The Managerial Turn - part V

I started this series wanting to explore 3 basic questions –

-       Why and how, all of 30 years ago, did the “managerial turn” get underway, contaminating our everyday experiences and discourse?

-       How have we allowed managers to gain such unaccountable power?

-       What we can now do to bring them to heel?

Some of you may not remember the days when managers hardly existed in the public sector - so I therefore used extracts from the intro to the little book I wrote in the 1990s In Transit – notes on good governance to convey a sense of the strength of institutional inertia as I experienced it in the 1970s (even as some major reforms were taking place)…

It was at that point I realised how amazingly prescient Gerald Caiden’s “Administrative Reform” had been. It came out (in the US) in 1969, just after some of the UK Royal Commissions presaging major reforms (in fields such as the civil service, trade unions, local government, broadcasting) had published. But, for all the buzz there was then about “future shock”, few organisations (public and private) showed any sign of changing and the excerpts of Caiden’s book I can access don’t really explain what experiences moved him to select reform as his theme....

I also noticed that my references to the 1970s said more about professionalism than managerialism….hardly surprising since, under the influence of Illich and Alinsky, I had made a bit of a reputation for myself in the early 70s for my critique of professionals…

The Scottish professional class (of teachers, social workers, planners etc) had strong prejudices and myths about the people who lived in the disadvantaged housing estates. “Born to Fail?” was a national document which appeared in 1973 revealing the scandal of the concentration of “multiple deprivation” in a few such urban areas (including the Region covering half of Scotland which came into being a year later). This gave a few of us who were working on that issue a unique opportunity to forge for the Region a rare social strategy of empowerment.

This involved building – through pamphlets and training - what was almost a “counter culture” not only amongst the community workers but amongst younger managers in the various Departments.

It was only in the early 90s, after I had left the Region, that I recognised that we had perhaps been missing a bit of managerial discipline in the strategic work we did in the West of Scotland from 1975. This was the third of 5 messages I left with the urban committee of the OECD in a paper about the Strathclyde experience I presented in 1993 (see para 4.2 of the hyperlink) viz

- Resource social inclusion work with mainline money – not the marginal pennies

- give “change agents” proper support

- Set detailed targets for departments

- Establish free-standing community development agencies

- Be realistic about the timescale of change

So let me be more precise in my charge against managerialism. And let me start by pointing to the fact that Public Administration is the name of the study of the management of the public sector – reflected in the titles of the two flagship journals of the relevant US and UK academic communities – Public Administration and Public Administration Review, respectively.

I have vivid memories of discussions in the mid 1980s about the difference between management in the public and private sectors. My notes from those days show that - Some authors suggested the following distinctive features for public administration bodies -

·       accountability to politicians

·       difficulty in establishing goals and priorities

·       rarity of competition

·       relationship between provision, demand, need and revenue

·       processing people

·       professionalism and line management

·       the legal framework.

But, when you think about it, these features (apart from the first) are true of very many large private companies – where competition can be minimal or “fixed” (ie manipulated).

The definitive book on the subject - Bureaucracy - what Government Agencies do and why they do it  was written by JQ Wilson in 1989 and points out that MacDonald’s – the burger makers - is a bureaucracy par excellence – a uniform product produced in a uniform way.

So what makes a government bureaucracy behave so differently and be seen so differently? Three reasons - according to Wilson. Government agencies –

- can’t lawfully retain monies earned;

- can’t allocate resources according to the preferences of its managers;

- must serve goals not of the organisation’s choosing, particularly relating to probity and equity.

They therefore become constraint-oriented rather than task-oriented. He goes on to suggest that agencies differ managerially depending on whether their activities and outputs can be observed; and divides them into four categories (“production”; “procedural”;  “craft”; and “coping agencies”).

It was Chris Hood who popularised (in spring 1991 in the first of the journals mentioned above) the term “New Public Management” (NPM) when he presented A Public Management for all Seasons. This article stressed just how ruthless and relentless the attack of commercial management practice was on the hallowed turf of the public sector…No activity – even in the universities - was off limits to the managers

This was also the period when the term “the audit explosion” was coined

Those interested in trying to identify where the inspiration for NPM came from are invited to dip into this short intellectual history of its origins and theoretical basis

1992 saw the publication of Reinventing Government; Clinton’s election; and, in 1993, Gore being given the task to “reinvent American government”!! The term was so laughable – but no one was laughing!!

At this point, the floodgates of writing on the subject opened….New Labour’s programme of modernising British government (1999 – 2010) was just the icing on the cake….

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

a rare voice of clarity and sanity

Let’s keep the clock in the late 1960s for a moment longer in this exploration of the possible reasons for the demonic restructuring of public services which has been such a feature of government (and academic) activity over the past 40 years.

