Austria: The Dynamics of Public Management Reform and Staff Participation

Public management literature is mostly dominated by Anglo-Saxon or northern European experiences (Christensen and Lagreid 2001, Farnham et al. 1996, Horton and Farnham 2000, Olsen and Peters 1996, Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000) only peripherally covering Continental European countries with a strong Rechtsstaat tradition and, in terms of staff participation, a distinct industrial relations model with workplace employee representation and participation structures based on law and widespread collective agreements. In administrative systems (like the German or Austrian) that rely heavily on ‘legitimacy through procedure’ (Luhmann 1969), the process is a key component of a measure’s ‘appropriateness’. This not only applies to ‘routine’ administrative activity but also to the legitimacy of change and public management reform. A key parameter of this procedural appropriateness is a high level of mandatory and informal staff participation. In this chapter, we outline the existing Austrian institutional context and public management system and describe the system of indirect staff participation arrangements. We then analyse the dynamics of current public management reform with an emphasis on the federal level and its relevance for participation. In the final section, we examine developments within a specific federal ministry.