I will recommend that you use a systems thinking approach with it associate tool: Evolutionary Learning Laboratory, The ELLab which offers a methodology for creating informal learning spaces or platforms for managing complex issues. It aims to introduce systems thinking for researchers, research managers, policy makers and other decision makers to develop a shared understanding of complex issues and to create innovative and sustainable solutions using systems approaches. The research processes include generic skills in problem solving, team participation and team learning. It consists of a seven step process and methodology for integrated cross-sectoral decision making, planning and collaboration in dealing with complex multi-stakeholder problems. 

In the post modernist culture the multiphrenia like print, electronic, film, photographs and web has been of utmost importance. Being skeptic and being confused has been the impact and the world will keep on to create a grand design. The post modernist world and globalization of administration  from the institutions like UN's umbrella organizations can also play a vital revolutionary role to create the myth of implementing human rights and social justice through the postmodernist multiphrenia's like print, electronic, film, photographs and web ....

I will recommend that you use a systems thinking approach with it associate tool: Evolutionary Learning Laboratory, The ELLab which offers a methodology for creating informal learning spaces or platforms for managing complex issues. It aims to introduce systems thinking for researchers, research managers, policy makers and other decision makers to develop a shared understanding of complex issues and to create innovative and sustainable solutions using systems approaches. The research processes include generic skills in problem solving, team participation and team learning. It consists of a seven step process and methodology for integrated cross-sectoral decision making, planning and collaboration in dealing with complex multi-stakeholder problems. 

Maybe you can have inspirations in some of this material:

CRUIKSHANK, Barbara. The will to empower: democratic citizens and other subjects. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999.

ESCOBAR, A. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011 (1995).

FERGUSON, J, The anti-politics machine. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1990. p. 251-277.

Questionnaires and Focus groups could work.

This is an interesting question. The two words are, at times, used as synonyms hence the confusion. Indeed, in a recent article, I have used the word 'reform' when I could perhaps have made a distinction between reform and modernisation.

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ikBa9ceeQvvvISvzzVIX/full

However, one can strictly make a distinction in the following manner: one could say that public service reform of the last four decades has taken the form of what is known as modernisation. So, reform has a wider and more abstract connotation than modernisation and refers to the need to change per se. Both reform and modernisation can be used rhetorically to imply the antiquated’inefficient nature of public service and public administration pre-1979.

Modernisation however has a narrower and more concrete connotation than reform and denotes a set of policies that embody the principles of New Public Management.. NPM roughly equates to making the public sector more like the private sector. It hopes to do this through a set of techniques and practices such as performance management, the use of indirect labour through outsourcing, the replacement of bureaucratic/professional approaches with managerial ones. The idea is to make public administration and public service more ‘efficient’ through injecting market-like mechanisms into it. For example, decentralising pay determination and service delivery in order to link them to local labour markets. However, this decentralisation goes hand-in-hand with an increased centralisation in that targets are centrally set whether it be for student intake into universities or NHS hospital waiting times.

Dear Arvydas,

Interesting question.

I just can not figure out the reason why we necessarily need empirical research on postmodernism which can be most effectively and comprehensively investigated through qualitative research designs. I'd like to know what you specifically mean by '' empirical research '' , is it tantamount with the epistemological ontological and theoretical  backgrounds of  Empiricism ?  Or you have a more dynamic approach to it including both qualitative and quantitative designs? 

hope my inquiry is not regarded as a fallacious argument of '' answering a question with another question !

Dear all,

Thank You for helpful answers,

Dear Rahimi Ali,

I meant all possible qualitative and quantitative research which could be. possible to have in addition to descriptive and reflexive design.