Managing 'mixedness': Understanding the effects of public sector reform in human service organisations

textabstractOur government is confronted with many unintended effects of policy programs. In order to address these problems, a large number of public sector reforms have been implemented over the past decades. These reforms formed a reaction to implementation problems rather than to problems in relation to policy content: more and more, policy makers seem to have recognised that not so much the provisions that were offered, but the process of policy implementation generated its own effects and was an important source of problems. At times, high expectations existed as concerns the effects of policy sector reforms. Time and again, however, reform outcomes did not live up to expectations. How come? These reforms were mostly aimed at human service provision: the softer sectors of the public sphere in which interaction between citizens (in their role as clients) and the state takes place, as in the field of education, the police, public assistance, health care, etc. Human service provision is of a fundamentally mixed nature: general regulations are applied to individual clients. In day-to-day business, implementation problems are the result of inherent dilemmas in human service provision. We argue that these reforms do not live up to expectations, because they cannot fully cope with the dilemmas that originate from the fundamentally mixed nature of human service provision. In this paper we make a start with combining insights from implementation theory with research on public sector reform. We argue that this link has been missing so far in discussions on public management and public sector reform. The inherent ‘mixedness’ in human service provision needs to be acknowledged in order to better understand the effects of public sector reform in organisations that provide ‘human services’ . This paper is structured as follows. First, we build an argument as to why human service organisations have a inherent ‘mixed’ nature. We discuss three levels on which this ‘mixedness’ is observable: on the level of the organisational environment, the level of the organisational structure and on the level of individual service provision. Second, we briefly discuss the rise and characteristics of reform trajectories in the Dutch public sector. We link the ideas and features of these reform strategies to the unique nature of human service provision in order to explain why these kinds of reform do not result in their expected outcomes