Change Dynamics and Public Management: Challenges and Opportunities
Author(s)
Stupak, Ronald J.
Abstract
With the growth of contemporary technology, communications, and transportation, infused with television, computers, and the information highway, all of us are quickly becoming aware of the linked consequences of change. As traditional boundaries are collapsing around us, there is a growing sensitivity to the need for change, along with the belief that we need to plan for it. As such, strategic planning, competitive positioning, and innovative management systems that involve longer-term perspectives, critical trade-offs, and opportunity-driven forecasting are being fashioned here in the United States, and around the world. To grasp the initiative to shape an organizational context that will ensure a competitive, vibrant, healthy, fiscally rigorous and humane decision making environment for the public sector is the analytical foundation on which this symposium is anchored. Public managers have no option but to respond to American and global events, and the accompanying cultural, economic and political developments with courage, innovations, and strategic perspectives. It is clear that a paradigmatic crisis is occurring in American society and in public administration. Therefore, the harbingers of new paradigms are being created and crafted, which provide “hard” methods of inquiry, “real” cases of success; sound “fiscal” measures of performance; and “clearer” professional/leadership redefinitions of responsibility.
