Inspired by changing paradigms on public management -from Weber’s bureaucracy, over NPM to NPG- governments can choose today from a range of ideal-type coordination tools ( Pollitt & Bouckaert 2011; Smullen 2007; Osborne 2010). Hierarchy-, market-, and network- mechanisms can be used to coordinate policy implementation (Bouckaert et al. 2010). At the same time, scholars claim that governments, organisations and managers have to deal with wicked policy issues nowadays. Wicked policy issues entail uncertainty, are complex, open ended, or intractable (Head & Alford 2013, p.2). Efforts to deal with these policy problems are influenced by the working mechanisms of the public sector. These inform the sequence of action of policy implementation by public sector organisations. Head and Alford (2013) claim that wicked issues call for new strategic approaches and processes, which must coexist with those of competing policy priorities. The task of a central government is to design coordination-arrangements, by creating or enforcing instruments and functions, in order to reach coherent policy implementation by managers in government agencies.
The central question in this paper is: how do managers perceive these coordination-arrangements designed at the central level, and how do they deal with the wicked, cross-cutting policy issues in their own organisations? We will study perceptions of public managers in the Flemish government.
Q-methodology, a method designed to systematically study persons’ viewpoints, is used to distinguish different perspectives that public managers have on the challenges of dealing with wicked, cross-cutting policy issues. In Q-methodology, a series of statements is presented to the respondents, who are then asked to sort the statements into a quasi-normal distribution of preference. Next, factor analysis is used to statistically distinguish perceptions on coordination of wicked issues.
