Reform and Innovation as Rhetoric and Method

Abstract

This paper examines reform both as a rhetoric for legitimising and as a method for facilitating constant and recursive organisational change. The legitimisation of reform is primarily addressed to elite-level decision makers themselves, and is a form of self- and peer-justification. Reform rhetoric coopts the rhetoric of progressive political reform for its own ends. It is, however, less necessary to persuade the second audience - those upon whom change is foisted - of its legitimacy because change is introduced by stealth and supported by 'desperate predicament' arguments that foreclose debate and by strategies of 'collibration' that pre-empt potential collective resistance. We thus move to a second level: the analysis of organisational change as a methodology deploying the instruments of New Public Management (NPM). The exposure to recursive reform induces both cynicism and strategies of individual exit or accommodation. The paper concludes by identifying the most common of these individualised strategies.