the itinerants

A second post today - freezing fog (and light snow) has reduced visibility to 20 metres - and supplied the atmosphere to do a ot of reading, most of which I;ll summarise tomorrow.
One of the daily delights is selecting a picture to go with the blog – but it has an element of what the Germans call “Die Qual der Wahl” – the torture of choice! I am building up a stock of pictures I can draw on – and found that the Uzbek photo perfectly fitted the notion of philosophical discussions which comes later in today's earlier blog. But the first part of the blog is actually about a poem called Smuggler – so I surfed to find such a picture and was reminded of the great Russian school of painters who went by the name The Itinerants. I've supplied a link to the list on the right of the site.
I had to practice my first censorship just now - on an engraving by Albrecht Duerer no less! I wanted it to be the pic for today - but when I uploaded it and saw it, I knew that it just too risque! Instead, I've selected one of the Itinerants - Bogdanov-Belskiy - and his

Mental Arithmetic In the Public School of Rachinskiy

Quite superb! It's a much more powerful painting than the one I had to use in my recent posting of the report on the English primary school system.

I've uploaded two new papers to my website. One fits uneasily with all the jargon of the professional paper - it's 40 Tips for 2010 but fits nicely with the tenor of some of the recent postings. It's paper 9 and is more a New Year thing. But I thought of it since I determined yesterday to (a) read each day at least 2 of the hundreds of professional papers which I;ve downloaded but lie unread in folders and (b) skim at least one of the googlebooks which have been equally downloadedwith enthusiasm but then languished. There is no beating the sensuality of a book between your hands!
I also came across a little pamphlet I produced for a Conference the European Delegation in Kyrgyzstan asked me to attend in late 2006. I've included it because it's an example of the sort of policy analysis I like to write - which tries to find a pragmatic approach to issues in the local context. It was called Building LG in a hostile climate – it's paper 7

Zen Calvinism and Pyrronian scepticism

Still on yesterday’s poem, another pleasure is inspecting the latest books from Amazon – particularly here in Sirnea where their arrival is more of an event. The process starts with a shout from the post office to my neighbour who then phones me to announce the event. Yesterday was such a day – with 6 new books – one of which was a new collection of Norman MacCaig’s poems. His wry, humanistic observations on man and nature have always been a favourite. I thought I had already reproduced a very typical one - “Smuggler” – on this blog but can’t find it (in fact it was Oct 17but this will save the trouble of searching).

Smuggler
Watch him when he opens
His bulging words – justice
Fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
peace, peace. Make it your custom
to pay no heed
to his frank look, his visa, his stamps
and signatures. Make it
your duty to spread out their contents
in a clear light

Nobody with such language
Has nothing to declare

There are many similarities with the poetry of Marin Sorescu who is my favourite Romanian poet. Both died about the same time in the early 1990s. MacCaig’s last Collection is in the (small) poetry section of my library here – this one (edited by his son) contains about 200 additional ones (some unpublished)
His voice was to be heard even in the Introduction – which recalls how he replied when asked about his religious beliefs – “Zen Calvinist!”
I had just been reading the chapter in the Montaigne book which explores the sort of philosophical scepticism which influenced him.

“Ordinary scepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge; it is summed up in Socrates remark; “All I know is that I know nothing”. Pyrronian scepticism starts from this point but then adds, in effect, “and I’m not even sure of that”. Pyrronians deal with all the problems which life can throw at them by means of a single (Greek) word – epokhe – which means “I suspend judgement”.

MacCaig has some of the same spirit.

One of the World Bank publications I downloaded yesterday was an E-book of 500 pages - Governance Reforms under real world conditions – which looks very useful. It is organised around what it regards as six key challenges facing governance reform efforts:

1. How do we use political analysis to guide communication strategy in governance reform?2. How do we secure political will, which is demonstrated by broad leadership support for change? What are the best methods for reaching out to political leaders, policy makers, and legislators?3. How do we gain the support of public sector middle managers, who are often the strongest opponents of change, and then foster among them a stronger culture of public service?4. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?5. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?6. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

I was amazed to find the following section in the introduction -

There is an iron triangle of stakeholders whose interests seem to converge mostly on business as usual - Economists in donor agencies, experts in consulting firms, and CEOs in large NGOs are well intentioned. But the natural inertia of modern large-scale organizations, together with residual affinities for the cult of expertise, threatens to halt progress toward people-centred development in its tracks.No doubt much of the threat, if one can call it that, lies in simply not knowing exactly what to do. Large-scale organizations need to change their best practices.

