Working in neopatrimonial settings: Perceptions of public sector staff in Tanzania and Uganda

This paper focuses on staff perceptions of the use of merit principles in staff management. It focuses specifically on hiring, firing, transfer, demotion and promotion practices in the public sector in Tanzania and Uganda and on how such practices influence organisational performance and staff motivation to work in such ostensibly neopatrimonial (NP) settings. The central argument is that the NP paradigm applied to these issues does not provide an adequate analytical basis for understanding politics and administration. Specifically, proponents of NP tend to: (a) ignore that legal-rational and patrimonial practices co-exist and interact; (b) interpret all evidence of informality and poor performance as a result of patrimonial practices thereby ignoring other relevant factors identified by human relations and organisational theory; and (c) use the category ‘patrimonial’ as a label for practices that are actually quite different. As a result, analyses based on the paradigm tend to overlook the often significant variations in organizational capacity in the public sector; the uncertainty that characterises relations in NP settings; and the peculiar kinds of hypocrisy that this generates.