The Limits of Legitimacy Pressure as a Source of Organizational Change : The Reform of Human Resource Management in the OECD

Abstract

The process of international diffusion of the New Public Management (NPM) has to a considerable extent been fuelled by communication activities of international organizations, such as the OECD. Management reforms within these international organizations themselves so far were hardly subject to comprehensive investigations. While considerable scientific attention was placed on analyzing the role of international organizations as arena for international cooperation, it is only recently that the role and functioning of international bureaucracies became a subject of growing importance. In this context, however, changes in management structures have only been addressed by few descriptive case. We hence have limited knowledge about the extent to which international organizations, often considered as crucial diffusion agents with regard to public sector management reforms, actually live up to the standards they promote. Moreover, we have limited theoretical understanding of the causes of corresponding reform developments in these organizations. In this article, we address this research gap by an analysis of human resource management reforms in the OECD between 1996 and 2004. The period of investigation is determined by the term of office of Donald Johnston as OECD Secretary General (since 1996) and the data available. The OECD embarked on a major reform program of its human resource policies in 2005. But this had not been completed at the time of this study and is therefore not covered in this article.