The strange British Love Affair with Reform

I had no sooner posted about the need for every country to be critically reviewing its systems of government than the British government came up with proposals for further reform.

It was actually a year ago that the relevant Minister, Michael Gove, first signalled the intention to reform the civil service – but the disastrous performance of the British government (as distinct from the civil service) during the Covid pandemic seems to have persuaded them that, at least for presentational reasons, a rather wider review was necessary. The proposals cover only ten pages (for which parsimony we should be grateful) but seem a bit vague and repetitive to me – with talk of

-       transferring officials out of the capital

-       recruitment system which bring those with different work experience into the system eg from business, local government, voluntary organs  

-       more training for both officials and Ministers

-       establishing more challenging structures to encourage creative thinking and discourage groupthink

-       performance management

-       sharper departmental accountability

-       greater diversity

-       better coordination

-       putting data at the heart of government

-       better use of scientific evidence

Properly to appreciate what’s going on, outsiders need to understand the politics involved.

Michael Gove has been one of the central figures of the Conservative Governments of the past decade – being Minister of Education from 2010-14 when his advisor was the notorious Dominic Cummings who was famously branded by Prime Minister David Cameron a “career psychopath” for his general nastiness and disruptive style.

Cummings then became the Director of the successful Leave Campaign during the Brexit referendum – with Benedict Cumberbatch appropriately taking the role of Cummings in the film “Brexit – the Uncivil War” – but then retired to the sidelines to nurse a rather scholastic blog and a business career.

To everyone’s amazement, Boris Johnson – having won the Prime Ministership (a contest in which Gove had been a major rival) - plucked Dominic Cummings in August 2019 to be his Principal Advisor. Within a few months Cummings was talking of the need for “wierdos and misfits to be at the heart” of the policy-making process – a view fro which I have a lot of sympathy – in fact it’s one I’ve been preaching for some time here. But Cummings is just too abrasive a character to last – and was sacked by Johnson in November last year. 

But hey presto – his philosophy has now become part of the received wisdom of the British Government. The Institute of Government is a fairly recent UK Think-Tank (founded 2008) which has established a good reputation for critical appraisal and has just published its own (short) comment on the government proposals – generally favourable. In what appears a deliberate choreography Cummings had been invited a few weeks earlier to a Parliamentary Select Committee hearing at which he gave evidence for 7 hours about the serious mistakes made by government Ministers – which also attracted favourable comment from the Institute of Government.        

But how come a country famed for its conservatism seems to love reorganisation and reform so much? The link gives access to a timeline detailing the non-stop changes which have affected British civil servants over the past 50 years – many of which have been globally copied – which is part of Martin Stanley’s superb website Understanding the Civil Service

Is this perhaps what Lampadusa meant when he wrote in the famous “The Leopard” that 

“things will have to change in order to remain the same”?

Non-stop organisational reform is not a good idea. Britain’s lack of a Constitution is one of the reasons why British governments are so prone to changing structures. 

“We have a cunning plan” they say – 

but, of course, don’t stay around long enough to pick up the pieces afterwards! 

At least, this time the focus seems to be more about changing "culture" rather than structure. So perhaps some lessons have been learned!  

Further Reading/Viewing

Change for the Better? A Life in Reform; (2021) the present version of a draft which presents a distinctive view of the challenge of admin reform in a variety of countries 

Dominic Cummings’ Evidence May 2021 to UK Parliamentary Select Committee – all 7 hours (Youtube)

Government Reimagined (Policy Exchange 2021) The latest UK Think-Tank report on the subject

The UK Civil Service site’s background note on the Policy Exchange report

Is Organisational Reform really all that sexy?

The last 2 posts have tried to direct readers to posts they may have missed last year - relating to one of the three subjects which most occupied my thoughts viz the nature of the economic beast which had us in its grips. You can read these thoughts more easily on “To Whom it May Concern” – the latest version of which is accessible by clicking on that title in the list in the top-right corner of the blog’s masthead.

