'Practicing alchemy': a grounded theory of the implementation of best value in Victorian local government

This research explores how a new public sector modernization agenda, Best Value, is implemented in Victorian local government authorities. It aims to generate a substantive theory grounded in conceptual understanding of how organizational development practitioners interpret and make Best Value operational. The Alchemic Life-Cycle accounts for the process of transitioning from a prior management regime based on market competition principles. Starting with no explicit hypotheses, data from in-depth interviews, supplemented by observation, is analysed using the Glaserian coding paradigm. The results demonstrate how new projects of rule impact on day-to-day management of service delivery, identifying how participants resolve their main concern(s) as they struggle to make Best Value objectives operational, while producing service reviews in a milieu of continuous improvement. We found the flexible framing of the legislation contributed to a context of uncertainty, generating widely variable practitioner responses. The Alchemic Life-Cycle, with four stages: Filtering, Smoothing, Praxis and Grooming, was formulated as a Grounded Theory, and cyclic cause-consequence model of the implementation process. The core category Practicing Alchemy was identified as a useful heuristic for explaining how practitioners resolve the inherent tensions of reconciling performance management with the duties requirements of the legislation. With each stage characterized by a predominant (but not exclusive) alchemic practice, the Alchemic-Cycle explains resolution of successive concerns, emerging at each stage, to inform the evolution of new shared understandings of Best Value within, and between, local authorities. With completion of the mandated reviews five years after the inception of Best Value, new uncertainties emerge about the future leading to a renaissance of the Alchemic-Cycle. Relying significantly on the experiential ‘learning’ of practitioners, the introduction of new projects of rule like Best Value is likened to the challenge of early alchemists to produce gold from base metals. Their struggles had the unintended consequence of underwriting modern Pharmaceutical practice. Similarly, changes to centrally decreed programs concerning service delivery should be understood as malleable in the hands of those responsible for achieving the Best Value objectives. Our findings indicate the value of treating service delivery as a dynamic phenomenon, and of treating the predilections of policy makers to depend on zero sum measures of quality assurance cautiously. The academic agenda for evaluating public sector reform may need to be more broadly conceived to accommodate inductive research approaches to meaningfully explicate conditions, causes, strategies, and behavioural reactions of organizational practitioners to new projects of rule. In addition, The Alchemic Life-Cycle provides insight on divergences both in practice, and conceptually, from some foundational neo-liberal assumptions of New Public Management, demonstrating that service quality cannot be fully understood when divorced from the impact of historical, contextual and political legacies on which it is predicated.