Fluent Essays

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Education Saudi Electronic University المملكة العربية السعودية وزارة التعليم الجامعة السعودية الإلكترونية College of Administrative and Financial Sciences Assignment-1 MGT425 - Spreadsheet Decision Modeling Deadline: 16/10/2021 @ 23:59 Course Name: Spreadsheet Decision Modeling Student’s Name: Course Code: MGT425 Student’s ID Number: Semester: 1 CRN: Academic Year: 1442/1443 H For Instructor’s Use only Instructor’s Name: Students’ Grade: Marks Obtained/Out of Level of Marks: High/Middle/Low Instructions – PLEASE READ THEM CAREFULLY · The Assignment must be submitted on Blackboard (WORD format only) via allocated folder. · Assignments submitted through email will not be accepted. · Students are advised to make their work clear and well presented, marks may be reduced for poor presentation. This includes filling your information on the cover page. · Students must mention question number clearly in their answer. · Late submission will NOT be accepted. · Avoid plagiarism, the work should be in your own words, copying from students or other resources without proper referencing will result in ZERO marks. No exceptions. · All answered must be typed using Times New Roman (size 12, double-spaced) font. No pictures containing text will be accepted and will be considered plagiarism). · Submissions without this cover page will NOT be accepted. Course Learning Outcomes-Covered Aligned PLOs Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) Question MGT.K.3 (1.2) Explain simple decision models and management science ideas that provide powerful and (often surprising) qualitative insight about large spectrum of managerial problems. Question 1 MGT.S.1 (2.1) Demonstrate the tools for deciding when and which decision models to use for specific problems. Question 2 Assignment Instructions: · Log in to Saudi Digital Library (SDL) via University’s website · On first page of SDL, choose “English Databases” · From the list find and click on EBSCO database. · In the Search Bar of EBSCO find the following article: Title: Towards “Cognitively Complex” Problem Solving: Six Models of Public Service Reforms (Case Study). Author: Willy McCourt (June 2017) Assignment Questions: (Marks 05) Read the above Article and answer the following Questions: 1. Explain the problem-solving approach discussed in this article. (450-500 words) 3-Marks 2. What is your opinion about this study and how it is related to learning in the course of management science?. (250-300 words) 2-Marks Answers: A c c e p te d A rt ic le Towards ‘Cognitively Complex’ Problem-Solving: Six models of Public Service reform Willy McCourt1 Abstract This paper proposes ‘cognitively complex problem-solving’ as a refinement of the recent problem- solving approach to public service reform, and as an addition to existing political and institutional explanations for the frequent failure of reform. In order to substantiate the new problem-solving model, it identifies and selectively reviews six models of reform that have been practiced in developing countries over the past half- century: public administration; decentralization; pay and employment reform; New Public Management; integrity and corruption reforms; and “bottom-up” reforms. A short case study of Myanmar is presented to illustrate the problem-solving approach in practice. 1. Introduction: Facing up to failure When Apollo declared through his Oracle at Delphi that no one was wiser than Socrates, what the god was trying to get across (at least according to Socrates himself, who declined to take the compliment at face value) was that ‘The wisest of you men is he who has realised, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless’ (Plato, 1969: 52). To say that what we know about public service reform is ‘worthless’ would be an exaggeration. But a confession of our relative ignorance may still be the beginning of wisdom. It will be fruitful if it helps us to frame the problem that faces us in a way that stimulates readers to propose approaches that stand a better chance of success than the ones we have been following up to now. That is what this paper tries to do. 2. Evidence and explanations: Politics and institutions 2.1 Evidence The most robust evidence that we have of reform outcomes is in the form of World Bank project evaluation reports. The Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) found that that only 33% of the public service reform projects completed between 1980 and 1997 had been rated as satisfactory (IEG, 1999). When IEG revisited the topic nine years later, public sector reform was rated joint eighth among the Bank’s twelve project sectors in terms of project success, and its success rate had declined over the 1 Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. Email: [email protected] This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not beenthrough the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi:10.1111/dpr.12306 This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le previous five years more sharply than all but one of the other eleven sectors (IEG, 2008: xiii and 83). Reviewing overlapping evidence just before the first IEG evaluation, Nunberg (1997) found that the success rate was lower than for Bank projects as a whole. We should keep these negative findings in perspective. World Bank projects are a skewed sample. The Bank operates predominantly in low- and middle-income countries where reform is difficult. The Bank’s own finding that its civil service reform projects have a poorer track record than other kinds of public service reform (such as public financial reform) disappears when we allow for the fact that they are disproportionately located in poor and unstable countries (Blum, 2014). The Bank's perspective when it evaluates its projects is not necessarily the same as that of the beneficiaries or other stakeholders. Moreover, failure is by no means the