Today I want to switch the focus to the section of the collection which is entitled “What is it about Admin Reform which makes it so sexy?” But first I owe my readers some explanation of why I continue to be so fixated about public management reform….Quite simply I find the writings on the subject less than satisfactory because they are produced either by academics (who reify and obfuscate) or by think-tankers (who simplify and exaggerate). It’s very difficult to find material written by practitioners – or, even better, by those who straddle boundaries of discipline, nation or role.

I came to full adult consciousness in the 1960s, getting my first taste of political power in 1968 and of political responsibility and innovation in 1971 when I became Chairman of a Scottish Social Work Committee.

“Reform” was very much in the air – although no one could then have imagined what an industry public administrative reform would become. Indeed, in those days, the only management author you could find in the bookstores was Peter Drucker. And the only books about reform were American….

The opening pages of my How did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy? try to convey a sense of what it was like to be an early pioneer of organisational change in the country. My position in academia encouraged me to develop a habit of publishing “think-pieces” often in the form of pamphlets in a Local Government Research Unit which I established in 1970 at Paisley College of Technology – this 1977 article gives a good example of the style.

The same year I published a little book about the experience of the new system of Scottish local government and, for the next decade, musings on my experience of running a unique social strategy in the West of Scotland. 

In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) were the reflections which resulted from my first decade living and working in the countries of post-communist central Europe. Eight years then followed in three Central Asian countries and strengthened a feeling about the inappropriateness of the approach we “foreign experts” were using in our “technical assistance”.

In 2007 I tried to interest people in the NISPace network in a critique called Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors – is admin reform in transition countries a religion, business or a medicine? – but to no avail.

I started blogging in 2008 with a website which is still active – publicadminreform - clearly signalling that I wanted to use it to reach out to others. Sadly that has not happened…but it has not stopped me from continuing to “talk to myself” on this blog and from trying to produce a book which does justice to the thoughts and experiences I’ve had in about 10 countries over the past 50 years….

So let me try to summarise why I persevere with this fixation of mine –

-       Authors in this field focus either on students or experts in government, academia and think tanks.

-       I know of only a handful of books which have been written for the general public

-       Most writers about PAR have known only one occupation – whether academic or think-tanker – and one country

-       I’ve occupied different roles (political, academic, consultancy) in different countries and can therefore see the issues from many sides

-       few authors have bothered to try to explore the possible reasons for the stratospheric and continued rise in interest in administrative reform

-       New cohorts of politicians, public servants and even academics arrive in the workforce without a good sense of the history of this subject

Post	What sparked it off	Why it’s worth reading
Time to reclaim public services Time to get the Finger out	Oxfam report for Davos Rereading last year’s draft book about administrative reform	Gives us the encouraging lessons from the experience of those who have rolled back privatisation
The invisible power of managerial ideology	Going back to Burnham	Explores the question we rarely ask
How did it happen? part II	My 1999 book “In Transit – notes on Good Governance”	Looks at how reform was seen in the 1990s
a Rare voice of clarity – part III	Gerald Caiden	A prescient voice
Machiavelli’s Warning – part IV	A reminder of the strength of organ inertia	A first stab at an answer to the question
The Managerial Turn - part V	Clarifying professionalism	First we rubbished the professionals
“Not with a bang, but a whimper” - Part VI	We don’t seem to have learned much in 40 years……	Key lessons are however extracted
Chris Pollitt RIP	Belated acknowledgement of a great scholar	Those who express important truths in a clear language deserve honour
Looking for purpose	“The Puritan Gift” is a rare critique of how modern management has poisoned us all	Has a good summary
Peter Drucker’s Deadly Sins of PA – part VII	The Grand Old Man of management says it better	Important proverbs
Wresting politics back from the technocrats	an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving”	Technocracy is the new enemy
Workforce management – an idea whose time has come	Laloux book	Summary of one of the most important books about organisations in recent years
Let the Fingers do the Talking	an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving	Good references
Real Control	Workforce management again
The Virus affecting the world	Neoliberalism
Blowing up departmental silos	Hilary Cottam’s book	Time to take this issue seriously
Plain speaking - words and PAR	A rare article about translation  should leave us wondering why international summits are not more conflictual..

