Nowadays, many public professionals face identification problems towards public policies they have to implement; that is, they experience policy alienation. This is troublesome, as for a proper implementation a minimal level of identification with the public policy is required. We use literature related to the identification problems of (public) service workers, for example Public Service Motivation (Perry, 2000), New Public Management (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004), technology (Zuboff, 2004) , street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) and organization commitment (Steinhaus & Perry, 1996). But mainstream literature has not yet studied the problem of identification of the service worker with public policies. These disciplines will, however, be used to construct propositions for the identification problem. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna by using the concept of alienation, a concept originating from the sociology of work and organization. Literature from this discipline offers useful concepts for building our theoretical framework. All in all, the project offers a multidisciplinary approach, combining the research fields of public management, public policy sciences and the sociology of work and organization.

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hdl.handle.net/1765/10873
Department of Public Administration

Tummers, L., Bekkers, V., & Steijn, B. (2007). Public policy alienation of public service workers. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/10873