Books about getting public services to run well for the average person are little fun to read – which is a crying shame since the issue is of fundamental importance to almost all citizens.
Arguably, it was Gerald Caiden who first made administrative reform sexy – in the late 1960s
Because it’s an issue which has been
central to my work, as academic, politician and then as consultant, for the
past 50 years, I’ve had to wade through thousands of books and article on the
subject since then – most of them academic. A few only have given real pleasure
– those written by people such as Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt and B Guy Peters –
exposing the nonsenses of the fashion for New Public Management (NPM) which
started around 1990.
Most of the writing is spoiled by the
appalling academic tic of backing up every statement, in almost every line,
with named references (in brackets) linked to long bibliographic lists. And academics
have to demonstrate their cleverness – so the articles and books consist of
long descriptions of innovations – with results difficult to measure but almost
certainly with little real impact…
You might think that the net result of
this torrent of negative academic coverage would have discouraged innovators in
government – but, hey, there are reputations and careers to be made out of the
change process. And staff turnover is such that the disappointing results which
eventually come in can be blamed on others
Managers first started to make an
appearance in government in the 1970s – they were the magicians supposed to turn dross into gold. I confess that I was an early enthusiast for
“corporate management” which is indeed still alive and well in the continued reference to managerial silos which are to be slain…..John Stewart of the
INLOGOV institute of the University of Birmingham was the guru who inspired a
whole generation of local senior officials to think more creatively about this
and indeed led me, in the mid 1970s, to help set up in Europe’s largest Region two
new types of structure – area committees and scrutiny groups of middle-level
officials and politicians
But it was the Department of Government at Harvard University under the leadership of Mark Moore which began to show what it was possible to do at a more local level…His “Creating Public Value” (1995) celebrated the energy and creativity which good public managers brought to state bodies at both the national and local levels. By then, however, the formulaic NPM had got its grip and Moore, despite teaming up with Stewart and producing a second book, remained a lone voice – with his message that people (rather than techniques) made the difference.
In recent years Ive noticed a little
ripple of interesting titles about more creative ways of working – such as Frederic
Laloux’s “Reinventing
Organisations” (2014), Jorrit de
Jong’s (of the Kafka Brigade fame) “Dealing
with Dysfunction” (2014), Hilary Cottam’s “Radical
Help” (2018) culminating in Strategies
for Governing (2019) by Alasdair Roberts
But it’s only in recent weeks that I’ve realised that Mark Moore’s influence has inspired a few Europeans (particularly from the Netherlands) who have been producing a series of books on good practice in public management – of both the “heroes” and “institutions” (of integrity) sort as they are called in the recent Guardians of Public Value – how public organization become and remain institutions (2021) ed A Boi, L Harty and P t’Hart This seems to take inspiration also from Hugh Heclo whose “On Thinking Institutionally” I wrote about some years ago
At this stage I would normally conclude
with a “resource” of relevant titles – but I realise that this can look a bit
off-putting…..so those interested can ask me for the list (or I’ll add it later)
