Chapter 3 The Poetics of Management, and the Politics of Organizational Cultures. A Sociological View on NPM-Reforms in Switzerland

New Public Management (NPM) was widely welcomed in the early 1990s of the last century in Switzerland. In accordance with different diagnoses of insufficiency against the public bureaucracies, several NPM programs on all three levels of the Swiss state were launched. But interestingly, most of them did not succeed: they were abandoned, voted down by the electorate, and where they were completed, not much has really changed. So the question from a sociological point of view is, how and why did this happen? To find preliminary answers, NPM is described as a particular professional orthodoxy and confronted with the findings of two ethnographic case studies. What clearly becomes visible is how organizational and professional cultures were neglected by the technical approach of the NPM. This gave way to phenomena like free riding on a reform within the organizations, and in one case to a “fordization” of work resulting in a decrease in workplace quality. If public management seeks an impact in the future, it has to account for the culture within organizations more thoroughly and should seek to use context-sensitive language.