7 - Policy analysis in the bureaucracy: the production of knowledge for professional public management training

Summary

Introduction

This work aims to analyze some aspects related to education and training in senior public management (SPM) in Argentina, considering the relationship established between segmentation and knowledge management. Changes in the relations between state and society have structured increasingly complex social relations. The public administration itself does not escape this. For this reason, the existing specialization processes in the scientific and technological fields are also expressed in the civil service. This chapter will introduce the problem of the segmentation in knowledge and competencies that shape SPM, presenting some dilemmas around education and training systems. The design and implementation of education and training programs must be conceived from the perspective of an agile, flexible, modern, transparent, inclusive, and open paradigm, which can and should be linked to the knowledge management that the organization itself does. That is a fundamental element of providing quality services and equal opportunities to all citizens.

Knowledge of bureaucratic structures, their characteristics, peculiarities, forms of entry, systems of education and training, and promotion have been central to studies on the state and public administration, which have been elaborated from different disciplines (Weber, 1944; Crozier, 1969; Oszlak, 2015; Peters, 2001).

This study aims to address some aspects related to the education and training of the public sector, with emphasis on SPM, that is, the highest hierarchical positions in the structure of public administration.

During the last decades, partly due to some great social transformations, such as structural reforms carried out in several countries in the state apparatus itself, the functions of recruitment, entry, and permanence in the public sector have changed as well as strong modifications in their training and education systems. This implies an institutional redesign and an analysis of the new missions and functions that appear in the different transformations of public organizations. We will especially address how the education and training mechanisms of the public sector have been transformed, as well as their link with knowledge management. In this chapter, our primary goal is to analyze the specificity of the functions and objectives of the different positions that comprise SPM, by detecting and analyzing the knowledge, expertise, skills, and competencies, both general and specific, for each segment of this level of the state structure.

This set of transformations has been registered in numerous public administrations.