Strategies for Governing - Reinventing Public Administration

A strange new virus was let loose on the world some 50 years ago – so strange that it lacked a name. In 1975 it caused a report called “The Crisis of Democracy” to be produced; it made states “ungovernable” and/or “overloaded” but, in recent years, has acquired the name of “neoliberalism”.

In 1989 “the state” had crumbled – at least in eastern Europe – and a huge effort was made by international bodies and consultancies to try to encourage countries in that region build on western experience and create effective state bodies which would be responsive to public needs… and deal with the new socio-economic challenges which required dramatic changes in how all state bodies went about their business…

The Brits had started this fashion in the 1970s – but, by the 1990s, everyone wanted in on the act….In How did Admin Reform get to be so sexy? I suggest (on page 21) 15 questions on the best way into the most interesting (and extensive) writing about the reform of public services and noted that

- Different parts of the world have their own very different approaches and ways of talking about public sector reform. English language material has tended to dominate the literature (with an emhasis on learning from commerical practice); 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.
- We are overwhelmed by texts on reform experience but most written by academics – targeting their students and other academics. Where are the writers who can help the public make sense of it all?
- At least 8 very different groups have been active in shaping our thinking about “reform” efforts. These are - academics, politicians, think-tankers, global bodies, senior officials, consultants, journalists 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 interested in this issue (Hilary Wainwright being an honourable exception….)
- and the public, suffering from a decade of austerity, have been left blithely 

unaware of the incestuous discussions the subject of state reform has been causing amonsgt the cognoscenti

The Covid pandemic, however, brought home to everyone the damage austerity had been doing to the social fabric. 

I have been rereading “STRATEGIES FOR GOVERNING - reinventing Public Administration for a dangerous century” which a Canadian academic, Alasdair Roberts, produced in 2019. It argues that -

The field of public administration took a wrong turn forty years ago, and slowly moved away from large and important questions about the governance of modern-day states. The purpose of this book is to map a way back to the main road.

This is a book about public administration and what its aims should be. It is intended for researchers in the field, practitioners in public service, and students preparing to become researchers or practitioners, but it will also interest readers concerned about building secure and thriving societies.

My argument is straightforward: In the United States, the field of public administration was launched almost a century ago by people with bold aspirations. They were not interested only in the efficiency of government offices; they wanted a thorough overhaul of the creaking American state so that it could manage the pressures of modern-day life.

Unfortunately, this expansive view of the field’s purpose has been lost. Over the last four decades in particular, the focus within the field has been mainly on smaller problems of management within the public sector.

This narrowing of focus might have made sense in the United States and a few other advanced democracies in the waning decades of the twentieth century, but it does not make sense today.

The challenge of governing was described by the Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli a half millennium ago. Machiavelli warned the rulers of Italian city-states such as his native Florence that their work was fraught with danger. Sometimes the threat was posed by other city-states, and sometimes it arose within the city walls because people were restless and hard to please. A clever leader sought advice on how to build institutions that would bolster his authority both inside and outside the city walls. But even strong institutions could be toppled by the tempest of public affairs. They had to be renovated constantly to keep up with changing conditions, and this was very hard to do. States that did not constantly renew themselves, Machiavelli warned, were likely to collapse.

Some commentators have suggested that Machiavelli lived in unusually precarious times. In some ways, though, the rulers of sixteenth-century Florence had it easy. Florence was merely a city-state: its walls contained only four square miles of territory and sixty thousand people. Today the average state has more than two hundred thousand square miles and more than thirty million people. Compared to Florence in 1500, China has a million times as much land and twenty-three thousand times as many people. The institutional apparatus required by a state like China is more vast and complex than anything Machiavelli could have imagined.

There are additional complications for today’s rulers. Machiavelli warned about renewing institutions to keep up with the times, but the world in which he lived was relatively stable. In important ways, it was not much different when he died in 1527 than when he’d been born sixty years earlier. By comparison, the pace of change today—social, economic, technological—is blistering. The planet’s current population of seven billion is also more restless: urbanized, literate, wired, and mobile. And they have higher expectations of their rulers. Standards for security and order, public services, and protection of human rights are more demanding today than they were in the sixteenth century. The leaders of modern-day states have a difficult assignment.

• They must devise a strategy for leading their countries toward security, order, prosperity, and justice.

• Next, they must design and build institutions that translate their strategy into practice.

• And then they must deal with the vicissitudes of time and chance, adapting strategies and institutions in response to altered circumstances and unexpected events.

