"Shades of hybridity in public manager/servant identity"

Abstract

New Zealand's economic reforms of the 1980's and early 1990's affected the identity of the country profoundly; various commentators have claimed that such New Public Management reforms denigrated bureaucracy. 'Postbureaucracy' is the term used to describe the era after reform, and it is becoming an important area of critical theorising within management; within that literature, 'hybridity' has been held up as the deformed product of bureaucracy's encounter with postbureaucracy. However, this thesis claims that this new state is not a deformation but an ongoing reformation. This study inquires into insights that can be gained on the present state of public manager/servant identity in New Zealand's Public Service, and it is intended as a contribution to the current bureaucracy/postbureaucracy literature. Language as a defining factor in public administration has been widely researched and discussed, Discourse Analysis (as a method of text analysis) has become a popular mode of investigation. This research takes an analytical perspective on public administration commentary related to reforms, particularly where the term 'postbureaucracy' is concerned. This thesis inquires into the identity of New Zealand's public managers, utilising Critical Discourse Analysis through the exploration of theme interdiscursivity. Publicly available texts taken from the State Services Commission, a governing body managing all government departments and State-Owned Enterprises, were analysed using Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis. The three texts analysed were the New Zealand Public Service Code of Conduct, the State of the Development Goals Report 2006 and the Career Progression and Development Survey 2005. The discursive themes presented here were identified in the a priori, iterative and a posteriori stages of the research process; these themes include bureaucracy, postbureaucracy, neoliberalism, globalisation, hybridity, mimesis, social cohesion, trust and legitimation. In the light of previous research, this study gives some insight into the New Zealand context of hybridity in the Public Service. Hybridity, here, is an open acknowledgement that instability and flux feature in the Public Service, and subsequently affect the identity of public managers/servants.