Abstract :
[en] The role and competencies of public managers are a central topic of public administration reforms implemented these last 30 years in OECD countries. In fact, as New Public Management (NPM) doctrines suggest, public administration managers have to be professionalized and free to manage (Minogue, Hulme & Polidano, 1998). This professionalization and managerial freedom imply the development of new competencies borrowed from the private sector. This leads public managers to be focused on the search for performance and to consider citizens as clients.
Without losing its dominance, the NPM conception has evolved with the development of new theoretical paradigms such as Neo-Weberian State (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004 ; Peters, 2001 ; Drechsler, 2005) and Public Value Management (Stoker, 2006 ; Moore, 1995). In these models, the manager is still driven by performance targets to provide citizen-customers professional and quality service. However, these paradigms reassert the centrality of the State and the specificity of the public sector by comparison with the private sector. In addition, the public manager must play a role in the co-construction of public value for citizens and political actor in both the short and long term (Greve, 2010).
These evolutions have led to a need for hiring public managers with new profiles, and this has been reflected in new practices for recruiting and training future top civil servants. In Belgium, at some levels of government, these practices include for instance mandatory training prior to the appointment of public managers. This training aims at developing the managerial skills of the Walloon and French-speaking public services leaders. Doing so, the purpose is to guarantee the objectification of public managers’ nomination. But so far, do these trainings develop the skills highlighted by the theoretical models above? Are they in line with the ambitions of public management reforms of the last thirty years?
From these first questions, we analyse on the one hand the training system genesis and the interactions between the original actors, and on the other hand, the effects of the training, in a critical perspective. Our study of the training effects is critical for two reasons. First, it questions the role of training in the transmission of the dominant principles conveyed by the NPM and its successors. Second, it considers the role of this training in the reproduction of power games between actors. In other words, we analyse how the compulsory training actually reflects a new conception of public managers and their competencies. Moreover, we consider the impact of this training on the political-administrative system and the power relations included.
To this end, we articulate two distinctive approaches: one inspired by the strategic analysis (Crozier & Friedberg, 1977) to understand the interactions between actors at the genesis of the dispositive; and the other one inspired by Critical Management Education (CME), emphasizing the role of management training in the transmission of dominant ideology (Caproni & Arias, 1997).