The first self-styled school of public administration was established in 1922, and the first textbook in public administration, written by Leonard White of the University of Chicago, was published in 1926. Woodrow Wilson’s work did not get much attention until the 1930s, when professors of public administration invented a history for their new field, which included a contribution from a well-regarded then-recent president. The first generation of scholars and practitioners in public administration were tied to a political movement in American politics known as progressivism, which coalesced in the 1890s and gained strength over the next two decades. American society was convulsed during these years by the emergence of big industries and cities, stark inequality and labor unrest, a surge in immigration, extraordinary technological advances, and shifts in the international balance of power. Americans had great hopes for their country. But many also worried that events could spiral out of control. Institutions designed for a simpler time did not seem sufficient for new realities. “The government of the part of the world in which we live,” Luther Gulick warned, “is in many respects three generations behind our necessities.”3 Gulick was one of the leading figures in American public administration in the early twentieth century. He believed that progress required a complete reconstruction of the old order. The writer Walter Lippmann called this “the fitting of government to the facts of the modern world.”

Martin Amis - stylist extraordinaire

Martin Amis’ unexpected death has produced an outpouring of admiration bordering on love. One of the rare exceptions was Terry Eagleton whose reflections drew attention to the liberalism underpinning the clique to which he belonged

English culture has produced a number of cliques and coteries in its day, from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Bloomsbury Group to Macspaunday (otherwise known as the Thirties poets Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis). The Angry Young Men of the Fifties weren’t exactly a clique since they scarcely knew each other, and apart from being young they shared almost nothing in common, least of all anger. Several of them ended up as curmudgeonly old buffers with dubious views about women and ethnicity. Among the latter was Kingsley Amis, father of the novelist Martin Amis, who died last week. Amis Senior moved from the high-spirited iconoclasm of Lucky Jim to a Right-wing clubman’s view of the world, and we shall see later that in one respect at least, Amis Junior followed suit.

Amis’s own clique — Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Clive James — were a formidably talented bunch of wits and whiz kids, almost all of them products of Oxbridge in an era of intense cultural creativity, the Sixties and Seventies. Between them they have produced superlative fiction, caustic satire, and devastating humour. Hitchens, who wrote that the life of the “poxed and suppurating” John F. Kennedy was remarkable not for being cut short but for lasting so long, described Prince Charles (as he was then) as a “morose, bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts”. Ian Fleming was “a heavy sadist and narcissist and all-round pervert” with a particular penchant for the human bottom.

Most commentaries, however, have drawn attention to his style and the sheer originality of his sentences. Writing on Saul Bellow’sThe Adventures of Augie March, he provided the most succinct description of his literary credo:

“Style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis, and so on), but they aren’t separable: they come from the same place. And style is morality.”

Amis always considered himself a satirist, which is to say a moralist, and his war against immorality revealed itself in another war in The War Against Cliché - Michael Crichton’s dinosaur epic “The Lost World” is for him a “strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences” in which the reader encounters “herds of clichés, roaming free. You will listen in ‘stunned silence’ to an ‘unearthly cry’ or a ‘deafening roar’. Raptors are ‘rapacious’. Reptiles are ‘reptilian’. Pain is ‘searing’.”

Amis’s aversion to this kind of writing was almost pathological, and it is no coincidence that one of the hallmarks of his own style was his use of modifiers, which he unmoors from their usual contexts. So we get “gentle coma” and “grim approval” and “glare of congeniality.” He forced the reader to rethink first principles.

He does this because he understood that the dangers of bad prose are not merely aesthetic. “Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart,” he wrote in an essay on Fay Weldon. “Cliché always does.” It is a mental rot that, like poison ivy, eventually smothers and poisons the body it is attached to. When you flick through “The Lost World”, you realise that you are not reading a novel in any real sense of the word (especially if you boil down the term “novel” to its first principles). What you are reading are strings of clichés held together by coordinating conjunctions and laughable dialogue.

In “Politics and the English language”, Orwell described the act of “throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you… and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” It is at this point, Orwell wrote, that “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear”. For Orwell, “political chaos is connected with the decay of language”.

Amis never liked Orwell, throwing away 1984 after reading an unpardonable cliché — “ruggedly handsome” — on the first page. “The man can’t write worth a damn,” was his verdict. But I think the two men shared an understanding of what happens when, as Orwell wrote, language is reduced to thoughtless phrases bolted together “like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house”. Clichéd language is the perfect vessel in which to transmit an ideology that resists scrutiny and relies on obfuscation to promulgate. For both Amis and Orwell, bad writing is a form of unthinking that can end in a callousness to human cruelty and the horror it wreaks.