Academia has not been terribly attentive to this need, and those who control the spigot of funding are those whose thinking remains most determinedly technocratic.

Things are looking up at the World Bank! Read for yourself here

Easter lamb in Transylvania

It’s Easter Friday and, as I see the dawn come up over the hill, I can sense it’s going to be clear, bright day. I feel at the moment very much like the alter ego I have given this site (see Spitzweg’s painting at the right of the site - at the bottom of all the links etc).
For my part, I sit up in bed, fully clothed, a pile of books down on my left, a stove and candles in the room! Unlike "Der Arme Dichter", I a have scarf around the neck (not a hat), a carpet on the floor, paintings on the wall, a laptop on my lap and a secure ceiling!

Yesterday the old couple invited me to join them for an Easter meal – I heard the word “Miel” – and thought “interesting that honey should be part of the Easter celebrations”. Later I heard the word again when I went to another neighbour who makes and sells the most glorious Cascaval and Burdurf cheeses. OK, I thought, I’ll buy some honey. When I entered the basement room where they make and store the cheese, he proudly pointed to several carcases of lamb hanging from the ceiling!

Writing this has reminded me of an earlier blog in which I had recalled the impression an essay called “Dissertation upon roast pork” had made on me at school. Decades later I was sure (not without reason!) that its author was the inestimable Francis ....Bacon! When I tracked down the essay, it was to discover the author was Charles..... Lamb! Can create a good quiz or crossword question – “when is pork ...lamb?”!!
While on the subject of food, I drove to Brasov and Zarnesti yesterday on various errands – including general stocks; getting an anti-virus programme inserted on laptop; a haircut; and booking a test-drive of the new Dacia 4 wheel.
Amongst the purchases was my favourite bread – a huge Hungarian potato bread (cu kartoffel) brought in apparently from the Hungarian county. It lasts me at least 2 weeks (and costs just under 2 euros) As I groaned with its - and the 3 kilos round of cheese - weight up the hill and stored the cheese in the (ice-cold) spare room, 2 thoughts came into my head – first Brecht’s poem which celebrates the things wich gave him pleasure -

Pleasures
The first look out of the window in the morning
The old book found again
Enthusiastic faces
Snow, the change of seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Taking showers, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Taking things in
New music
Writing, planning
Travelling
Singing
Being friendly
Brecht (Last Poems 1953-1956) It's his pic above - not the usual one but if you look closely you will see he still has that large typical cigar!

OK – so it’s not really poetry – but it’s poetic! And it doesn’t refer to beer, bread or cheese. And what on earth does he mean by dialectics? The newspaper and planning and I would cut out – and include good bread and strong cheese; viewing favourite paintings; and walking in the hills with a breeze on the face (for one of the great Brecht poems see the Brecht and Candide blog entry of mid-October)

The second memory sparked was the old black and white French film “The 7 deadly sins”...The one which made the impact on me was the traveller in old France who was given shelter in a hovel by an old man and a younger wife. The place was so small the guest shared the marital bed – the camera focussed on the faces of the guest and the young woman – both lustful. Eventually the man could bear it no longer – he leapt over the woman; stretched up to the top of the cupboard and brought down .....a succulent round of cheese!

I’ve discovered and put on my links a Romanian photographer whose pictures do justice to the glorious landscape here – see Stunning Transylvanian landscapes on Links
http://www.panoramio.com/user/1063344/tags/judetul%20Brasov?photo_page=9

Finally, for this early Easter morning (the sky is cloudless as 07.00 pips on the radio), a good series of blogs and papers from a world bank site. Waisbord has a useful comment about how practitioners and academics rarely talk to one another and indeed talk a different language.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/talking-about-theory-and-practice
And I downloaded from the site some interesting papers on, for example, different models of Freedom of Information systems (including the Scottish). Another on social accountability mechanisms and their role in public sector reform.

The world's first blogger

Montaigne is a name which evokes France in the troubled 16th Century; a lone writer in a castle tower putting his thoughts about everyday life on paper , a count who had taken early retiral from life in public service. I had bought an Everyman’s edition of The Complete Works a year or so ago but only dipped into its 1,340 pages. I am now more encouraged since starting to read Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live – a life of Montaigne in one question and 20 attempts at an answer. It’s a superb edition by Chatto and Windus – with superb black and white engravings, paper, layout and typeface (sadly it doesn’t say which). It’s a long time since I’ve seen such a beautifully produced book. It’s also beautifully written – and all for 10 euros from Amazon.
I knew that he had retired young from a political life in Bordeaux in troubled times in France to look after his estate and muse about life in what became an exemplar for the memoir – and that he was inventing the template which people like Proust (and Pamuk in modern times) have made their own. But I hadn’t realised that he retired at age 37! So I feel better at this first attempt at musing in retirement at 67!
Now The Guardian has its obvious April Fool story – although the picture and first para did fool me! You must have a look at it!

