Arenas as Standardizes

Abstract

This chapter describes how an international organization set up as a forum for the discussion of public administration issues ended up being an active standardizer. Numerous organizations provide standards even if this is not their official or main purpose. Examples are organizations whose task is to be arenas; they produce and provide information and comparisons, report and propose initiatives for change, and generally facilitate exchange of experience, ideas, and ideals. One such organization is PUMA, a committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that serves as an arena where representatives of OECD countries can learn and share their ideas and experience concerning the development of public management. This chapter shows how PUMA emerged as an organization and explains how it developed into a standardizer. The character of the standards created by PUMA is described and explained.

Standardization of (higher) education in Europe – policy coordination 2.0?

“…The development of the EQF was marked by a process of extensive consultation as a means to assure legitimacy and to persuade member states (Elken, 2015a). Furthermore, the EQF advisory group and the national referencing processes have become increasingly standardized, similar to what Sahlin-Andersson (2000) observed in her study about OECD Management group activities. That is, national diversity and ideological differences become downplayed; the use of expertise in the process is used as a means of justification and legitimation.…”

“…Thus, standards are also not neutral, as the actor with capacity to select relevant experts will in this manner shape the process. The actors are those who engage in the process of collecting, editing and distributing information (Sahlin-Andersson, 2000), and thus produce standards. The legitimacy of standards is linked both to their scientific and technical rationality, as well as their negotiated nature suggesting of increased democratic principle (Borraz, 2007).…”

The “steering state” model: The emergence of a new organizational form in the French Public Administration

“…In the same perspective, the very experienced Director of the DGAFP, Bernard Pêcheur, 10 in post from 1989 to 1994, chaired the OECD's Public Management Service (PUMA 11 ), which brought together senior civil servants in charge of administrative reform issues in various countries. The working groups in which senior civil servants from the DGAFP took part tended to favour learning from foreign experience (for example, from the countries of Northern Europe) and mechanisms for importing and translating New Public Management ideas that were judged to be legitimate in the French context (Sahlin-Andersson, 2000;Bezes, 2005).…”

Clinical Audit, Guidelines and Standards: A Productive Relation for Managing Clinical Practices

“…In this paper, however, I argue that the relationship between clinical audit and EBM is more complex than just subordinating the role of clinical audit to being the ‘watchdog’ of evidence‐based guidelines’ implementation. This analysis will show how the Scottish Hip Fracture Audit has become an ‘arena’ (Sahlin‐Andersson, 2000, p. 100) which opens up spaces of intervention, where clinical communities engage with processes of change of clinical procedures, and in these spaces, clinicians and managers are in a position to refine clinical practice and service organisation, to reflect upon their own actions and to allow insight into the rationalities of their work (Berg, 1997). As Sahlin‐Anderson observes (2000, p. 100) arenas ‘do not have an explicit mandate to standardise […] Rather, standardisation is a by‐product of meetings held for other purposes’.…”