exclusive prerogative of civil service reform, or even international development. Business start-ups in the US funded by venture capital have a failure rate of anything from 25 to 75%. Public policy failures in the UK have been common enough to provide the material for a substantial recent book (Gage, 2012; King and Crewe, 2013). However, even if we amend ‘relatively poor’ to ‘relatively not bad’, the outcomes have not been good enough. Moreover, the ‘frequent failures’ and the perception of public service reform as ‘out of fashion or too difficult in practice’ (IEG, 2008: xvi; 65) – as recently as 2010, an internal Bank paper carried the title, Why do Bank-supported public service reform efforts have such a poor track record? – are likely to have a chilling effect on activity if not addressed.2 In this paper, we briefly review two existing explanatory factors, politics and institutions, before proposing a third factor of our own, cognitive complexity, which we illustrate through a discussion of alternative models of public service reform. 2.2 Politics While IEG’s remedial recommendations in 1999 were mainly technocratic and piecemeal, by 2008, IEG was identifying ‘political feasibility’ as a key factor. (Similarly, political commitment to reform by client governments had pride of place in Nunberg’s 1997 review.) This emphasis on politics reflected the political economy studies of the structural adjustment era, based on which the Bank’s 1998 Assessing Aid report concluded that ‘Successful reform depends primarily on a country’s institutional and political characteristics’ (World Bank, 1998: 53; see also Campos and Esfahani, 2000; Johnson and Wasty, 1993; and Nelson, 1990). The management of the Bank and IMF took the lesson to heart, with the Bank’s 2 In the author’s personal experience as a practitioner, this is already happening. . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le President at the time, James Wolfensohn (1999: 9), remarking that ‘It is clear to all of us that ownership is essential. Countries must be in the driver’s seat and set the course. They must determine goals and the phasing, timing and sequencing of programs.’ After the dawning of that realization on the international development agencies in the late 1990s, the decade of the 2000s could be called the decade of politics, with the Swedish and UK governments, and the World Bank, all sponsoring studies of the politics of reform (Dahl-Østergaard et al., 2005), and with one of the largest US development consulting companies employing as many specialists in politics as in public administration (Cooley, 2008). The studies pointed to generic factors like technical capacity, insulation from societal interests and building incentives for politicians to embark on reform; and country- specific factors like the importance of public society and the media (Duncan et al., 2003; Robinson, 2007). 2.3 Institutions3 The Assessing Aid report highlighted institutional as well as political characteristics, and they are a second group of factors which affect the success of reform. Tanzania’s legal framework for public staff management illustrates their subtle influence. The Constitution, and both primary and secondary legislation enacted over several decades, give the President immense direct powers, with few procedural checks on how he exercises them. For example, the Public Service Act, 2002 states that ‘(any) delegation (to the Public Service Commission (PSC)... shall not preclude the President from himself exercising any function which is the subject of any delegation or authorization.’ Further, ‘The President may remove any public servant from the service of the Republic if the President considers it in the public interest to do so.’ An earlier Act states that ‘Whether the President validly performed any function conferred on him... shall not be inquired into by or in any court.’4 As a consequence, Tanzania’s senior officials have little job security. One of them remarked that ‘the President changes the top officers in the service in a similar way as (sic) he changes attire.’ Yet 3 I use ‘institutions’ in this paper to refer to the formal laws and agencies of the state (such as a Civil Service Law or an Election Commission), and not the informal institutions of society (such as the family). 4 http://bunge.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/8-2002.pdf; http://polis.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/16-1989.pdf. . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. http://bunge.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/8-2002.pdf http://polis.parliament.go.tz/PAMS/docs/16-1989.pdf A c c e p te d A rt ic le increasing their security, or restoring the independence of the PSC, would require both a constitutional amendment and the revision or repeal of many separate laws and procedures; and, they, in turn, w o u l d r e q u i r e ‘political commitment’ of the kind which we discussed in the previous section. (Bana and McCourt, 2006) 2.4 Beyond politics and institutions We have discussed politics and institutions quite briefly, not because they are minor factors, but because they are quite well understood by now (which is not to say, of course, that they have invariably translated into the practice of governments and development agencies). However, they do not provide an exhaustive explanation for reform outcomes. Organizations can succeed while others are failing within a single political dispensation (Grindle, 1997; Tendler, 1997). Similar institutions such as the Commonwealth public service commissions which are responsible for appointing and, sometimes, managing public staff have had different outcomes in different countries (McCourt, 2003 and 2007). If we now focus for the remainder of this paper on another group of factors, we do so in an additive spirit. We acknowledge the political and institutional factors, but we suggest that they leave a significant explanatory residue. 