This spell in the mountains helped me rediscover my energy so quickly that I had an interesting marketing idea – a retreat for shell-shocked mercenaries of technical assistance – not so much to help send them back into battle as to help redefine the enemy and nature of battle needed!
The experience has helped me reconnect with the critique I wrote 3-4 years ago – which was a mite too ambitious. It’s the paper on my website’s “key papers” – entitled critique of development assistance.

And let me direct you to another excellent piece in Scottish Review – one on how those who blow whistles are treated

modern work

Went exploring yesterday afternoon on the hills above the house – accompanied by 2 more dogs which have attached themselves to me. The view from the upper part of the extensive strip of ground we have there are quite stunning. The picture above doesn't do the view I have justice. I struck over to the left side of a wooded copse which runs at the top of the main hill which screens the main range of mountains and was intrigued to hear an engine. When I topped the ridge I saw 2 tractors in the small valley down below each dragging a large tree trunk toward the far end of Sirnea. Following their tracks I quickly found myself in a real Shangrilai – the real old Romania of scattered summer cowshacks. I headed left down a deep dell in the general direction of Dambivici and was very soon into a settlement which I guessed was Tohani (or Cohanini??)– a village whose northern part I know. An old guy spreading manure onto the field from his cart confirmed this. Then a lovely walk following the contours which took me back to above the house. Google these various names on Google Earth and you will find quite a few superb photos taken by various Romanians.
Now that my spirits are reinvigorated, I’ve been drafting a note trying to pin down why I became disabled so quickly in my last project. I had noted 14 points – which is more a manifesto than an explanation! Starting a project is never easy - with doubts about what one can really contribute (and I've already mentioned that reading too much in this confused field is not good for your health!!) Going into new terrain every 2 years or so – another unknown country, another new flat, new team , new contractor, new EC structure, new beneficiary, new procedures and ways of doing things, having to prove one’s credentials again and again. Mercenaries grow old – what was once a delight becomes unbearable.
Basically I have been spoiled by the flexibility I enjoyed in my projects until 2008 The conditions in which I worked in places such as Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan demanded this – and the EC desk-officers basically trusted me to deliver. Now the project management ideology has become so strong that it is assumed that you can and should plan detailed activities a full year ahead – and that your every (scheduled) visit to the toilet has to be recorded and monitored. This is full-blown Fordism which is now mocked in the private sector which is assumed to have all the answers and skills. Some years ago I found an article Lost in the matrix which attacked the logframe approach to projects – and have uploaded it to my website

Now a bit of light relief. Todays Guardian carries a story about a shopkeeper being fined 1,000 pounds (and put under a curfew for a week!!!) for selling a goldfish to a 14 year old. April Fool's Day is actually tomorrow - I'm assuming this is an early bash. See for yourself here.

Finally I have to record the discovery at last of the title and author of a book I've been searching for since it was stolen from my office in Kyrgyzstan. I used it extensively in mini-seminars with the staff in my Tashkent and Bishkek offices. It's Peter's Honey's Improve your people skills

Weber and NPM

Superb cloudless sky - and last night the full moon lit up the landscape beautifully. Had trouble with an Amazon delivery yesterday - they had sent it UPS and it landed up in the wrong village. But an hour there the package was - on my neighbour's table. And one of the items is mouth watering - How to live - a life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell.

On the Saturday post I promised to give some excerpts from Dreschler's Rise and Demise of NPM. I hope you'll find this syfficiently tantalising to go and read the full paper -w hich you will find on my website
NPM is based on the understanding that all human behavior is always motivated by self-interest and, specifically, profit maximization. It assumes that everything relevant can be quantified; qualitative judgments are not necessary. It is popularly denoted by concepts such as project management, flat hierarchies, customer orientation, abolition of career civil service, depolitization, total quality management, and contracting-out.
NPM is part of the neo-classical economic imperialism within the social sciences, i.e. the tendency to approach all questions with neo-classical economic methods.
In advanced PA scholarship itself, especially – but not only – in Europe, NPM is on the defensive by now, if taken as a world view (i.e. an ideology), rather than as one of several useful perspectives for PA reform (i.e. part of a pluralistic approach). The question here is more whether one favours post-NPM (anti-NPM) or post-post-NPM, Weberian-based PA, the latter being the most advanced, and the most sophisticated, and now called the Neo-Weberian State (NWS). What was an option ten years ago is not an option anymore today. I would say that in PA
• in 1995, it was still possible to believe in NPM, although there were the first strong and substantial critiques
• in 2000, NPM was on the defensive, as empirical findings spoke clearly against it as well
• in 2005, NPM is not a viable concept anymore

Yet, in many areas, both of scholarship and of the world, as well as in policy, NPM is very alive and very much kicking. It is, therefore, necessary to look both at the concept itself and at the reasons for its success.

