A Way Out of the Crisis?

Abstract

Like all developed industrial countries, Austria is in the midst of a crisis of its centralist steering apparatus. To be sure, the proverbial Austrian general-storekeeper1 capitalism has limped a bit behind the economic and technical development of the leading industrial countries; nonetheless, the scenario is also a familiar one: more differentiated cooperative structures are overburdening the central steering mechanisms, and the increasing complexity of internal organization calls for the delegation of responsibility to local government, even as technical innovations require broader skills on the part of staff and personnel. Organizational development, total quality management, and all the other magical formulas of "crisis management" punctuate the discussion on the future of work, and hence, derivatively, educational reform as well. Against this background, the process of decentralization has hardly been posed seriously in Austrian schools (see, for example, Vierlinger 1990; Posch and Altrichter 1991; Severinski 1992; and Hackl 1995b). Thus to that extent the development of the Austrian school largely reproduces the general trend elsewhere in Europe.