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This concluding chapter examines how this study extends and reimagines a long scholarly tradition of state-building based on the European state experience, including ways the framework may help scholars fill in some of the mechanics of early European state-building that have been less well documented in the historical record because they affected public servants rather than elites. It also highlights contributions to the field of development sociology. The chapter points toward a fruitful new framework that opens new avenues of research for configurational approaches to understanding state capacity, interrogating the developmental consequences for where and how state capacity is situated within the varied administrative apparatus of central states. In addition, it highlights how the framework of the book may be of interest to organizational scholars more broadly, including identifying how the framework might also apply to private-sector organizations. The implications for development practitioners are also discussed. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the book's findings about the challenges of top-down institutional change and the importance of lived experience lay the foundation for a cognitive turn within institutional development scholarship that takes cognitive science more seriously in the way development interventions are designed.

This chapter asserts that, by drawing together learning points and key principles from private- and public-sector attempts to embed flexibility, agility, and adaptability into the everyday practices of organisations, it is possible to illuminate a set of key attributes required for putting organisational resilience into future practice effectively. The complex vulnerabilities and associated disruptions of today shine a light on the importance of developing corporate resilience to survive and thrive through enhancing both business continuity and competitive advantage. In the wake of 9/11, emergency or ‘resilience’ planning became a highly influential area of strategic policy in many areas of government and business. There was growing importance placed on developing robust processes and procedures for managing risk as a way to sustain key functions and improve the ability of an organisation to perform under conditions of disruption and stress. Greater importance was placed on business continuity planning as well as more nuanced forms of risk assessment and ‘horizon scanning’ that could better detect and plan responses to expected threats and possible crises.

Private sector organisations have learnt the importance of consortia and partnerships to handle large contracts. Public services have been slow to learn these lessons. This chapter examines how public learning about the impact of the long hours culture or the benefits of partnerships occurs when those who have a stake in the issue under consideration create new meanings and insights about it together. It also explores ways in which such processes – in which those involved hear their colleagues and stakeholders from other departments, agencies, and locations understand each other's perspectives – can forge new understandings by stimulating a collective ‘making sense’ that acknowledges individual contributions, but is shared and jointly owned.

This chapter illuminates how the practices underpinning economic and financial resilience have progressed since the early 2000s crash. It draws on a series of vignettes from private- and public-sector organisations. From there, the chapter charts a journey from a conservative approach, which sought continuity and promoted ‘business as usual’ following the crisis, to a situation where complexity is increasingly embraced to cope with an unknown future. Here, while the fundamental aim of incorporating complexity is to be better able to predict the future in order to generate stable conditions in which to better manage risk, there is also a sense that things have changed and that we can never return to the headless days of the early 2000s. The journey of economic resilience reflects the broader evolution of resilience as a universally applied idea.

This chapter studies how public and private sector organizations are increasingly using key performance indicators (KPIs) and technocratic procedures to manage work and workers and its consequences. Since the 1980s and the introduction of new public management (NPM) — an approach to running public sector institutions in a more business-like way — various kinds of assessment have been introduced to measure and track performance. Usually, these measures are institutionalized through formalized assessment schemes designed to improve efficiency, productivity, and quality. An entire bureaucracy has developed to oversee this datafication, and the management of institutions has transformed to become more instrumental and technocratic, guided by metrics. Decisions concerning individual promotion, departmental staffing and budgets, and strategic investments are informed by KPIs and rankings. In places like the UK and Australia, management through metrics has become deeply ingrained into the working lives of academics and the management of institutions. While Ireland has managed to avoid the worst excesses of management through metrics, it has not been totally immune. KPIs are now a part of the management regime and are used to guide decision-making, but they are used alongside other forms of information rather than narrowly determining outcomes.