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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, August 26, 2019

Chris Pollitt RIP

I live what might be called a peripheral life – remote from friends and professional communities. That was brought home to me when I discovered that the scholar, whose work I was summarising in yesterday’s post, had died a full year earlier.

Chris Pollitt was one of two Christophers whose writings about public administration so impressed me that I had opened some time ago a special folder for their articles - the other being Chris Hood. Both were my age and wrote, in wry and elegant English, articles to which they would give provocative and exciting titles.    
I remember an early book of his Managerialism and the Public Services – cuts or cultural change in the 1990s? (1993) which clearly and critically analysed the ideas and practice shaping the public sector revolution in Britain and America in the 1980s and explored possible alternatives to this new orthodoxy. Even better was “The Essential Public Manager” (2003) which had some friends role-play and discuss some common dilemmas facing contemporary public services..

And his various articles were a constant delight to anyone looking for clear expositions of what was going in the reform industry. Here’s how he summarised things on one occasion – “I would suggest a number of ‘lessons’ which could be drawn from the experience:
1.      Big models, such as NPM or ‘good governance’ or ‘partnership working’, often do not take one very far.  The art of reform lies in their adaptation (often very extensive) to fit local contexts.  And anyway, these models are seldom entirely well-defined or consistent in themselves.  Applying the big models or even standardized techniques (benchmarking, business process re-engineering, lean) in a formulaic, tick-box manner can be highly counterproductive

2.     As many scholars and some practitioners have been observing for decades, there is no ‘one best way’.  The whole exercise of reform should begin with a careful diagnosis of the local situation, not with the proclamation of a model (or technique) which is to be applied, top down.  ‘No prescription without careful diagnosis’ is not a bad motto for reformers.

3.     Another, related point is that task differences really do matter.  A market-type mechanism may work quite well when applied to refuse collection but not when applied to hospital care.  Sectoral and task differences are important, and reformers should be wary of situations where their advisory team lacks substantial expertise in the particular tasks and activities that are the targets for reform.

4.     Public Management Reform (PMR) is always political as well as managerial/organizational.  Any prescription or diagnosis which does not take into account the ‘way politics works around here’ is inadequate and incomplete.  Some kernel of active support from among the political elite is usually indispensable.

5.     PMR is usually saturated with vested interests, including those of the consultants/advisors, and the existing public service staff.  To conceptualise it as a purely technical exercise would be naïve.

6.     Successful PMR is frequently an iterative exercise, over considerable periods of time.  Reformers must adapt and also take advantage of ‘windows of opportunity’.  This implies a locally knowledgable presence over time, not a one-shot ‘quick fix’ by visiting consultants.

7.     It does work sometimes!  But, as indicated at the outset, humility is not a bad starting point.

One of his colleagues put up a full tribute to his work which mentions many of his key books – you can find it in full here here. I’ve taken the liberty of editing it down a bit-

Christopher Pollitt was one of the most productive researchers ever in the field of public administration and management. He wrote, coauthored and edited nearly 30 books and countless articles and reports. In “Public Administration”, a journal he edited between 1982 and 1989, he published 15 articles.
Christopher's books show the enormous width and depth of his knowledge. First, he produced seminal textbooks like “The Essential Manager” (2003) or “Advanced Introduction to Public Management” (2016) that display his ability to synthesize, make central concepts understandable to students/practitioners and illustrate their applications.
In his most cited work, “Public Management Reforms”, with Geert Bouckaert, he combines two of his main research interests, studying public sector reforms in a comparative context. This book is very useful both for its unambiguous analytic framework and its very impressive overview of reforms in so many countries. It is not surprising that the book has gone through several editions and updates.

Christopher's many research interests were reflected in his key book publications. He was interested in public services, as reflected in his early “Management and the Public Services: Cuts or Cultural Change in the 1990s” (published in 1993) and “New Perspectives on Public Services: Place and Technology”, published in 2001. He was interested in quality assessment and this led, for example, to the publication, in 1995, of “Quality Improvements in European Public Services”.
………….
Looking at Christopher's articles over the past decade, one can distinguish three broad lines of interest. One is an emphasis on taking stock and reviewing the comparative experiences in public sector reform. These publications, most of them with Sorin Dan, include ‘30 Years of Public Management Reform: Has there been a Pattern?’, for the World Bank from 2011; ‘The Impact of NPM in Europe: A MetaAnalysis’ (2011); ‘Search for Impact in PerformanceOriented Management Reform: A Review of the European Literature’ (2014); ‘The Evolving Narrative of Public Management Reform: 40 years of Reform White Papers in the UK’, from 2013; and ‘NPM Can Work: An Optimistic Review of the Impact of NPM Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe’ (2015).
Christopher also took aim at new reform fashions and institutions; typical examples include ‘Bureaucracies Remember, PostBureaucratic Organizations Forget?’ (from 2009) and ‘Talking about Government: The Role of Magic Concepts’ (from 2011).
Christopher was always interested in and concerned with developing public administration as a field of study, and this led to some highly influential papers. Some of these critical contributions are ‘Envision Public Administration as a Scholarly Field in 2020’ (published in 2010) and ‘Future Trends in Public Administration and Management: An OutsideIn Perspective’, a 2014 paper for the international COCOPS research project.

Overall, then, what characterized Christopher's profile as a researcher and scholar? Unlike many of his colleagues, he had a background as a civil servant, which influenced him considerably. This outlook is pretty well summed up in the following sentence from the preface of his 2011 New Perspective book: ‘What I hope to offer, at least on my optimistic mornings, is a new way of thinking about public service organizations – more concrete and practical than long analyses of abstract management tools and concepts, and more rooted in locational specificities of everyday life.’ He really succeeded in this endeavour by combining wellgrounded and clear concepts with close attention to empirical data.

Christopher was a great communicator who really enjoyed telling stories. He brightened up conferences and workshops with wellconstructed presentations that often involved surprising twists and turns. But he even more liked to entertain his colleagues and friends with, at times, endless, but never boring stories. His stories always included an edge that one could learn from, especially as they pointed to the shortcomings of human nature, something that he had a relaxed attitude towards.

Let Chris’s own challenging words end this tribute –

“what we see in academic PA is too often a retreat into scholasticism or, at the other extreme, a kind of highbrow management consultancy. Of course we need both these types, but we also need a solid core of PA scholars who practice independent, high-quality critical analysis of big things which are happening now and will happen in future (climate change, demographic change, migration). Scholars who will build and find funding for ambitious projects aimed at those issues, simultaneously growing networks of concerned scholars across disciplines and fields. And – most importantly – who communicate, not only in learned journals, but also on websites and blogs, radio and TV and the press. Many citizens really are interested in why their schools are failing or their police are corrupt, and far less so in what celebrity politicians said to each other yesterday. We should be a respected voice addressed to that appetite”

One of the journals he edited, “Public Administration” has put created a “virtual edition” which allows access to several of his articles. Coincidentally I had already collected a few hyperlinks for sharing….

A Pollitt Resource

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