Learning from Second‐Hand Experience: Methodology for Extrapolation‐Oriented Case Research

Abstract

Critics of public management reform complain that governments copy legitimated foreign practices. Recent work by Eugene Bardach helps to explain why: neither government analysts nor academic researchers possess an adequate methodology to examine practices in source sites, with a view toward adaptation in target sites. Rather than complain, Bardach takes steps to develop such a methodology, drawing analogies with reverse engineering. This article offers specific guidance about how researchers can effectively investigate practices in source sites to prepare the ground for disciplined and ingenious extrapolation of practices from source to target sites. The resulting translation is illustrated by an extrapolation-oriented case study.The literature on public management reform is replete with accounts of how paradigmatic ideas and templates of organizational practices gain currency, travel widely, and settle into policy and practice in diverse locales (e.g., Aucoin 1990;Hood and Jackson 1991;Pollitt et al. 2001; SahlinAndersson 2002). These accounts-inspired to a large degree by the new institutionalism in organizational sociology-discern causal patterns in the recent history of public management reform. While such theoretical developments are needed (Barzelay and Gallego 2006), they nonetheless remain silent on a range of prescriptive matters that attract the attention of public management scholars and directly concern practitioners. One prescriptive issue is how participants in a social undertaking (Wenger 1998), such as operating a governmental program or performing an organizational function, should prepare to take actions with the intention of improving it. A usual presumption in our culture is that participants should do so, in part, by learning from experience. Two kinds of experiences are seen as candidate sources of learning: lived and vicarious ones (Levitt and March 1988). Under vicarious learning, actors take advantage of experience with undertakings in which they do not directly participate.

Explaining Positive Deviance in Public Sector Reforms in Development

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