Machiavelli warned us – being Part IV of the series on managerialism

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.” Machiavelli “The Prince” (16^th century)

The huge literature on the reform of public services rarely asks why and how “reform” was suddenly transformed from a topic of marginal interest to a veritable fixation…. The Machiavelli quote exposes the basic conundrum on which I hope this series of posts will throw some light…. the excerpts are from the intro of my little book In Transit – notes on good governance

“Increasingly in the 1980s, leaders knew that something was wrong - although the nature of the problem and solution eluded them. To some it was poor quality advice - or management. To others it was lack of inter-Ministerial co-operation: or over-centralisation.

In Britain a variety of reforms got underway from the early 1970s; and were accelerated when it became clear that no new resources were available for government spending and, indeed, that there would have to be significant cutbacks”.

But, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the mood of caution suddenly changed dramatically. Encouraged by the examples set by countries such as Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Finland, government reform become all the rage throughout the world in the late 1980s and 1990s. Initially this involved governments selling off industries such as Steel, Gas and Telecommunications but reform spread deep into the thinking about how the basic system of government and of social services should be managed - and what that meant for the role of government.

“Thanks to the global influence of bodies (such as the OECD and World Bank) the talk in the 1990s was of the "ENABLING" state - of government no longer trying itself to produce things and to run services but rather focussing on strategic purposes and trying to achieve them by giving independent public agencies - national and local - budgets and guidelines in contractual form. Then relying on a mixture of independent regulation, audit, quasi-market forces and arm-twisting to keep them on target.

Now (2000) no self-respecting politician - left or right - wants to be left behind from something that is variously seen as the "march of managerialism" or the "march of the market".

And the changed climate gives more courage to challenge staff interests and traditions of public service - although legal and constitutional constraints have been stronger on continental Europe. The inevitability of global change, the OECD or the European Union can, however, always be blamed! “

Bill Clinton won his Presidential victory in 1992 – the same year the book “Reinventing Government” was published – and soon had Al Gore heading up a major “Reinventing Government” programme of change which lasted a decade.

Even as I type the words, the outline of an answer to my question about the reasons for the sudden enthusiasm for reform is already emerging –

-       The disappearance of the threat of communism confirmed the apparent legitimacy of the Thatcher/Reagan agenda

-       Clinton and Gore’s espousal of the need for government bodies to be “reinvented” gave the notion of reform a global visibility and credibility

-       The UK had been quietly consolidating the case for innovation in the  delivery of public services with John Major’s various Citizen Charters

-       Global bodies such as The World Bank and the OECD were spreading the message of “lean government” with tracts such as the State in a Changing World (1997) which preached the doctrine of the minimum state; and Modernising Government (OECD 2005).The Canadian academic, Leslie Pal gave us the best expose in Inversions without End (2007)

-       In 1997, New Labour inherited the missionary zeal and launched in 1999 what they called the “modernisation of government” programme which lasted until Gordon Brown’s demise in 2010

If Protherough and Pick are to be believed, the first signs in the UK of the mangling of managerial language were in the 1980s – with “customer” becoming the fashionable word for “member of the public! I mocked this managerial invasion in Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary

Books on Managerialism

It’s curious how few books there seem to be about such a big issue!

I begin with what I consider to be the two best – and it’s significant that they go back at least a decade….  I suggest you go to the articles

Management and the Dominance of Managers – an inquiry into why and how managers rule our organisations; Thomas Diefenbach (2009) Great start to this book which I can read only in google excerpts  It suggests that the question of how managers have gained their excessive power has not been sufficiently explored…..This article of his is in “academese” but you can still sense his concerns - NPM – the dark side of managerial enlightenment

Managing Britannia – culture and management in modern Britain; Robert Protherough and John Pick (2003) 

Managerialism  a critique of an ideology; T Klikauer (2013) is a more recent book but received a devastating critique from one of the subject’s doyens…

Rethinking Management – radical insights from the complexity sciences; Chris Mowles (2011) A delightful and very thoughtful book from an experienced consultant trying to rethink his profession from first principles….

