The Managerial Turn - part V

I started this series wanting to explore 3 basic questions –

-       Why and how, all of 30 years ago, did the “managerial turn” get underway, contaminating our everyday experiences and discourse?

-       How have we allowed managers to gain such unaccountable power?

-       What we can now do to bring them to heel?

Some of you may not remember the days when managers hardly existed in the public sector - so I therefore used extracts from the intro to the little book I wrote in the 1990s In Transit – notes on good governance to convey a sense of the strength of institutional inertia as I experienced it in the 1970s (even as some major reforms were taking place)…

It was at that point I realised how amazingly prescient Gerald Caiden’s “Administrative Reform” had been. It came out (in the US) in 1969, just after some of the UK Royal Commissions presaging major reforms (in fields such as the civil service, trade unions, local government, broadcasting) had published. But, for all the buzz there was then about “future shock”, few organisations (public and private) showed any sign of changing and the excerpts of Caiden’s book I can access don’t really explain what experiences moved him to select reform as his theme....

I also noticed that my references to the 1970s said more about professionalism than managerialism….hardly surprising since, under the influence of Illich and Alinsky, I had made a bit of a reputation for myself in the early 70s for my critique of professionals…

The Scottish professional class (of teachers, social workers, planners etc) had strong prejudices and myths about the people who lived in the disadvantaged housing estates. “Born to Fail?” was a national document which appeared in 1973 revealing the scandal of the concentration of “multiple deprivation” in a few such urban areas (including the Region covering half of Scotland which came into being a year later). This gave a few of us who were working on that issue a unique opportunity to forge for the Region a rare social strategy of empowerment.

This involved building – through pamphlets and training - what was almost a “counter culture” not only amongst the community workers but amongst younger managers in the various Departments.

It was only in the early 90s, after I had left the Region, that I recognised that we had perhaps been missing a bit of managerial discipline in the strategic work we did in the West of Scotland from 1975. This was the third of 5 messages I left with the urban committee of the OECD in a paper about the Strathclyde experience I presented in 1993 (see para 4.2 of the hyperlink) viz

- Resource social inclusion work with mainline money – not the marginal pennies

- give “change agents” proper support

- Set detailed targets for departments

- Establish free-standing community development agencies

- Be realistic about the timescale of change

So let me be more precise in my charge against managerialism. And let me start by pointing to the fact that Public Administration is the name of the study of the management of the public sector – reflected in the titles of the two flagship journals of the relevant US and UK academic communities – Public Administration and Public Administration Review, respectively.

I have vivid memories of discussions in the mid 1980s about the difference between management in the public and private sectors. My notes from those days show that - Some authors suggested the following distinctive features for public administration bodies -

·       accountability to politicians

·       difficulty in establishing goals and priorities

·       rarity of competition

·       relationship between provision, demand, need and revenue

·       processing people

·       professionalism and line management

·       the legal framework.

But, when you think about it, these features (apart from the first) are true of very many large private companies – where competition can be minimal or “fixed” (ie manipulated).

The definitive book on the subject - Bureaucracy - what Government Agencies do and why they do it  was written by JQ Wilson in 1989 and points out that MacDonald’s – the burger makers - is a bureaucracy par excellence – a uniform product produced in a uniform way.

So what makes a government bureaucracy behave so differently and be seen so differently? Three reasons - according to Wilson. Government agencies –

- can’t lawfully retain monies earned;

- can’t allocate resources according to the preferences of its managers;

- must serve goals not of the organisation’s choosing, particularly relating to probity and equity.

They therefore become constraint-oriented rather than task-oriented. He goes on to suggest that agencies differ managerially depending on whether their activities and outputs can be observed; and divides them into four categories (“production”; “procedural”;  “craft”; and “coping agencies”).

It was Chris Hood who popularised (in spring 1991 in the first of the journals mentioned above) the term “New Public Management” (NPM) when he presented A Public Management for all Seasons. This article stressed just how ruthless and relentless the attack of commercial management practice was on the hallowed turf of the public sector…No activity – even in the universities - was off limits to the managers

This was also the period when the term “the audit explosion” was coined

Those interested in trying to identify where the inspiration for NPM came from are invited to dip into this short intellectual history of its origins and theoretical basis

1992 saw the publication of Reinventing Government; Clinton’s election; and, in 1993, Gore being given the task to “reinvent American government”!! The term was so laughable – but no one was laughing!!

At this point, the floodgates of writing on the subject opened….New Labour’s programme of modernising British government (1999 – 2010) was just the icing on the cake….