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!
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.
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
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!
