Engineering the Developmental State Path: The new role of management control systems in a knowledge-intensive public organization

Abstract

This paper examines how a democratic developmental state ideology in a developing country establishes and institutionalizes a neoliberal, corporate-style governance model that produces social control under the guise of enhancing efficiency, accountability, and democracy. We gather data from multiple sources spanning 1991-2018 to trace how the temporal implementation of management control tools at one of Ethiopia’s largest and oldest universities delivered exogenous politico-ideological demands by undermining its collective decision-making organs. Using historical institutionalism, a theory that posits institutions change through
gradual endogenous processes and exogenous punctuations, facilitated by the choices of willful actors at critical junctures, we explain how social control mechanisms influence long-term governance outcomes. We find that a series of New Public Management reforms facilitated institutional (re)production and reactive sequences, creating a ‘locked-in’ trajectory of social control through ‘individualized autocracy’. The subjects of social control were actors deemed threats to the ideology, namely academics within a knowledge-intensive public organization. The social control was exercised through the design and implementation of temporally
interspersed public-sector reforms that employed modern management control systems within New Public Management. We find that public-sector reforms in universities, contrary to their stated goal of enhancing productivity and democratic participation, foster autocracy among politically connected individuals who seek to perpetuate the state’s structural ideological dominance over academia. Our study contributes to KIPO governance by examining changes in management control in developing countries and their role in social control in non-neoliberal contexts. By placing macro-level ideological developments at the center of its analysis, our historical approach complements micro-level approaches to the study of control systems.