The invisible power of the managerial ideology

For some 50 years I’ve been chewing over the question of how the organisations that run our public services might be “managed better”. Indeed, some might say that I “have a bee in my bonnet” about “public management” (ie that I’m fixated about it). To which the only appropriate answer is the Churchillian…

”some bee!….some bonnet”!

Amongst all the confusing talk there has been about “neoliberalism” in the past decade, another animal has lurked ……..multiplying and changing shape until it has insidiously penetrated our very minds…..and that is of “managerialism”. In this post (and others to come) I want to look first at how this has happened; then at the nature of the virus; and finally at what we can do about it.

Over the past decade I have several times alluded to managerialism as the new ideology – the first time as far back as 2009 and, to take another example, in 2014.
But the references have been casual - it is time to do a serious analysis!

It was, of course, James Burnham who first set this ism running with his The Managerial Revolution - published as far back as 1942. When I read his book in the early 60s it was, therefore, still fresh - particularly from the way it had been used by Anthony Crosland to argue that the managerial revolution had transformed the nature of capitalism.... 

Management first came to my attention when I found myself a town councillor in 1968 – representing a neighbourhood whose public services aroused constant complaints and were managed in an off-hand if not arrogant manner by the municipality.

My town had been one of the first to designate its Chief Officer a “Town Manager” or CEO – they had previously been “Town Clerks”! But it was the idea of citizen participation rather than management which was attracting interest in the country – the UK Liberal party indeed used an electoral/tactical form of it known as “pavement politics”.

I decided to beat them at their own game by launching various ward-level campaigns, self-help projects and town-level participation processes (in my capacity by that time as the Chairman of a Social Work committee).

I was also reading up on the community development and organisational change literature and producing academic reports with titles such as “From corporate planning to community action”, “community development – its administrative and political challenge” and, in 1977, a little book called “The Search for Democracy”

In the mid 1970s (at the age of 33) I became one of the leaders of a Region which covered half of Scotland and employed no fewer than 100,000 professionals (teachers, social workers, police, water and sewage engineers etc). Making officials pay attention to “citizen voice” became the core of the innovative Social Strategy for the Eighties which a few of us developed in the late 1970s. I, for one, had been profoundly affected by Ivan Illich’s critique of professionalism 

Management training for officials didn’t really exist in those days (!!) – although the Institute of Local Government Studies (or INLOGOV) had been set up in Birmingham University in 1964 – with John Stewart as an inspirational force. In my dual capacity as an academic and change agent, I made repeated trips there to absorb their thinking….Almost certainly it was that spirit which gave me the confidence to launch in the mid 1970s a new approach called the “member-officer group” which had small groups of middle level officials and politicians jointly assess the quality and effectiveness of a range of council services…

We knew that the majority of the professionals in our service had strong prejudices and myths about the people who lived in the disadvantaged housing estates  and started to build what was almost a “counter culture” not only amongst the community workers but in some younger managers in what was an important new Chief Executive Office which was set up

The 1970s had seen the quiet start to a range of managerial initiatives in national government – triggered by the Fulton Report into the Civil Service commissioned in 1966 by Harold Wilson,

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she brought not just management ideas but business people whom she let loose on a mission to bring a more business-like approach into government. Her huge privatisation programme, of course, involved getting rid of a large range of activities completely from the government sector - but a lot remained and was massively restructured into free-standing Agencies….

By now, the world was beginning to sit up and take notice of what it loosely called “Thatcherism”. It was academic Chris Hood who first suggested (in 1991) that it was more than a political programme of public asset disposal and had become a new managerial doctrine to which he gave the name “New Public Management” and whose 7 features he analysed in this table

New Public Management (NPM) according to Hood (1991)

No.	Doctrine	Meaning	Typical Justification
1	Hands-on professional management of Public Organisations	Visible management at the top; free to manage	Accountability requires clear assignment of responsibility
2.	Explicit standards and measures of performance	Goals and targets defined and measured as indicators of success	Accountability means clearly stated aims
3.	Greater emphasis on output controls	Resource allocation and rewards linked to performance	Need to stress results rather than procedures
4.	Shift to division of labour	Unbundle public sector into units organised by products with devolved budgets	Make units manageable; split provision and production; use contracts
5.	Greater competition	Move to term contracts and tendering procedures	Rivalry as the key to lower costs and better standards
6	Stress on private sector styles of management practice	Move away from military- style ethic to more flexible hiring, pay rules, etc	Need to apply "proven" private sector management tools
7.	Stress on greater discipline and parsimony	Cut direct costs; raise labour discipline	Need to check resource demands; do more with less

Like bees to a honey-pot, such a designation was irresistible to academics who have since spawned a veritable industry on the subject….

It would be wrong to say that NPM is the same as “pop” or “guru” management” which has been the subject of ridicule since such books as Huczynski’s Management Gurus (1993); and Micklewait’s “Witch Doctors” (1996) – but arguably it has played the same ideological role in the ranks of senior civil servants and Think Tankers as Peter Drucker’s and Tom Peters writings did in previous decades for business leaders…

It is impossible for new generations to understand the excitement in those days – Wordworth captured the mood when he wrote these lines in celebration of the French revolution –

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 

But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times, 

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 

The attraction of a country in romance! 

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, 

When most intent on making of herself 

A prime Enchantress—to assist the work 

Which then was going forward in her name!