I have to confess that I wasn’t a fan of his novels – but I loved his non-fiction, starting with The Moronic Inferno in which he collected the assessments he had written of the various American authors he had grown to respect in what ultimately became his home

And it was James Wood, the UK born New Yorker’s literary critic whose tribute superbly captures the reasons for Martin Amis’ power

He combined many of the classic elements of English literary comedy: exaggeration, and its dry parent, understatement; picaresque farce; caustic authorial intervention; caricature and grotesquerie; a wonderful ear for ironic registration. Take that phrase, “a work of colossal administration.” Sterne, Fielding, Austen—above all, Jane Austen—might have recognized its mixture of cruelty and mercy. The Austen of “Emma,” the satirist who describes the irritating Mrs. Elton’s large bonnet and basket as her “apparatus of happiness,” would have seen exactly what Amis is doing here. To fall to the ground massively, slowly, with great difficulty, is an act of labor that wins from the writer that cumbersome word “administration.” And the cool Latinate tease of it is funny. But it also hints, more tenderly, at what will be needed of us—our administration, as we struggle to lift the almost deadweight up off the street. The entire drawling phrase ironically distances something that’s unbearably painful and intimate.

The Englishman’s adoration of the foreignness of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, the comedian’s yearning for seriousness and soul, the borrowing of deep “themes” (nuclear disarmament, the Holocaust, Stalinist terror, Islamic extremism)—these obsessions were all surplus to his true literary vitality, which was comic and farcical. Like a number of postwar English writers, he chased after the things he flagrantly lacked, idealizing the qualities he found most difficult, or was simply unwilling, to enact in his own literary practice. (Iris Murdoch’s admiration for the vital and utterly free characterization of Tolstoy and Shakespeare might be another example of this odd English questing.)

The Guardian tribute also puts it nicely

It is often said that this generation of writers was the closest the books world gets to having rock stars, then Amis was Mick Jagger. Those 70s photographs (The Rachel Papers years) of him pouting extravagantly at the camera, cigarette dangling – you can almost smell the smoke and ambition – announced a changing of the guard. His pose, like his prose, poised somewhere between provocation and seduction. Where the literary world had been grey and tweedy, presided over by ageing grandees (Amis Sr, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch), now it was young and outrageously brash, and Amis was the frontman.

The insolence, the silliness, the seriousness, the grotesqueness, the erudition and audacity were all swept up in those inimitable sentences and corralled into order by his cleverness with form. As Enright summed up in her review: “Damn, that fool can write.” And, like an imposing building slightly worn with time, Amis changed the landscape of literature so dramatically that it is hard to remember what it looked like before. And for all the macho-ness of his writing, his influence can be seen in writers of the generation that followed, for instance his friend Zadie Smith.

“He was a talismanic figure for my generation of novelists, and an inspiration to me personally,” says another friend, Kazuo Ishiguro. “He was famous, notorious even, for his biting satire and swaggering prose, but there was always a surprising tenderness not far beneath that surface. His characters were always yearning for love and connection. I believe ultimately his work will age well, growing over the years.” We will be reading him for decades, weather permitting.

But to go back to 2009 and Amis’s closing words on Updike: “His style was one of compulsive and unstoppable vividness and musicality. Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself, ‘How would Updike have done it?’ This is a very cold day for literature.” And so it is today. Younger writers will ask: “How would Amis have done it?” He was exceptionally sui generis.

Another author recounts the impact Amis made on him when he was only an aspiring author – once more emphasising the generosity of the man

By way of unpacking for the newly Amis-curious what pleasure his best work brings to those who admire it, here are three great generosities that are as alive in the style as they were in the man.

The first is to do with straightforward abundance. There’s a ravishing luxuriousness to all his writing. You get to revel and recline in the great opulent apparel of our language as if it were yours to drape yourself in all along. Which, of course, it is. In this way, he generously returns to you what you feel you have lost by hair-shirting your way through other writers of various pinch, beef and earnest. You feel more subtle in his company, you feel your own vocabulary expand, your sensibility for words is reconjured, your vow of love for the English language is remade; in the moment of reading his best work, you fee  richer.

