La gestione dell'austerity nei Comuni italiani: verso il cambiamento organizzativo
- Austerity management
- Decline
- Downsizing
The recent global crisis has reawakened many scholars’ interest on austerity management in public organizations. Specifically, since their preferred alternative consists in implementing cuts on the expenditure side, the literature on cutback management has come back into vogue. This latter has been traditionally characterized by a proliferation of words often used to refer to identical concepts, and by a consequential difficulty in classifying empirical evidences, which are also scarce. While a meaning contribution in solving the first one has been made by Overmans and Noordegraaf (2014), the one relating to practical cases is still an open gap. In an attempt to fill it, this article focuses on the case of 142 Italian Municipalities’, quantitatively analysing their answers to a questionnaire. Results show that in 2015 they were in an intermediate stage of implementation of a downsizing reaction, adding some important specifications to the just mentioned Authors’ theoretical framework.