Learning and experimenting municipalities. A theoretical approach on how to understand and enhance municipal organizations as learning and experimenting organizations
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2016-10-10
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Central in this thesis are the current challenges that municipalities face in the etherlands. Municipal organizations have become responsible for solving complex social problems, under budget pressure and accompanied with a promise to deliver localized and customized services. Given the complexity of this responsibility, it is worth to understand how these municipal organizations can be understood and enhanced as experimenting and learning organizations. In this thesis a theoretic approach will be provided in order to contribute to the development of the municipal organizations and the achievement of the promises of the decentralizations. In this thesis, organizations will be understood as self-producing and self-maintaining systems. They survive because they make decisions regarding their primary transformation and regulatory activities. The process of decision-making is structured by decision premises that both enable and constrain the production of new decisions. Thereby all decisions are inherently experimental of character: every
decision is based on expectations that can never be sure in a social, complex and dynamic environment. An experimenting organization is able to regulate its own decision-making regarding the primary transformation and regulatory activities.
The decision premises that enable and structure decision-making can also form a brake on development, leading to suboptimal equilibria. Especially when premises – like habits, customs and routines - get frozen: getting inaccessible for revisions and reflection. I therefore define learning organizations as being able to improve their own decision-making (again referring to operational transformations and regulatory activities). This means that a learning organization is able to use its decision-making to improve its future decision-making.
Central in this thesis are two theoretical approaches that help us to design municipal organizations that are able to learn and experiment. The first approach – the bociotechnical System Design [STSD] theory – is a design theory that helps to recognize and utilize structural conditions in order to design an organization that is able to perform its primary transformations and regulatory activities. Due to the right structural conditions an organization becomes able to realize and adapt its own goals. I will conclude that STSD is able to provide the structural conditions to enable organizational experimenting
and learning, but that it could be specified and enriched regarding frozen norms and the utilization of its potential.
Experimentalist Governance is used as an additional theoretical approach in order to specify the STSD theory towards municipal organizations and to utilize its full evelopment potential. Experimentalist Governance is based on continuous process of inquiry, reflection, deliberation and experimentation. It uses local experiences and local diversity to drive organizational development. It is thereby emphasizes to make implicit consideration explicit and subject of reflection and deliberation. It proves to have great
value in the specification of the need for continuous reflection in order to overcome frozen decision premises. In the concluding chapter of this thesis I integrate both theories in a way that allows us to use both their strengths. A municipal organization that is adequately able to learn and to experiment is an organization with a well-designed infrastructure, a supportive attitude toward its own primary process and with a focus on enabling local execution and development. In such an organization there are three categories of
incentives that drive continuous organizational development. These drivers of continuous development are complementary as long as the levels of regulation are tightly coupled. First of all is development driven by adaption to the environment, secondly by local diversity and local experiences and at last by systematic doubt regarding potentially frozen decision premises.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen