirical question is whether NWS is sustainable and resilient in re-inventing and re-appraising ‘bureaucracy’ in the 21st century. This contribution claims that initially there was an empirical observation, certainly in continental Europe, of neo-Weberian public administration derived from the dynamics of public sector reforms in the second half of the 20th century. It was then ‘upgraded’ as an NWS ideal type model for theoretical reasons. NWS is a hierarchy-driven system within a hierarchy-market-network space. This NWS (based and driven by hierarchy) then moved to one of the normative reform models.

Neo-Weberian State in a Different Context: The Malaysian Experience

Malaysia has undergone a series of civil service reforms, and the article considers one of the approaches to be in line with Bouckaert’s Neo-Weberian State thesis. A Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) under the Prime Minister’s Department works to three core principles; collaborative governance, citizen delivery mindset and commitment from the highest hierarchy level. Collaborative governance is increasingly experimented with but still considered a black box in a non-Western context. The process of innovation is described.

Legitimizing Bureaucracy and the Challenge of Caesarism

Part One of the article re-examines Weber’s famous chapter (as presented in the Gerth and Mills anthology) on bureaucracy in the light of the historical-critical edition of the text in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. A contrast emerges between the ideal type treatment of bureaucracy and actual, country specific, cases of bureaucracy where the determinants of state, economy and culture impact the bureaucracy. Weber insisted on the legitimacy of modern bureaucracy, which he analysed through his theory of social action. He offered broad legal grounds for its validity. This becomes the subject of detailed and critical examination in relation to neoliberalism, New Public Management and Neo-Weberian state theory.

Critical reflections on Pollitt and Bouckaert’s construct of the neo-Weberian state (NWS) in their standard work on public management reform

Pollitt and Bouckaert and their neo-Weberian state (NWS) have been chosen as the subject for this essay because the book has become a standard work in the public management movement. It is frequently cited and has been re-published in multiple editions (most recently in 2017). The authors also refer explicitly to Max Weber.This contribution seeks to draw attention to three important aspects, which inevitably overlap with one another:1. There is no Weber in the neo-Weberian State (introduction, 1; section II). Pollitt and Bouckaert fail to grasp that Weber’s understanding of the state [the state as an “institution” (Anstalt); and the state as an “idea of validity” (Geltungsvorstellung)] is not identical to his ideal type of modern bureaucracy; it is the features of the latter on which they draw. The ideal type is a standard measure constructed in order to establish how close any concrete, given instance of bureaucracy comes to it (introduction, 3). Meanwhile, the “neutral official” insisted upon by Weber has “taken their leave” in Germany from important positions (section III, 3). Furthermore, Weber did not address those structures and processes internal to the administration which are precisely the object of interest for the new public management reformers. Weber’s lack of interest arises from the fact the members of an Anstalt, whether it is the state or the Church (WuG, § 15, no. 2), are subject to imposed orders (oktroyierte Ordnungen) and, as such, do not enjoy the “right to have a say”. Scharpf (1973a) was the first to pay particular attention to the problems brought about by specialisation and by the division of labour within the administration that are responsible for an incremental form of politics (section III, 3); even if he later ascribes advantages to the combination of “negative” and “positive coordination” (Scharpf 1991: 18ff.).2. The “legalistic culture” that characterises Germany will be considered in a more differentiated way, drawing on empirical studies which provide information, for example, on how laws (i.e. programmes) actually originate inside the ministerial apparatus (introduction, 2; section III, 2 and 3) or how use is made of the power of authority (Weisungsrecht) in practice (introduction, 2; section III, 2 and 3), even when, formally, it claims to have validity (section III). In this way, only empirical studies (Benz 1994; Bohne 1981; Dose 1997; Dose/Voigt 1995; Treiber 2007a) prove that the administration that implements laws has often, in practice, become a “negotiative administration” (introduction, 2). Such a phenomenon as a “co-operative administration”, which negotiates rather than rules, is a “foreign concept” in Weber’s discussion of the state and modern bureaucracy. Scharpf’s (1970) comparison between constitutional governance in Germany and legal relief in America is enlightening when it comes to the meaning of the constitutional state (Rechtsstaat) (introduction, 2; section III); the same applies to his discussion of the failed federalist reforms, which sought, among other things, to mitigate, if not entirely eliminate, the opportunities for blockades provided by political entanglement (Politikverflechtung) (section III). Neither was it possible to realise long overdue proposals to reform administrative law (Verwaltungsrecht) (section III, 1), which involved weakening or removing altogether three important assumptions in the dominant administrative doctrine (the “dogmatic normality”) and which also included the ambitious intention for the law to achieve tangible impact (Hoffmann-Riem 1994). Nonetheless, while no-one would dispute that reform of the federal government and administration remained “on the agenda” (Scharpf 1991, Mayntz/ Scharpf 1973), the priorities of such a reform were, and still are, different to those of new public management reform [the key terms here are Planung (“planning”) and the term that replaced it, Steuerung (“management”)]1.3. Pollitt and Bouckaert ascribe to the neo-Weberian state extremely varied functions without providing any (theoretical) basis for them. In this way, the notion of public management reform that they present acquires the status of a “reformist philosophy” (introduction, 3; section IV). See Scharpf (1991) for a theoretically well-founded argumentation on the State’s ability to act in our days. Scharpf’s essay will be discussed briefly (section IV).ConclusionThere is no Weber in the neo-Weberian state. According to the discussion presented here, the neo-Weberian state can only mean: how would a modern state constituted by Weber look today?

Max Weber and the Neo-Weberian State: A workshop and aMax Weber StudiesTheme Issue

Max Weber and the Neo-Weberian State: A workshop and a<i>Max Weber Studies</i>Theme Issue

Institutionalizing innovation in welfare local services through co-production: toward a Neo-Weberian State?

AbstractInnovative practices based on the involvement of citizens as co-producers of welfare local services have been increasingly adopted by the public sector to effectively tackle emerging social problems. Despite the development in the literature on this subject, recent studies still do not clearly indicate which are the challenges for the institutionalization of such practices. By applying a governance lens to the analysis of co-production of local public services, this article aims to contribute to bridging this gap through the empirical analysis of the childcare experience in four European cities. More in detail, it debates the concepts of co-production and innovation in public service delivery within the context of the different waves of public administration reforms; and it investigates how three different sets of conditions – namely, state support and capacity; organizational cultures which support innovation; and integration with facilitative technologies – integrate to facilitate or hinder the institutionalization of co-production initiatives. The findings show that the enabling role of the state actor is a sine qua non to guarantee an institutionalization of these practices, particularly concerning the promotion of trust-building processes. Doing so, the article contributes to the international debate about the possible co-existing of the paradigms of public administration that are arising in the last decades to remedy the problems with the New Public Management; and it provides professionals working in public management and administration with key policy recommendations for the elaboration of new governance systems for the provision of social and welfare services.