My draft - continued. "The Long Search for Democracy" - part II

 A series of interesting tensions emerge from the first two chapters of my The Long Search for Democracy - best represented as Manichean opposities between

• Old and new

• West and east

• Management and politics

• The practical and the theoretical

- In 1989 “the state” crumbled – at least in eastern europe… more than 30 years on. how do we assess the “huge efforts” to make its operations more “effective”??

- Different parts of the world have their own very different approaches and ways of talking about reform. English language material has tended to dominate the literature; but

- Scandinavians, Germans and French let alone South Americans, Chinese and Indians have also developed important ideas and experience - of which English-speakers tend to be blithely unaware.

- Two very different “world views” have held us in thrall over the past 50 years….a “third” and more balanced (eg the “new public service”) has been trying to emerge

- At least 8 very different groups have been active in shaping our thinking about “reform” efforts. These are - academics, journalists, politicians, think-tankers, global bodies, senior officials, consultants and an indeterminate group

each uses very different language and ideas – with academics being the most prolific (but tending to talk in jargon amongst themselves; and therefore being ignored by the rest of us)

- Some old hands have tried to summarise the experience for us in short and clear terms. The lesson, they suggest, is that little has changed…

- What is sad is how few “social justice” campaigners seem interesting in this issue, Hilary Wainwright being an honourable exception…..

So it’s taken me a long time to develop this little table about patterns of writing about admin reform……

Table 12 The different sources of Communicating administrative reform

Source	Numbers Active in the field	Audience	In what format	With what “Tone”
Academics	Too many!	colleagues and students	Academic journal articles; and books	Aloof, qualified and opaque
Journalists	Too few specialists!	The public – and professionals	PR handouts generally; more rarely an article	Breathless; More rarely critical
Politicians	All leaders use the language of change – a handful understand it	The electorate	PR handouts; more rarely a pamphlet	Critical of past; optimistic of the future
Think-Tankers	Most	Opinion-makers	Booklets; and PR material	Ditto
Consultants	All	Senior civil servants	Confidential reports; very rarely booklets and even a few books	Celebrating their “product”
Senior civil servants	Few	One another; OECD wonks	Descriptive papers and reports	Ditto
Global organs (eg World Bank, ADB, WHO	Virtually all	A global network inc Cabinet Offices, Ministers, think-tanks; journalists;	well-researched, well-produced reports and websites	Omniscient, dry
Mugwumps – sitting on fences	Very few	The poor middle-ranking official who is expected to achieve the required change	Toolkits; manuals; roadmaps; notebooks	Open, humorous

The Argument We’re all ambivalent about “the State”….We slag it off with pejorative terms…and often profess to anarchistic and libertarian tendencies….In my formative period in the early 70s I was very taken with the concept of The Local State whose corporatist tentacles some saw strangling life în cities. Cynthia Cockburn’s 1977 book on the subject and the products of the national CDP Project were the most powerful expression of this critique – although Newcastle sociologists such as John Davies and Norman Dennis had led the way with their books on “The Evangelical Bureaucrat” and “Public Participation and Planner’s Blight”.

Local planners had status in those days – I actually taught planning students for quite a few years – using texts such as Critical Reading in Planning Theory. I was an active social democrat, consciously using the levers of (local) state power open to me to push the boundaries of opportunity for people I saw as marginalized and disenfranchised 

You can read the entire middle chapters - all 53 pages of "Questions about the State" and "The Management Virus"

The Management Virus

In the late 60s I was an early “reformer” – pushing at the open door offered by 2 Royal Commissions on Local Government which, between 1966-68, led to the wholesale reorganization of that system in, separately, Scotland and England and Wales in the mid-1970s.

The only academic discipline covering such developments at the time was that of public administration whose intellectual fare was every bit as boring as its name suggests – although my politics tutor, John P Macintosh, wrote a powerful and prescient book in 1968 on “The Devolution of Power – local government, regionalism and nationalism”. And another academic, John Stewart, was shortly to start electrifying a new generation of officials at Birmingham’s Institute for Local Government (INLOGOV) with a new vision of local power - centred on a more open and flexible system of local government – which, sadly, failed to materialize.

Since then, the world has been searching for the silver bullet of organizational improvement (or reform) in its public services. 50 years ago we naively thought that the right rules (and strategies) – fairly managed by well-intentioned officials and politicians in a system of accountable power – was the way forward…

But that model was thrown away in the 1980s – to be replaced by the “theory of the market” which argued that citizens would be better off being able to choose between competitive suppliers. David Osborne’s “Reinventing Government” (1992) was the book which really opened the floodgates – with its notion of “Steering…not rowing..”

The only problem was that most of the relevant services have this basic reality of being chunky monopolies ….Overnight therefore a system of regulators had to be created – bringing forth an Audit Explosion.

By 2000 it was obvious that wasn’t working – but it took 2008 to blow the thing apart.

But although another way of organizing things, whether in the economy or government, has been actively explored for many decades we still do not have a consensus about a better way….