3. Cognitively complex problem-solving What is the residue, and how should we deal with it? This paper proposes a problem-solving approach, viewing the different reform interventions as ways of dealing with the problem situation as different national governments have defined it. ‘Problem situation’ is borrowed from Karl Popper (1989: 129; and 1999). Popper argues that at any given point in the history of science, there is an agenda which arises from problems which current theories have created or failed to solve: ‘You pick up, and try to continue, a line of inquiry which has the whole background of the earlier development of science behind it.’ Similarly, it seems to us that at any given point in the development of public administration in a particular country, there is an agenda of problems which the previous experience of reform has created, and which confronts the most perceptive national policy-makers and other stakeholders.5 This paper is not alone in adopting a problem-driven approach. It follows Fritz et al. (2009), who have already applied it to political economy. Andrews (2013) has developed an alternative and more 55 Cf. Fritz et al. (2009). . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le elaborate problem-solving model in parallel with this paper. This paper arguably refines their approaches in one respect. Readers will be familiar with the saying that ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem becomes a nail.’6 Identifying a problem, or problem situation, is not an end in itself. We must propose a solution. And when we do so, at least in the experience of the present writer, we tend to fall back on the tools in our reform toolbox; all too often, reform problems do get treated as ‘nails.’ In a globalized world, most reform does not start from first principles, but in the light of previous reforms in other places (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). In other words, the suggestion is that public service reforms have sometimes failed because of the reformers’ cognitive narrowness. The notion of 'cognitive complexity' is borrowed from psychology, where it is defined as 'an aspect of a person's cognitive functioning which at one end is defined by the use of many constructs with many relationships to one another (complexity) and at the other end by the use of few constructs with limited relationships to one another (simplicity) (Cervone and Pervin, 2015). People with a large set of interpersonal constructs tend to have better social perception skills than those with a relatively small set. (Delia et al., 1982). This psychological finding has been applied to in organization studies, in work which emphasizes the value in decision-making of a range of perspectives. A wide ‘information range’ makes it easier to spot problems and opportunities, or reframe problems that have been intractable up to now (Bolman and Deal, 2003; George, 1972; Mitroff and Emshoff, 1979). It contributes to the ‘cognitive complexity’ of reformers; their ability to entertain a range of options and engage in what Weick (1993), drawing on Lévi-Strauss, has called ‘bricolage’, rather than defaulting to a ‘best practice’ solution of the kind criticized by Grindle (2007), Rodrik (2008) and many others.7 To be sure, cognitive complexity is not a sufficient condition for policy success, which also entails such features as ethical understanding and some finesse in action (Bartunek et al., 1983; Denison et al., 1995). However, it seems plausible to suggest that it is a necessary one. 6 It was actually coined by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who some readers will recognize as the creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of (psychological) needs. 7 See also Wilkinson (2006) on the related concept of tolerance of ambiguity as an attribute of successful leaders. . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le 4. Models of public service reform In applying a ‘cognitively complex’ approach to problem-solving, we cannot make bricks without straw. If we are serious about respecting the specific priorities of developing country policymakers, and compensating for past cognitive deficiencies, then we will need a variety of tools. We flesh out the approach by a selective review of the experience of public service reform in developing countries. 'Reform' is necessarily a broad term. Public service reform has been defined as ‘interventions that affect the organization, performance and working conditions of employees paid from central, provincial or state government budgets.’8 It can be seen as policies implemented by public agencies with the intention of improving some aspect of the functioning of that agency. In this article, it will be defined operationally as the six reform 'families' which are listed in Table 1. In keeping with our problem-solving approach, the origin of reform is located in problems which policymakers pose to themselves, or which circumstances thrust upon them.9 Abstracting from the practice of developing country governments over recent decades, six major problems are identified; and six families of reform are listed as attempted solutions. Table 1: Public Service Reform Problems and Models Problem Model Main Action Period 1. How can we put government on an orderly and efficient footing? ‘Weberian’ public administration and capacity- building Post-independence period in south Asia and sub- Saharan Africa 2. How can we get government closer to the grassroots? Decentralization 1970s to present 8 http://www.gsdrc.org/go/topic-guides/civil-service-reform. 9 Many others have recognized that governments tailor approaches to their circumstances: see for example Nunberg (1997: 14); and Turner (2002). . