Changing organizations in a changing institutional order: The reform of warsaw's governance system¹

¹ This is an excerpt from a study of the management of city of Warsaw (Czarniawska, n.d) which forms a part of a larger research program, Managing the big city: A 21st century challenge to technology and administration, conducted in cooperation between Gothenburg University, Sweden, and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. The program encompasses studies of European metropolises, beginning with Stockholm, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, and Brussel. The study was financed by the Daimler-Benz Foundation. The project of the program was prepared during the stay of the program leaders at Bellaggio Rockefeller Foundation. I am grateful to both foundations, and I thank my colleagues who read the paper critically: John Forester, Bernward Joerges, Katharine Peters, Tatiana Pipan and an anonymous reviewer. The first version of the paper was presented at the 2nd conference Public Sector in Common Europe, Nerano (Italy), June 1995.

Abstract

This paper reports a part of a field study dedicated to the issues of big city management, focusing on an introduction of a new governance system in the city of Warsaw. The study shows complexities of public sector reforming, which are common to many a public administration, although the normative theories do not pay them much heed. It also reveals the specificity of this particular administrative reform, which took place in the context of and as a part of an attempt to change the political and economic regime of the country. The reform is thus metaphorically framed as an attempt to translate without the help of a dictionary. Historical and contemporary complications are taken up in interpreting this manifold process.

Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembled a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid material of buildings, laws, regulations and historical traditions. (Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1 p. 4)

¹ This is an excerpt from a study of the management of city of Warsaw (Czarniawska, n.d) which forms a part of a larger research program, Managing the big city: A 21st century challenge to technology and administration, conducted in cooperation between Gothenburg University, Sweden, and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. The program encompasses studies of European metropolises, beginning with Stockholm, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, and Brussel. The study was financed by the Daimler-Benz Foundation. The project of the program was prepared during the stay of the program leaders at Bellaggio Rockefeller Foundation. I am grateful to both foundations, and I thank my colleagues who read the paper critically: John Forester, Bernward Joerges, Katharine Peters, Tatiana Pipan and an anonymous reviewer. The first version of the paper was presented at the 2nd conference Public Sector in Common Europe, Nerano (Italy), June 1995.

¹ This is an excerpt from a study of the management of city of Warsaw (Czarniawska, n.d) which forms a part of a larger research program, Managing the big city: A 21st century challenge to technology and administration, conducted in cooperation between Gothenburg University, Sweden, and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. The program encompasses studies of European metropolises, beginning with Stockholm, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, and Brussel. The study was financed by the Daimler-Benz Foundation. The project of the program was prepared during the stay of the program leaders at Bellaggio Rockefeller Foundation. I am grateful to both foundations, and I thank my colleagues who read the paper critically: John Forester, Bernward Joerges, Katharine Peters, Tatiana Pipan and an anonymous reviewer. The first version of the paper was presented at the 2nd conference Public Sector in Common Europe, Nerano (Italy), June 1995.

Notes

¹ This is an excerpt from a study of the management of city of Warsaw (Czarniawska, n.d) which forms a part of a larger research program, Managing the big city: A 21st century challenge to technology and administration, conducted in cooperation between Gothenburg University, Sweden, and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. The program encompasses studies of European metropolises, beginning with Stockholm, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, and Brussel. The study was financed by the Daimler-Benz Foundation. The project of the program was prepared during the stay of the program leaders at Bellaggio Rockefeller Foundation. I am grateful to both foundations, and I thank my colleagues who read the paper critically: John Forester, Bernward Joerges, Katharine Peters, Tatiana Pipan and an anonymous reviewer. The first version of the paper was presented at the 2nd conference Public Sector in Common Europe, Nerano (Italy), June 1995.