The use of business techniques within the public sphere thus confuses the most basic requirements of any state, particularly of a Democracy, with a liability: regularity, transparency, and due process are simply much more important than low costs and speed.
If you go for savings and neglect context and even the actual goals, you will not be efficient but rather the ultimate wastrel. This misunderstanding of the concept of efficiency and the depolitization that comes with it are typical symptoms of technocracy and bureaucracy, which NPM professes to oppose but which, as Eugenie Samier has demonstrated, it rather fosters. (2001)
The catchword promises have empirically not been delivered – flat hierarchies are a matter of appropriateness and depend in their suitability entirely on context; taking the citizen merely as customer takes away her participatory rights and duties and thus hollows out the state; the abolition of career civil service will usually let administrative capacity erode; depolitization – and thus de-democratization – leads to the return of the imperial bureaucrat (in its worst sense, disguised as the entrepreneurial bureaucrat – same power, less responsibility); and contracting-out has proven to be excessively expensive and often infringing on core competences of the state as well as on the most basic standards of equity. Total Quality Management is actually not necessarily an NPM concept; it can be just as well used elsewhere and was actually always understood to be part of a well-working PA; project management may frequently work, but as a principle and in the long run, it is more expensive and less responsible than the traditional approach.

The counter-model to NPM, indeed its bête noire, is what is called “Weberian PA”. This label is highly problematic, as NPM presents a caricature of it and thus builds up a paper tiger. Its namesake himself, the great German sociologist and economist Max Weber, did not even particularly like the model of PA so described; he only saw it, rightly, as the most rational and efficient one for his time, and the one towards which PA would tend. That this is by and large still the case 80 years later if one looks at the model rather than at its caricature is something that would have probably surprised him quite a bit. (He also described, almost clairvoyantly, the NPM system, which for him was the most dehumanizing of organizational forms; see Samier 2001.)
Apart from the caricature, for Weber, the most efficient PA was a set of offices in which ap¬pointed civil servants operated under the principles of merit selection (impersonality), hier¬archy, the division of labor, exclusive employment, career advancement, the written form, and legality. This increase of rationality – his key term – would increase speed, scope, predict-ability, and cost-effectiveness, as needed for an advanced mass-industrial society. (Weber 1922: esp. 124-130) And although we are well beyond such a world – and in what we may or may not call the “network society” –, these, or almost all of these, are not obsolete criteria, but in fact, they are exceedingly close to most of the recent large-scale principles of PA reform agendas worldwide, including the European Admin¬istrative Space’s main standards of reliability and predictability, openness and transparency, accountability, and efficiency and effectiveness (SIGMA 1998: 8-14). Most certainly, they are closer to responsible PA reform than the catchwords of NPM.

The Neo-Weberian State
And yet, of course there are legitimate problems with many a bureaucracy, there are still very self-centered administrations that hinder economic development rather than fostering it, there is the frequent legalistic domination of PA – and of lawyers within the civil service – that is preventing a problem-solving approach, and there are organizational changes and other shifts in public life that distance us from the Twenties. But the Weberian system has actually (been) adapted to them very successfully, as Continental PA always has. Both to characterize these and to denote a post-post-NPM, synergetic system of PA, perhaps a specifically European one that is not a NPM “laggard” but the opposite, Pollitt and Bouckaert, in what is now the standard book on Public Management Reform, have coined in the second edition (September 2004) the term “Neo-Weberian State” or NWS. I think it is wise to accept that label for the sake of clarity and uniformity, even if I do not agree completely with all details (for my earlier thought on the matter, see Drechsler 2003, 2005a, upon which much of the current article is based), and even though the Weber label might not be “cool” enough for the consultancy circuit. The respective outline of the NWS will be quoted here in full, rather than paraphrased:

‘Weberian’ Elements
• Reaffirmation of the role of the state as the main facilitator of solutions to the new problems of globalization, technological change, shifting demographics, and environmental threat
• Reaffirmation of the role of representative democracy (central, regional, and local) as the legitimating element within the state apparatus
• Reaffirmation of administrative law – suitably modernized – in preserving the basic principles pertaining to the citizen-state relationship, including equality before the law, legal security, and the availability of specialized legal scrutiny of state actions
• Preservation of the idea of a public service with a distinct status, culture, and terms and conditions

