Del empaquetado neo-institucional a la materia prima: Una concepción alternativa a las reglas burocráticas de calificación de personal en la Administración Central

RODRÍGUEZ GUSTÁ, ANA LAURA

Montevideo, Uruguay

Jornada; Jornadas Anuales del Colegio de Sociólogos del Uruguay; 2000

Colegio de Sociólogos del Uruguay

This presentation will provide information about the design of the performance appraisals resulting from reform efforts at the Central Administration. In doing so, I will inform the reader about the stipulated rating rules, the evaluative stages, and the expected outcomes in terms of rewards. Then I will focus on the institutional basis of the procedures, by providing a detailed analysis of the three underlying objectives: improving employee control and task coordination, improving supervisors’ command capacity by means of bounded discretion, and introducing important status distinctions among employees. Overall, I will show that evaluative ratings are true raw material changed strategically, during the course of implementation, by supervisors. I take the performance ratings of the Ministry of Public Health and the Ministry of Culture. The evaluative procedures are one aspect of the reforms of public organizations in Uruguay. In a framework conceiving of managerial bureaucracies as antipodean to a formalized and hierarchical bureaucracy, and for this reason inherently beneficial; the evaluative procedures still provide hybrid elements. Their main features are the inception of status distinctions among employees, the improvement of labor force control and the increase of task efficiency, and the enforcement of supervisors’ managerial power vis-à-vis the introduction of clearly formalized guidelines to exert such authority.