The conceptions about managing coordination in Iranian governmental machinery: a Q methodology study

Alignment among governmental organizations is one of the major national concerns in all political systems. The origin of this concern is the weakness of “horizontal management” which refers to horizontal coordination among all organization that exercise national governance. One of the important influences on horizontal management is the attitudes and perceptions of governing elites. This paper focuses on perceptions of barriers to coordination in government among public administrators, programming elites, politicians and academics involved in the government system. The authors use the inductive research technique Q-methodology, which is a research method used to study people’s “subjectivity”, to investigate the views of of 50 members of the governing elite about barriers to coordination of the Iranian government web. The results show that these elite members have seven distinct conceptions about managing coordination in government which are based on how they perceive these barriers. The authors labeled these conceptions as: goal-orientation, unification-orientation, policy-orientation, reality-orientation, equilibrium-orientation, performance-orientation and architecture-orientation. The seven conceptions are examined in more details and are interpreted based on existing theories in the final section of this paper. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013