The second is to do with his scrupulousness and precision. Leaving aside macro concerns, you can as a reader always rest assured that there is no other British prose writer who has taken quite so much care over the word-by-word selection that goes into making a sentence. His status as a novelist is mercurial but his paragraphs are still the best in recent English. Most of this hand-to-hand stuff is intuitive for him (as was apparent when he spoke), but he also checked and double checked and read and reread his work until its sound and rhythm and timbre was (as he felt it) perfect. For many readers this assiduousness is strangely relaxing. Relaxing because you know you can trust him; because you never have the feeling of being let down on the sentence level by a cliché, or a repetition, or some other infelicity that breaks the all-important spell of authorial command. 

The third generosity is to do with exuberance – an intoxicating joy, a pleasure, a live kinetic vitality that lives word to word in his work. As your author-guide, he is forever delighting you with unexpected phrase-making, with freshness, with ingenuity, with invention and ingeniousness. In his other masterpiece, "Money" you laugh, you gasp, you shake your head, you rush towards the next sentence at the same time as you back up to marvel at the last. Think again about the meaning of this word, he seems to urge the reader, and then look at this word next to that word. I never wholly bought his Nabokovian style-is-morality schtick. But I do believe that his work is existentially incandescent only because it is stylistically incandescent. 

This last quality – of exuberance and spirit; the incandescent style – is more in the tradition of the poets than the novelists; it is also much more in the tradition of the 18th century – Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding and the gang – than the writers he is often compared to – Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse. If you combine these thoughts, the figure who comes to mind is the great 18th-century poet Alexander Pope. And, indeed, I have always thought that Amis has a great deal in common with Pope’s sensibility. The way Pope is a flat-out genius with words and in such Bach-like musical control; the way he is unsurpassable as a compassionate-but-mighty-and-scathing satirist; the way he is unable to write about matters of the heart organically; the way he is endlessly funny and arch and sly and collusive and playful; most of all, the way he loves and takes care of his readers. From the opening of Pope’s “An Essay on Man”:

Let us (since life can little more supply  
Than just to look about us and to die)  
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;  
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;  
A wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot;  
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.  
Together let us beat this ample field,  
Try what the open, what the covert yield;  
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore  
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;  
Eye Nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies,  
And catch the manners living as they rise;  
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can…

Martin would love that invitational “Together let us…” and the way all those different meanings are simultaneously alive in the single line as it runs – beckoning us – forward: “Together let us beat this ample field.” Come on in. Come on in.

Taken altogether these three qualities represent what, I think, is at the heart of Amis’s work: a delighted, forensic, monumental and epic commitment to language itself. That’s the quiddity. That’s the core reason so many writers and journalists enjoy reading him. And that’s the reason I don’t think the distinction between the non-fiction and the fiction holds. Because all his writing is like that. Sure, the non-fiction feels more anchored because of its ostensible subject. And, yes, the bad fiction feels worse than it is because its subject is so obviously ostensible. But really the subject in either case was not the subject; the true subject was always the language – its meaning and its music. And – about this – Amis is never anything other than serious, devout, sincere, interesting, sublime.

On the way out the second time, I was fixed. I picked up Experience again from the side table and this time boldly asked him to sign it. I’m chary of overstatement and – thinking about that day – I’m still not sure if this is a failing or a virtue. But in those few hours, he restored my faith. Writing fiction, publishing, editing, magazines, poetry – they’re all such fragile businesses and yet he was absolutely certain that they mattered, that their power was not only purposeful but transcendent. I soon began again on another novel. And this – my “third”, the next thing I wrote – became my debut. It wasn’t until a couple of days later, though, that I opened up Experience. Only then did I read what he had written. “To Ed, keep going, Martin Amis.” Such a kind and generous thing to say. The same thing he had been saying to me all afternoon. I have the inscription in front of me now.

update

Even the NEw Left Review for into the act https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/high-flown-english

The Pursuit of Truth

I pride myself on my “open mind” – although I do realise that I am as guilty as anyone of confirmation bias. On the Covid issue, I have followed Dr John Campbell whose daily videos I and so many others found so helpful during the pandemic. However, some of his recent posts have caused me concern for the airtime he has offered to some very dubiou. s characters – right-wing European MPs and a UK MP voicing anti-vaccine views. And, a few months back, he agreed to take part in a video series managed by the conspiracy historian Neil Oliver. At the time, I felt this was a serious lapse of judgement but, in the event, I was wrong. The discussion helped me understand his thinking - namely a slow and reluctant recognition that the UK government has, in recent years, betrayed the trust we have put in evidence-based science.