Confronting Managerialism - How the Business Elite and their schools threw our lives out of balance; Robert Locke and JC Spender (2011) Bit repetitive

The Puritan Gift; Hooper and Hooper (2009) A marvellous book which one of America’s greatest thinkers on strategy called “one of the best books I have ever read in my long life”

Against Management – organisation in the age of managerialism; Martin Parker (2002) A disappointing book from the “critical management school”

Managerialism – the emergence of a new ideology; W Enteman (1993)

Articles

As is often the case, the articles will give you more (bangs per buck) 

managerialism – an ideal type 2018

Evolution of managerialism 2016 article

The administrative reform industry;  2013 article 

When reforms become permanent; Douzens (2012) 

James Burnham – the managerial revolution and the development of management theory in post-war America (2011)  - article

Managerialism and its discontents; Parker (2009)

Burnham’s political thought; c 1980 review in US journal

Globalisation and Administrative Reform – what is happening in theory? Lawrence Lynn (2000)

George Orwell commentary on Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution

Is Admin Reform really Sexy?

It’s a bit eccentric, I know, to upload a book about the experience of pubic admin reform at a time when the British government and society is stuck in a crisis second in British history only to the second world war. Courtesy of the UK Parliament’s live television channel, I was able to tune in every now and then to this week’s parliamentary debate but was, for most of the time, engaged in updating the little E-book on “Reforming the State” (which I had uploaded in April last year) to take account of the additional posts on the subject.

I’m now running with the title "How did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy?" – and I perhaps owe my readers some explanation of why I continue to be so fixated about the issue…

Quite simply I feel that the writing on the subject falls into one of two categories – it’s produced either by academics (who reify and obfuscate) or by think-tankers (who simplify and exaggerate). It’s very difficult to find material written by practitioners – or, even better, by those who straddle boundaries of discipline, nation or role

I came to full adult consciousness in the 1960s, getting my first taste of political power in 1968 and of political responsibility and innovation in 1971 when I became Chairman of a Scottish Social Work Committee.

“Reform” was very much in the air – although no one could then have imagined what an industry public administrative reform would become. Indeed, in those days, the only management author you could find in the bookstores was Peter Drucker. And the only books about reform were American….

The opening pages of How did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy? try to convey a sense of what it was like to be an early pioneer of organisational change in the country. My position in academia encouraged me to develop a habit of publishing “think-pieces” often in the form of pamphlets in a Local Government Research Unit which I established in 1970 at Paisley College of Technology – this 1977 article gives a good example of the style. The same year I  published a little book about the experience of the new system of Scottish local government and, for the next decade, various musings on my experience of running a unique social strategy in the West of Scotland.  
In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) were the reflections which resulted from my first decade living and working in the countries of post-communist central Europe. Eight years then followed in three Central Asian countries and strengthened a feeling about the inappropriateness of the approach we “foreign experts” were using in our “technical assistance”.

In 2007 I tried to interest people in the NISPace network in a critique called "Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors – is admin reform in transition countries a religion, business or a medicine?" – but to no avail.

I started blogging in 2008 with a website which is still active – publicadminreform - clearly signalling that I wanted to use it to reach out to others. Sadly that has not happened…but it has not stopped me from continuing to “talk to myself” on this blog and from trying to produce a book which does justice to the thoughts and experiences I’ve had in about 10 countries over the past 50 years….

So let me try to summarise why I persevere with this fixation of mine –
-       I’ve occupied different roles (political, academic, consultancy) in different countries and have therefore been able to develop a facility for seeing different sides to the same story
-       My knowledge of “the literature” tells me that few authors have bothered to try to explain the stratospheric and continued rise in interest in administrative reform
-       New cohorts of politicians, public servants and even academics arrive in the workforce without a good sense of history
-       Few authors in this field seem to have an interest in communicating with the public – they focus instead on students or experts in government, academia and think tanks. I know of only two books with a wider appeal

So please have a look at How did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy?

The Zombies take over the OECD

Time was when I read avidly everything the OECD produced on public management…..it was so clearly-written and uplifting…..I actually delivered a paper to one of its Paris seminars in 1990 – if on urban management which was then my area of expertise….But it was practitioners who were then the mainstay of OECD operations and gave it its credibility

The World Bank, on the other hand – with its legions of consultant economists - was suspect – particularly its infamous 1997 Annual Development report The State in a Changing World. To their eternal credit, the Japanese had been warning the Bank that it, for one, did not accept the Bank’s neo-liberal view of the State - Robert Wade’s important article by New Left Review in 2001 gives some of the background to the resignation of Joseph Stiglitz, the Bank’s Chief Economist, driven out in 1999 by Larry Summers…..

