Agents, ideas and microprocesses: What happens in the early stage of a public service reform?

This thesis explores the question ‘What happens in the early stage of administrative culture reform?’ by examining an exemplar of this type of reform in the New Zealand public service. Reforms of administrative culture are frequently proposed in Westminster democracies like New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. However, public administration has yet to attach much importance to what occurs at macro, meso and micro levels while administrative culture reform is occurring. Top-down, ex-post perspectives obscure what agents do in the ‘time lag between talk and change’, leading to a blind spot in our practical knowledge of reform. A constructionist methodological approach is used to capture an exemplar of administrative reform in the New Zealand public service focused on the idea of stewardship, using a nested case study. Interviews and documents are analysed using Vivien Schmidt’s Discursive Institutional analysis framework to provide insight into unfolding reform through the realised stewardship meaning and practice. The research question is answered by using a framework resulting from synthesis of the case findings and scholarship on reform and change in other contexts. In the early stage of administrative culture reform, agents drive five interacting dynamics for collective action with the aim of solving issues in local contexts by adapting or adding practice. The thesis concludes that agents modify reform ideas after they are introduced and take up reform ideas to address issues within their own context, not necessarily the wider reform problem. The framework in the thesis provides insight into why administrative culture reform take-up is patchy and varies from what was intended. The thesis makes four contributions: a theory-based conceptual framework of early-stage administrative culture reform dynamics; a novel research strategy for capturing context, ideas, and practice changes in a ‘live’ reform for further analysis, it fills a gap in the literature around formation of stewardship practice, and captures stewardship reform in New Zealand at the time when it was new and unfolding.