When Bureaucracy Meets the Crowd: Studying “Open Government” in the Vienna City Administration
Abstract
Open Government is en vogue, yet vague: while practitioners, policy-makers, and others praise its virtues, little is known about how Open Government relates to bureaucratic organization. This paper presents insights from a qualitative investigation into the City of Vienna, Austria. It demonstrates how the encounter between the city administration and “the open” juxtaposes the decentralizing principles of the crowd, such as transparency, participation, and distributed cognition, with the centralizing principles of bureaucracy, such as secrecy, expert knowledge, written files, and rules. The paper explores how this theoretical conundrum is played out and how senior city managers perceive Open Government in relation to the bureaucratic nature of their administration. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to empirically trace the complexities of the encounter between bureaucracy and Open Government; and second, to critically theorize the ongoing rationalization of public administration in spite of constant challenges to its bureaucratic principles. In so doing, the paper advances our understanding of modern bureaucratic organizations under the condition of increased openness, transparency, and interaction with their environments.
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Biographies
Martin Kornberger received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Vienna in 2002. Prior to joining EM Lyon he worked at the University of Technology Sydney and Copenhagen Business School. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh Business School and a research fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. His research focuses on the ideas that inform strategy practice and new organizational designs, with the aim to stretch the political and philosophical imagination of practitioners, policy makers and scholars alike.
Christof Brandtner is a PhD student in sociology at Stanford University. He studies the expansion and consequences of rational organization in the public and nonprofit sector. Christof’s work includes studies of strategic management and administrative innovation in cities, managerial reform and openness among charitable organizations, and how rankings and ratings shape organizational behavior.
Renate E. Meyer is a Professor of Organization Studies at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Permanent Visiting Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. She is also Co-Director of the Research Institute for Urban Management and Governance at WU. She mainly works from a phenomenological institutional theory and has recently focused on framing and legitimation strategies, visual rhetoric, and new organizational and governance forms in the public and private sector.
Markus A. Höllerer is Professor of Public Management and Governance at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Senior Scholar in Organization Theory at UNSW Australia Business School. His research interests, broadly anchored in organizational institutionalism, include the dissemination and local adaptation of global ideas—in particular, heterogeneous theorizations and local variations in meaning—as well as the relationship between different bundles of managerial concepts and their underlying governance and business models in the public and private sectors. Recent work has focused on discursive framing as well as on visual and multimodal rhetoric. Markus’ research has been published in scholarly outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Public Administration, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Strategic Organization, or Urban Studies, as well as in books and edited volumes.
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Published online: January 12, 2017
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