The OECD seemed to have a more activist stance on the role of the state – to which my attention turned from the mid-1990s as readers know from my 1999 book In Transit – notes on good governance. The OECD’s 2005 report on Modernising Government was the first warning sign that it had perhaps left its benign role behind.

Critical books and articles confirmed our doubts – particularly The OECD and transnational governance; ed Mahon and McBride (2008); and The OECD and global public management reform; L Pal (2009)

This Canadian academic, Leslie Pal, has worked assiduously over the past decade to bring to our attention the nature and scale of the effort global organisations have made to market a concept of the modern state eg Best practices in public mant – a critical assessment; (2013) ; and The OECD and policy transfer; (2014)

Managing Change in OECD Government – an introductory framework; Huerta Melchor (OECD 2008) represents the high point of optimism – drafted as it was before the full implications of the global financial crisis had hit home. I;ve excerpted the opening couple of paras and explain why I’ve highlighted some text after the excerpts…..

Today’s world is highly competitive and demanding. Society is better informed and expects more from public and private organisations alike. Traditional public processes and institutions are less effective in satisfying people’s needs. Globalisation, the wide use of communication and information technologies, and the coming of the knowledge society, among other factors, are rapidly changing the world’s order. This has created new challenges to nation-states as people’s expectations from government have increased, job seekers are more demanding on job content, and societies call for more investment in education, health, and society but are unwilling to pay more taxes ("Modernising Government: the way forward", OECD 2005).

Personnel systems are becoming less adaptive to these new challenges. Indeed, traditional practices in public administration are the product of a different context with different priorities. Now, governments have a new role in society and are taking on new responsibilities but generally without the necessary tools to manage them effectively. Public managers are expected to improve the performance of their organisations focusing on efficiency, effectiveness, and propriety which were not the priorities 50 years ago.

Therefore, to be able to respond to a changing environment the public sector has to transform itsstructures, processes, procedures, and above all, its culture. In this new order, the management of change has been identified as a critical variable for the success or failure of a reform policy. Managing change aims at ensuring that the necessary conditions for the success of a reform initiative are met. A reform policy may fail to achieve change, may generate unintended results or face resistance from organisations and/or individuals whose interests are affected.

For that reason, policy-makers and politicians need to pay special attention to issues such as leadership, shared vision, sequencing, resources for change, and cultural values while designing and implementing a reform initiative.

I’m always suspicious when abstract entities such as “society” are credited with thoughts….it’s called “reification”; presumes uniformity of thought; and assumes away any possibility of differences of opinion let alone social dissent!! Very dangerous….

And just look at the phrase – “new order”!! And the way that “contexts” have developed priorities….I thought it was people who had priorities!

I explained some years ago why I am suspicious of manuals and “toolkits”…….And seven years on, the OECD has just issued this booklet (for aspiring EU members) Toolkit for……public admin reforms and sector strategies – guidance for SIGMA partners (OECD 2018). which reads as if it were written by a sixth former….  Apparently the EC introduced (in 2014) “a third pillar” into its enlargement policy – to complement those of “rule of law” and “economic governance” – namely public admin reform….I’m sure the army of EC consultants and their counterparts in Balkan and “neighbourhood” countries are very grateful to have such cookbooks – they save everyone the trouble of having to develop approaches which actually fit the local context……

Examples of the new “Manual”/Guidelines/Toolkit approach

The Principles of Public Administration (OECD – SIGMA 2017)

Systems approaches to public sector challenges – working with change (OECD 2017)

Quality of Public Admin – a factsheet; EC Factsheet (2016)
Quality of Public Administration – a toolkit for Practitioners (EC 2015) 

From Old Public Admin to the New Public Services – implications for public sector reform in developing countries (UNDP 2015)
Making Reform Happen (OECD 2010)

Sequentialism or gradualism? – on the transition to democracy and rule of law (2009)  - a more critical article