Ours is very sceptical generation – a combination of education and socal media has made us so. We now question the narratives put up by both the commercial and government worlds – our own explanations have become legitimised. I’ve written about “Fake News” only a couple of times – first at the start of the pandemic and then more recently when I wrote -

“when we decry those who deny climate change and the benefits of vaccination, WE are guilty of the same behaviour – namely that we choose to trust our own preferred groups of people. This is the basic message of a new book - Bad beliefs – “Why they happen to good people” (2022) - by philosopher Brian Levy which has just been made freely available by the publisher and author but which I don’t recommend because it contains so much jargon.

Very few of us have the scientific training to “follow the science”. What those of us who accept that climate change is a reality have done is defer to those with the expertise. Those who deny simply don’t share our faith in science – let alone government – and choose to trust those found on social media. Of course, there is the little matter of the “falsifiability” embodied in scientific method – requiring theories to be set aside when evidence emerges that challenges them. Something called The Institute for Arts and Ideas (IAI) expressed things rather nicely in its “aims” -

There is little that we can be certain about, but we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice. So the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.

The IAI was founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.

That rethinking is urgent and necessary because the world of ideas is in crisis. The traditional modernist notion that we are gradually uncovering the one true account of reality has been undermined by a growing awareness that ideas are limited by culture, history and language. Yet in a relative world the paradoxes of postmodern culture has left us lost and confused. We do not know what to believe, nor do we know how to find the answers. 

I’ve made no secret of my sympathies for those who see multiple realities – who assert that there is no single truth. How could I do otherwise when I have argued there were 57 different ways of understanding capitalism? Or when I celebrate that outsiders are generally more insightful y virtue of the sense of different worlds they bring with them? But in all this, I insist on proofs of falsifiability. Mere assertion is no use – what disturbs me is that the new “deep sceptics” (who bring the scepticism I have always admired into gross disrepute) have no such criterion – or preferred group. They seem to oppose just for the hell of it.

It’s at times such as this that I begin to question my admiration for such contrarians as Chris Hitchens who took such joy in the process of disputation. The profession of lawyers has that same inclination and is it, therefore, any wonder that the USA, having the largest number per capita of litigious lawyers, just happens to be the country in which “fake news” has become so dominant? The author of the book with which I started this post – Brian Levy – has a more readable article here in which he reasserts his basic point that we all need a group we can trust

No doubt, psychological biases play a role in what people end up believing (though the extent to which we are irrational when we rely on these biases is open to question). No doubt there are many irrational and uninformed people around. But these facts don’t explain the partisan split we see on surveys, or indeed the many bizarre claims attributed to our fellow citizens.

Many of these reports are hugely exaggerated; inflated through some combination of expressive responding, the use of partisan heuristics or the sheer unwillingness to admit ignorance and downright trolling. To the degree there is a partisan divide, it doesn’t arise from their stupidity or our rationality. It arises from the fact that we place our trust in different sources.

A simple question, therefore – where do we find the verifiable sources quoted by the “deep sceptics”??

Disinformation and Fake News – interim report was the result of the Select Committee’s interesting deliberations….….raising the sort of questions we are beginning to ask about how the commercial world is using social media and algorithms - and trying to give preliminary answers in terms citizens can understand. They are the same issues which Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism deals with. The Select Committee’s Final Report – like all such reports – iwas written in exceptionally clear language.

The results of the fake news can be seen in Brexitannia (2017) - a thoughtful film of an almost sociological depth based on about 200 in-depth interviews the length and breadth of the UK. It’s reviewed here by Zero Anthropology. On this issue, I also recommend Dave Pollard’s latest post

update; The UK has just started a "Counter Disinformation Unit" which produced this useful video from Dr Campbell

Getting Balance in our Lives

These days, we seem to love to hate. The Declassified UK website is a typical “scandal-monger” in its focus on wrong-doing. They have just sent me an interesting questionnaire to try to entice me into subscribing which got me thinking of a fascinating book which came out 15 years ago - Thinking Institutionally by Huch Heclo

For whatever reason, trust in our institutions - public and private – has sunk to an all-time low. This is the issue with which Heclo’s book starts – indeed pages 18 onwards give a 5 page spread which itemises the scandals affecting the public, private and even NGO sectors in the last 40-50 years – arguing that mass communications and our interconnectedness exacerbate the public impact of such events. 

The past half-century has been most unkind to those discrete cohering entities, both formal and informal, that "represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations." Today, people almost universally denigrate institutions, including those of which they are members.