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.gsdrc.org/go/topic-guides/civil-service-reform A c c e p te d A rt ic le 3. How can we make government more affordable? Pay and employment reform 1980s and 1990s 4. How can we make government perform better and deliver on our key objectives? New Public Management 1990s to present 5. How can we make government more honest? Integrity and anti- corruption reforms 1990s to present 6. How can we make government more responsive to citizens? ‘Bottom-up’ reforms Late 1990s to present This stance aligns us unequivocally with those who prioritize context over ‘best practice’. We pay respect to successful reform models. But they must be understood in terms of the environment in which they have arisen; or, in the language used in this paper, in terms of the ‘problem situation’ as particular policymakers have perceived it. We reject the tendency of some international reform brokers to treat reform models as ‘widgets’ (Joshi and Houtzager, 2012) which can be transferred unaltered without regard to the environments that they are transferred from and to. That point will be emphasized throughout this paper. Emphasizing context means recognizing that ‘vice may be virtue uprooted,’ in the words of the Anglo- Welsh poet David Jones (1974: 56). It is not appropriate to express a preference for any of the approaches listed in Table 1, all of which are already normative rather than descriptive (the list does not include perverse problems which have absorbed some officials’ attention such as how to make government a vehicle for rent-seeking or patronage). I hope instead to provide enough detail for readers to decide what they have to offer in terms of the ‘problem situation’ in readers’ own countries or the countries with which they are concerned. This simple problem-solving approach should not be taken too literally. First, our models are what Weber called ‘ideal types’. They are abstracted from reality for analysis. Likewise, the periodization of the third column in the table should be handled with a light touch. Governments did not suddenly discover honesty in the 1990s, and particular governments started pay and employment reform for the first t i m e o n l y in the 2000s (Morocco) or even later (Serbia). However, there have been periods when particular questions have dwelt on policymakers’ minds. Public policy questions arise in the order they do partly because external shocks like the oil price rises of the 1970s foist them on policy-makers’ attention. But they also arise as reactions to the unintended consequences of the . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le previous generation of reforms (here again we follow Popper, for whom managing unintended consequences was the essence of public policy).10 The bureaucratization that was the unintended consequence of Weberian public administration created the need for decentralization. The expansion of state capacity had the unintended consequence of creating a fiscal burden which pay and employment reform was framed to relieve. Context has a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. An administration’s ‘problem situation’ is dynamic. By solving one problem we always create another as an unintended consequence. Moreover, just as grouping public service reform approaches in terms of policy problems provides a convenient structure for the paper, so the periodization outlined in Table One gives us a convenient order in which to address the approaches. There is insufficient space in this paper to deal with all six of the approaches. We shall discuss Approaches One, Four and Six in turn: Approaches Four and Six will be relevant to the Myanmar case presented later in the paper. (For Approach Two, see Evans (2003); and Turner and Hulme (1997); for Three, see McCourt, 2001b; and Lindauer and Nunberg, 1994; for Five, see Klitgaard, 1988.) 5. ‘Weberian’ public administration and capacity building We shall deal with this briefly, since many readers are already familiar with it. 5.1 Bureaucracy and (neo)patrimonalism The public administration model in developing countries is essentially the classic Weberian model of bureaucracy harnessed to the needs of the developmental state. The German sociologist Max Weber located its origins, for both the public and private sectors, in the growth and complexity of the tasks of modern organizations; and also in democratization, which created an expectation that citizens, and members of an organization, would be treated equally. The main features of the model are:  A separation between politics and elected politicians on the one hand and administration and appointed administrators on the other 10 See also Merton (1936). Merton and Popper seem to have come up with the idea independently of each other. . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le  Administration is continuous, predictable and rule-governed  Administrators are appointed on the basis of qualifications, and are trained professionals  There is a functional division of labor, and a hierarchy of tasks and people  Resources belong to the organization, not to the individuals who work in it  Public servants serve public rather than private interests (Minogue, 2001) There are partial exceptions, for example the socialist countries of East Asia such as Lao PDR and Vietnam, which do not recognize the separation of administration and politics. But in practical terms, administrations that follow the Weberian model – and almost all do pay at least lip service – begin by putting in place a system of rules. Where staffing is concerned, we can expect to find a compendium of posts, arranged in a hierarchy according to rank, with statements of the duties expected of each post (in some countries this is called a ‘scheme of service’). There will be clear guidelines about how the posts should be advertised and filled, how pay grades are determined, and so on. The rules and guidelines will be overseen by central agencies such as the finance ministry and the public service commission or similar body. There will be similar rules for the control of government spending, overseen by the relevant central