Reforming the state: Understanding the vicious circles of reform

Organization scholars have often criticized the discipline of being distant from practical managerial problems. In this article we discuss another form of distance: from citizen's problems. The recent financial crisis in Europe, especially in the South, made manifest formidable needs for massive state reform. The challenge, from a process view, is that previous reform attempts have often failed, with each new failure leading to less readiness for future reform. We discuss the possibility of state reforms being trapped in a pattern of vicious circularity, thus articulating two fundamental yet under-explored topics in European management research: state reform and the vicious circle.