Power circuit alignment and reform trajectories: a dynamic framework for public management research

Abstract Public management research has long recognized that power shapes reform outcomes. However, it has often examined different manifestations of power through separate research streams, including street-level discretion, professional power, and network governance, without integrating them into a unified theoretical framework. Drawing on Clegg’s circuits of power framework, this article develops an integrative approach that examines how episodic, dispositional, and facilitative power interact during public management reform. We argue that reform outcomes depend largely on whether these circuits exhibit full alignment, partial alignment, or misalignment. We develop this argument into a Power Circuit Alignment framework, which connects micro-level practices, meso-level structures, and macro-level systems and identifies circuit alignment as the key process explaining divergent reform trajectories. In doing so, the framework advances public management research by integrating previously separate power literatures within a single multi-level account. It also specifies how the circuits operate in public management: democratic accountability shapes the distribution of episodic authority, professional norms shape dispositional support and resistance, and interorganizational and intergovernmental complexity shapes facilitative capacity.