We take managerialism for granted – even although it didn’t exist in
the 1960s. “Managerial” then was only an adjective and, thanks to James
Burnham, followed by the word “revolution” (at least in the immediate post-war
period) to refer to what he first argued in 1941 was the growing influence of
senior managers in America’s larger Corporations vis-à-vis its shareholders. An argument sustained by the likes of Tony Crosland and Andrew Shonfield
who persuaded us that the system had now been tamed - although history has demonstrated
that this was a brief truce in the struggle between state, corporate and union
power. And, further, that shareholders and the importance of "shareholder value" came back with a vengeance in the 1980s....
In 1956, William W Whyte’s classic Organisation
Man may have painted a picture of docile managers but change was in the
wind - and was prefigured in Alvin Toffler’s Future
Shock (1970) which analysed vague social forces, not deliberative
organisational change
Even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty didn’t envisage significant social
engineering – although the power of the economists and number-crunchers was
beginning to be felt in the likes of Robert McNamara
And yet, however slowly, the 1970s saw in Britain the first signs of a
new management ethos in both central and local government which, by the late 80s
had become a gale-force wind. To most people at the time, public sector reform
was a graveyard for reputations….there seemed no mileage in it. There is an
important story here which has never been told properly….which resolves into
two basic questions –
- Where
did the urge to reform come from?
- How
on earth did managers become the new Gods?
In the late 90s I wrote a little book I wrote for a central European audience
- “In Transit – notes on good governance” – which tried to capture the change….
The life-cycle, pragmatism and attention-span of
Ministers and local government leaders (in the post-war period) caused them generally to adopt what might
be called a "blunderbuss" approach to change: that is they assume
that desirable change is achieved by a mixture of the following approaches -
·
existing
programmes being given more money
·
issuing new
policy guidelines - ending previous policies and programmes
·
creating new
agencies
·
making new
appointments
Once such resources, guidelines or agencies have been
set running, it was assumed that politicians would move quickly on to the other
issues that were queuing up for their attention.
Of course, they needed some sort of guarantee that the
policies and people selected will actually enable the resources and structures
used to achieve the desired state. But that was seen as a simple implementation
issue. Politicians tend to think in simple "command" terms: and
therefore find it difficult to realise that the departments might be structured
in a way that denies them the relevant information, support, understanding
and/or authority to achieve desired outcomes.
Increasingly, however, in the 1970s and 80s people
began to realise that large "hierarchic" organisations - such as
Ministries - had serious deficiencies which could and did undermine good
policies eg
·
their
multiplicity of levels seriously interferes with, indeed perverts, information
and communications flows - particularly from the consumer or client.
·
they
discourage co-operation and initiative - and therefore good staff. And inertia,
apathy and cynicism are not the preconditions for effective, let alone
creative, work!
·
they are
structured around historical missions (such as the provision of education, law
and order etc) whose achievement now requires different skills and inter-agency
work.
To move, however, to serious administrative reform is
to challenge the powerful interests of bureaucracy itself (on which political
leaders depend for advice and implementation) demanding an eccentric mixture of
policy conviction, single-mindedness and political security which few leaders
possess.
Whatever the appearance of unity and coherence at
election time, a Government is a collection of individually ambitious
politicians whose career path demands making friends and clients rather than
the upsetting of established interests which any real organisational reform
demands.
The machinery of government consists of a powerful set
of "baronies" (Ministries/ Departments), each with their own (and
client) interests to protect or favour. And Governments can - and do - always
blame other people for "failure": and distract the public with new
games - and faces.
What one might call the "constituency of
reform" seemed, therefore, simply too small for major reforms even to be
worth attempting. For politicians, the name of the game is reputation and
survival.
COMMENT – looking at this now, 20 years later, this analysis smacks of the influence of the public choice ideologues
– also evidenced in the 1997 World Bank Development Report on the
State in a Changing World .
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