Attacks on institutions come from our hyper-democratic politics but stem from the Enlightenment with its unshakeable confidence in human reason; its subsequent obsessive focus on the self; and, latterly, its belief that an institution has no value beyond that which an individual can squeeze from it for personal gain.

In the last 60 years our education system  has designated institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express themselves as they see fit. Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
 But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide.

How, then, do we protect and promote them? Heclo says that first and foremost we must learn to think institutionally. This is very different from thinking about institutions as scholars do. It is not an objective and intellectual exercise. It is a more participatory and intuitive one. To think institutionally you need a "particular sensitivity "to or an "appreciative viewpoint" of institutions.

To be more specific, the exercise moves our focus away from the self and towards a recognition of our debts and obligations to others.To think institutionally is to do something much more than provide individuals with incentives to be part of and promote institutions. It calls on them to modify their behavior. In this way, Heclo challenges rational choice's assumptions about institutional maintenance vigorously. 

I have a lot of sympathy for this line of argument – against “the quick buck”…. instant gratification….. tomorrow’s headlines…..we need cultures which respect timescales for investment and the idea of “stewardship” which Robert Greenleaf tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate…..The quotation, indeed, which graces the first page of my Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation is from Dwight Eisenhower’s last address in 1960 

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Heclo is now a retired American political scientist with form for an interest both in political institutions and in European aspects of political culture. I remember his name vividly from the 1970s from the book he wrote jointly with that great doyen of political analysis (and of the budgetary process) Aaron Wildavsky – The Private Government of Public Money. Heclo’s book, I concede, is in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and tended to attract the attention of clerics and university administrators – some of whom produced this interesting symposium

Thinking institutionally is a lonely pursuit. Its practitioners are unappreciated and considered naive. They expect to be taken advantage of by those who care nothing for institutions, only for themselves. But that does not mean we should not do it.

Readers wanting a sense of Heclo’s writing style are directed to page 731 of The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (the link gives the entire “Hand”book!) where Heclo has a short essay on the topic. And google gives some early excerpts from On Thinking Institutionally

“The Hidden Pleasures of Life”

This is the title of a book by Theodor Zeldin, hidden behind others, and pulled from the shelves here in my Ploiesti flat and one of whose attractions is its format – its pages are rounded and have margins which contain a couple of phrases to give us a sense of the text. One useful review puts it like this -

Theodore Zeldin is a curious man. And “The Hidden Pleasures of Life” a curious book. Over the course of twentyeight interconnected reflections, each beginning with the reported experiences of some figure from history, the author addresses old-fashioned philosophical questions:

• what makes a life go well?

• how should one live?

We begin with Hajj Sayyah, an Iranian student who leaves his home in 1859 at the age of twenty three and travels for eighteen years, meeting the great and the good, without any letters of recommendation or influential relatives. Sayyah is an adventurer whose quest is to discover the people of the world. Zeldin takes Sayyah, along with his other emblems, to point towards the nature of a good life. A good life involves curiosity. What is a curious life? One in which you seek to know other people. Not impersonally, as falling under this or that system of categories, nor superficially, in the ways in which we ordinarily interact. No, the point of living is to know each other properly – where that involves sharing our private thoughts and conversing on those topics which shape our lives. (Zeldin’s Oxford Muse Foundation organizes meals at which strangers are seated in pairs and given a Menu of Conversation, including such questions as “What are the limits of your compassion?” and “What moral, intellectual, aesthetic and social effects does the work you do have on others and on yourself?” Zeldin would be a wonderful lunch companion, but you might hate sitting next to him on a long plane journey.)

Conversing with others gives meaning to our lives by allowing us to learn how others see the world and, in turn, to share what it is that we see. Zeldin’s curiosity demands that we give up on the superficial frivolities that grease our everyday interactions and open instead the secret chambers of our hearts and minds, displaying, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, the “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything but [are] never offered openly, never made public”.

Theodor Zeldin will be 90 in a few months and is perhaps best known for his encouragement of the art of conversation but also a maverick historian whose books have searched for answers to three main questions

• Where can a person find more inspiring ways of spending each day?

• What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology, or therapy?

• What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or those who feel isolated, different, or are sometimes labeled as misfits?

His work has brought people together to engage in conversations in a variety of settings – communal and business – on the basis of some basic principles

The Hidden Pleasures of Life can be downloaded in full via  

https://vdoc.pub/documents/the-hidden-pleasures-of-life-a-new-way-of-remembering-the-past-and-imagining-the-future-6hl9gfrn62g0. It's an epub so does need conversion