Governance in Australia

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the criticisms of bureaucracy and focuses on hierarchical organisation, disobedience, rule-dominated structure, fragmentation and impassiveness. It begins with a brief summary of the market, community and bureaucratic models of governance. It then applies the models of market and community governance in order to examine the ability of these alternatives to address the criticisms of bureaucracy. Finally, the paper illustrates that where the bureaucratic model fails, an alternative model accounts for its shortcomings.

From the Paper:

"Whilst the bureaucratic form of governance has many criticisms, this essay has used the market and community models to provide alternatives to this failure. Of the bureaucratic criticisms of hierarchical organisation, rule-dominated structure and fragmentation, it was shown that the market model could address these issues. The community model also offers alternatives, providing solutions to the bureaucratic criticisms of disobedience and impassiveness. However, despite the increasing movement in modern society to the alternatives of market and community, the bureaucratic model still exists and plays an important role in regulating activity in the alternative models. Particularly between the models of bureaucracy and market, there has been a shift towards a combination of models to structure organisations. Although bureaucracy is often criticised for its failures, both the alternative market and community models also have failures of their own. This illustrates that where one model may fail in its organisational structure, there is an avenue for the alternative models to correct this failure."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Adams, D & Hess, M (2001), 'Community in Public Policy: Fad or Foundation?' National Council of the Institute of Public Administration, Australia, Viewed 3 October 2006, <http://plinks.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=5&hid=1&sid= bb340c40-ab67-4cd9-8bed-c738f6ce2ead%40sessionmgr4>.
• Barzelay, M 1992, Breaking Through Bureaucracy: A New Vision For Managing In Government, University of California Press, Los Angeles: California.
• Colebatch, H & Larmour, P 1993, Market, Bureaucracy and Community: A Student's Guide to Organisation, Pluto Press, London: UK.
• Considine, M & Painter, M (eds) 1997, Managerialism: The Great Debate, Melbourne University Press, Victoria.
• Fenna, A 2004, Australian Public Policy. 2nd ed., Pearson Education, Frenchs Forest: NSW.

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