‘Neo’ Elements
• Shift from an internal orientation towards bureaucratic rules towards an external orientation towards meeting citizens’ needs and wishes. The primary route to achieving this is not the employment of market mechanisms (although they may occasionally come in handy) but the creation of a professional culture of quality and service
• Supplementation (not replacement) of the role of representative democracy by a range of devices for consultation with, and direct representation of, citizens’ views (…)
• In the management of resources within government, a modernization of the relevant laws to encourage a greater orientation on the achievements of results rather than merely the correct following of procedure. This is expressed partly in a shift from ex ante to ex post controls, but not a complete abandonment of the former
• A professionalization of the public service, so that the ‘bureaucrat’ becomes not simply an expert in the law relevant to his or her sphere of activity, but also a professional manager, oriented to meeting the needs of his or her citizen/users (99-100)

Good Governance: The Back Door
This being realized, it is now important to beware of the “thief that cometh in the night.” NPM may be in demise – but what about the currently ever-so-popular concept of Good Governance? Arising, once again, in the 1980s in the International Finance Institutions (IFI’s), this was a positive extrapolation from the negative experiences that these organizations had had in the “developing” countries by observing that financial aid seemed to have had no effects. From this, they deduced an absence of institutions, principles, and structures, the entirety of which was called “Governance” – and “Good Governance” when they worked well. A good idea as such – but the provenience, the same as with NPM, may make us halt, and rightly.
By and large, the term “Governance” has by now become a more or less neutral concept that focuses on steering mechanisms in a certain political unit, emphasizing the interaction of state (First), business (Second), and society (Third Sector) players. “Good Governance”, on the other hand, is not at all neutral; rather, it is a normative concept that again embodies a strong value judgment in favor of the retrenchment of the state, which is supposed to yield to Business standards, principles, and – not least – interests. In that sense, “Good Governance” privileges the Second over the First Sector, even in First Sector areas.
Within the state sector itself, many of the principles of “Good Governance” are therefore identical with NPM. And while a unitary definition of the concept never existed, not even within the respective individual IFI’s, “good” principles usually encompassed such concepts as transparency, efficiency, participation, responsibility, and market economy, state of law, democracy, and justice. Many of them are indubitably “good” as such, but all of them – except the last one, which is the most abstract – are heavily context-dependent, hinging not only on definition and interpretation, but also on time and place. Critics from the “developing” countries thus often saw and see the demand for “Good Governance” as a form of Neo-Colonialist Imperialism and as part of negative Globalization, since it demands the creation of institutions and structures before economic development, while all wealthy countries of the “West” established them only afterwards.

PA as a humanistic discipline

After heavy snow yesterday and strong wind overnight, the electricity in the village went down about 08.30 and stayed off until 14.15 - repairs apparently. The snow has quickly melted.
As promised, I have updated the "key papers" on the public admincreform website (see links)mainly by adding the paper I referred to in my last entry - "Toward PA as a humanistic discipline - a humanistic manifesto". This is the sort of critique (and overview) I've been waiting for.
Blogs, I'm afraid, are part of the restless and senseless search for novelty. Only when I printed out the 100 plus pages of this blog and bind them in book form, did I see some of the entries from a few months' back. Bloggers tend not to look at archived material - no wonder, given the name "archives" for heaven's sake. Who visits such places? One of (several) reasons why I don't think E-books will replace real ones!

management blogs

Erasmus (by Holbein the Younger)

The “links” which are listed on the right hand side are those blogs (generally) which have impressed me over the past year or so. Initially it was quite difficult to find blogs which catered for my various interests in - food, literature, paintings, governance – let alone more arcane subjects such as carpets, haystacks and Egyptian music (actually Anouk Brahim ). But, once, you start surfing you get into a roll. One good link leads to another.
So, recently, I was led from authentic organisations to three useful managerial blogs -
graeme martin; bob sutton; and management craft

Management ideology (for such it is) is important to the theme I raised in the last post of the identity and future of PA since public administration has always been a pot-pourri – initially of the disciples of law, political science, economics, sociology and psychology but then of other parasitic subjects such as management and its dreadfully-named sub-subject "human resource management".

Toward PA as a Humanistic discipline – a humanistic manifesto

by Eugenie Samier offers an excellent overview of the subject's development (as well as a polemic) at I have been looking for a paper like this for a long time.