Global Social Policy, INGOs and Strategic Management

Abstract

The partial globalization of social policy is seen in the growth in importance of welfare programmes emanating from supranational and global governmental and non-government institutions. Yet social policy analysts have given relatively little attention to the significance of organizational management redesign for their field's global dimension. The primary objective of this article is to draw conceptual connections between `strategic management' patterns within the global (`super') international non-government organization (INGO) sector and the fight against global poverty. The principal argument is that the recent emulation by global INGOs of the strategic management methods of multinational corporations (MNCs) holds major implications for the effectiveness of delivery of anti-poverty programmes, and that this phenomenon calls upon researchers to pay closer attention to MNC organizational `structures' in assessing the effectiveness of global welfare reform. Primary among the salient INGO management changes have been the increasing use of INGO—government—corporate strategic alliances, stepped up contractualism, and various organizational redesign tools.