Abstract

The diffusion of a new public management, characterized by a strong emphasis on the need to develop more efficient management procedures for cost-cutting and consumer satisfaction enhancement, can represent an important opportunity to analyze how, and to what extent, classic tools and concepts of management, that are of common use in the private sector, can be applied to the field of public administration. In this article we focus our attention on the concept of organizational routines, that is at the basis of the behavioral theory of firm, and we discuss how it can be applied to the study of some particular developments that are currently taking place, at different levels, in specific sectors of the public administration.