Chapter 3: Public Management Reforms and the Oxymoron of Training Proceduralization

In this chapter we investigate the evolution of training in public administration in a given historical and local context, that is the Italian public administration undergoing a wave of reforms since the early 1990s.

We will focus this investigation on three main questions: first, what kind of “change” is taking place both in the wider panorama of Italian public administrations and as far as every single administration is concerned; second, around what kind of training conceptions the current public debate on the role of the training function within public administrations is focused; third, what kind of evolution can we identify when looking at the higher education offer (Masters degrees) to support the changes derived from the various public administration reforms.

The paradox we wish to explore in this chapter refers to institutional actors (legislator, administrations, higher education institutions) that are trapped in what we can call an “optimization of inefficacy” in order to respond to the emerging challenges of a more performing public administration. While the transformation of public administrations should, allegedly, bring a more efficient and effective system, the same rules designed to reach this objective are constraining institutional actors to deploy strategies that correspond to such an objective only at a superficial level. Focusing this reasoning on the question of training for and within public administration, we find that very little is being put into discussion at institutional level as regards the radically different nature of public administrations (Christensen et al. 2007), the shortcomings of a—strictly—functional view of training (Hager, 2005; Davis, 2012), and the paradoxes and complexities faced by public managers (Stacey & Griffin, 2007). Rather, taken-for-granted assumptions on such themes seem to inform the strategic decisions of all actors, leading to a two-layer picture: On the surface, something is moving, even though erratically, towards an alignment of training offer to the training needs derived from the reforms; below the surface we do find that reforms, strategies are not necessarily what they claim to be, reproducing the same problems that the reforms aimed to tackle in the first place.