body, such as a procurement agency (Schick, 1998). Administration tends to be highly centralized: the model posits an unbroken hierarchical chain from the top (in the capital) to the bottom (in the remotest outpost of government). The tendency is to focus on inputs, in the sense of the efficient management of resources rather than outputs in the sense of the goods and services that the resources are used to produce, let alone outcomes in the sense of the social and economic results that derive from the outputs. Bureaucracy has of course a bad name in the popular imagination. However, a study commissioned by the World Bank in the run-up to its 1997 World Development Report found a close statistical connection between public bureaucracy and economic growth. Their data suggested that merit-based recruitment was the most important bureaucratic element, followed by promotion from within and career stability for public servants (Evans and Rauch, 1999). Further support for meritocracy came from a more detailed study of personnel management in the Kyrgyz and Slovak republics and in Romania. It highlighted the importance of sound administrative procedures underpinning merit, very much as outlined here (Anderson et al., 2003). So we have recent evidence that Weber’s century-old insight was basically sound: the bureaucratic model was indeed the efficient successor to patrimonial regimes which had centered on the personal and arbitrary power of an absolute ruler. . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le But there are a number of pre-conditions which may need to be in place for the model to produce the results that Weber anticipated. Let us mention two. The first is a culture in which rules are respected and followed. (This point has been emphasized by Schick. We expand on it later in this paper.) A second condition is that the Weberian rules should not be undermined by patronage pressures. Weber did not anticipate that bureaucracy and patrimonialism would become fused in the hybrid of ‘neopatrimonialism’, where state resources are diverted for patronage purposes such as securing support in an election. This neopatrimonial hybrid is widespread, having been identified in modern times in places as far apart as Greece, and Chicago in the United States (Clapham, 1982). As the state developed, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be an attempt to use its growing resources in the same way that ‘traditional’ patrons used private resources: to co-opt supporters and ensure their loyalty (McCourt, 2007). But the neopatrimonial twist was that patronage operated by a single, visible patron mutated into patronage operated by political parties and other broad groupings, often organized on a national scale. With many individuals implicated at different levels, this stubborn neopatrimonial bush with its complex root system could be even harder to eradicate than its relatively simple patrimonial predecessor. Much recent reform effort has been devoted, either explicitly or implicitly, to the task of eradication. 5.2 Capacity building A distinctive feature of public administration in developing countries is that unlike industrialized countries, where capacity evolved gradually, developing countries have put in place crash programmes of capacity-building following independence and, more recently, armed conflict and state collapse. The programmes have centered on staff training and development. The assumption is that public administration is deficient because public administrators lack skills which can be readily imparted through training. The ‘training and visit’ system for agriculture extension workers was a typical example. In the context of a fixed programme of field visits overseen by their supervisors, extension workers received frequent one-day training sessions to impart the three or four most important agricultural recommendations that they should pass on to farmers in the following few weeks (Hulme, 1992). . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. A c c e p te d A rt ic le There is no doubt that capacity affects performance, as even politically-orientated studies such as Nelson’s (1990) recognize. But we have learned that capacity-building is a broad concept with a political dimension (Boesen and Therkildsen, 2005). Moreover, it is rarely effective in an organizational vacuum. For example, capacity-building at the individual level usually takes place on training courses, away from the workplace. Learning designs need to make a bridge from training to the ‘action environment’ of work - its organizational culture, management practices and communication networks - in the form of action plans, supervisor involvement and post-training review arrangements (Grindle and Hilderbrand, 1995; McCourt and Sola, 1999). 6. New Public Management (NPM) 6.1 Elements of NPM In terms of the periodization outlined in Table 1, NPM is the reform model which succeeded the public administration model. Of course, there was continuity as well as change in the succession. The OECD’s (1995) review of public management developments, published at the high tide of NPM, includes initiatives to improve management of HR, something that the Weberian model also emphasizes in its own way. The essential change, however, was from the public administration doctrine of regular, predictable and rule-governed behavior to behavior that was driven by performance. The public administration doctrine tends to assume that if a sound framework of rules is put in place and public servants are persuaded to adhere, adequate performance will follow. But the governments that went down the NPM road were setting their sights on better rather than adequate performance. Moreover, continuing pressure to restrain public expenditure meant that better performance could be bought only up to a point, and although the stimulus of competition was introduced (as we shall see), it became clear that there were limits to its …