The process of organizational decline and death: Internal and external factors precipitating the decline of the Ontario Ministry of Skills Development, 1985-199

This dissertation analyses the cause of the formal decline of the Ontario Ministry of Skills Development (MSD). The central research question is why was the organization severely truncated in 1989 four years after its establishment and then altogether extinguished in 1993 and replaced by the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board (OTAB)?;Based on the previous research two explanations are proposed to account for decline: internal deficiencies and competitive pressures. Data to "test" the explanations was collected from 49 in-depth interviews with senior political and civil service participants, including premiers, Cabinet members, deputy ministers and other senior officials from central agencies and line departments. A review of relevant documents, such as Cabinet submissions, and participant observation supplemented the data obtained from interviews.;The first explanation which proposes that MSD was poorly designed and led receives support from data which shows that MSD's inception was poorly executed with concomitant domain overlap and low levels of prestige. Furthermore, the organization had inadequate political and bureaucratic leadership which failed to build coalitions with other related ministries and while recklessly expanding MSD's domain.;The second explanation, which proposes that MSD faced high levels of competition from other ministries and insufficient regulation from the centre, also receives support. The overlap in domains between MSD and other ministries, especially those responsible for institutional training (the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, and the Ministry of Education) resulted in low levels of interaction and coordination.;The conclusion of the study is that the decline of a large organization is a complex multi-causal process in which the factors and processes from one phase of MSD's life influenced events in later periods. A discussion of the "lessons" learned from the MSD "experiment" about designing organizational forms for coordinating training policy and a prognosis for OTAB conclude the study.