And let’s make it personal - the 1968 student protests had just shaken the staid citizens of the US, France, Germany and even the UK; I  had been appointed to a Polytechnic; elected to represent the citizens of a low-income part of a shipbuilding town; and was engaged in community activism – inspired by the work of Saul Alinsky and books such as Dilemmas of Social Reform

And then, in complete contrast, a book with a simple title appeared Administrative Reform by Gerald Caiden. I remember reading it – with some curiosity – at the time. Change was definitely in the air – I’ve blogged before about the powerful impression Donald Schon’s Reith Lectures “Beyond the Stable State” made on me at the time - but none of us in Britain had actually experienced “reform” (the huge reorganisation of local government, which did so much to shape my future life, took place a few years later, in 1975)

Caiden’s subject was more the experience of developing countries and his tools those of comparative development – but I could relate to the dilemmas about the resistance to change he expressed so well. He returned to the subject in 1991 with a book entitled “Administrative Reform comes of Age”.

He may be an academic but he has worked with governments the world over and is able to express himself in language we can all understand. Just look at the opening section of the google extract you can read by clicking on “Administrative Reform” above. And the books he lists in the bibliography give a marvellous sense both of what was available in those days.....and of his eclectic interests.....How different from the reading lists you get now in the the thoroughly technocratic literature of reform  

I was delighted to discover a tribute to him (he is still active) in this 2013 article A Critique of the administrative reform industry

The idea of reform drives so many conferences, inquiries, research projects, reports and legislation today that it is not too much to suggest that administrative reform has become the dominating concern of the discipline and the practice of modern public administration. There is, indeed, an implication that, if we are not engaged in administrative reform, we are deficient in some way

Gerald Caiden probably did more than any other scholar to register that administrative reform had become a central and commanding concept in our discipline. 
In his pathbreaking book with the simple title “Administrative Reform” published as far back as 1969, he charted and assessed the various movements that led to this outcome – as well as offering nine propositions………

1. Administrative reform ‘has existed ever since men conceived better ways of organizing their social activities’ – but (up to the time Caiden was writing) it had ‘not received any systematic analysis’ (Caiden, 1969: 1).

2. The need for it ‘arises from the malfunctioning of the natural processes of administrative change’ (p. 65).

3. It rests on the belief ‘that there is always a better alternative to the status quo’ (p. 23).

4. ‘No aspect of administration is incapable of reform or has not been reformed at some time’. BUT this does not mean that reform is necessarily ‘good, desirable, preferable, successful, workable or necessary’ (p. 36).

5. Serious interest in administrative reform as a topic in its own right was stimulated by developments of the early post–World War II period (reconstruction, decolonization, et cetera), and especially the rise, within the discipline of public administration, of the sub-disciplines of development administration and comparative administration (pp. 37, 40).

6. Indiscriminate use of the term was leading to ‘confusion and to difficulties in setting parameters for research and theorizing’, and the absence of a universally accepted definition was handicapping the study (p. 43).

7. Caiden proposed his own definition: ‘administrative reform is the artificial inducement of administrative transformation, against resistance’ (p. 65).

8. When resistance is generated but overcome, ’change gives way to reform’ (p. 59).

9. BUT – and it is a big BUT – ‘resistance to change is indispensable for stability’ and, if ‘people were willing to change whenever an alternative presented itself, there would be chaos’ (p. 60).

Gerald Caiden has written a lot of books but his presence on the internet is a bit elusive. The last title in the short list below is actually a broad-sweep socio-economic analysis of the post-war period with a depth which borders on the philosophical. His is indeed a rare voice of clarity !

A Caiden resource

Administrative Reform; G Caiden (1969)

Administrative Reform comes of Age; Gerald Caiden (1991)

What Really is Public Maladministration?; article in PAR by G Caiden (1991)

“Toward more democratic governance – modernising the administrative state in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US “ – chapter in Public administration – an interdisciplinary critical analysis; ed Vigoda 2002

Public Administration in transition – essays in honour of Gerald Caiden; 2007
Culture and corruption; G Caiden - 2011 article in PAR

Fighting the scourge of corruption; G Caiden 2014

How did it Happen? The fashion for reform part II

We take managerialism for granted – even although it didn’t exist in the 1960s. “Managerial” then was only an adjective and, thanks to James Burnham, followed by the word “revolution” (at least in the immediate post-war period) to refer to what he first argued in 1941 was the growing influence of senior managers in America’s larger Corporations vis-à-vis its shareholders. An argument sustained by the likes of Tony Crosland and Andrew Shonfield who persuaded us that the system had now been tamed - although history has demonstrated that this was a brief truce in the struggle between state, corporate and union power. And, further, that shareholders and the importance of "shareholder value" came back with a vengeance in the 1980s....

In 1956, William W Whyte’s classic Organisation Man may have painted a picture of docile managers but change was in the wind - and was prefigured in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) which analysed vague social forces, not deliberative organisational change

Even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty didn’t envisage significant social engineering – although the power of the economists and number-crunchers was beginning to be felt in the likes of Robert McNamara

And yet, however slowly, the 1970s saw in Britain the first signs of a new management ethos in both central and local government which, by the late 80s had become a gale-force wind. To most people at the time, public sector reform was a graveyard for reputations….there seemed no mileage in it. There is an important story here which has never been told properly….which resolves into two basic questions –

-       Where did the urge to reform come from?

-       How on earth did managers become the new Gods?

In the late 90s I wrote a little book I wrote for a central European audience - “In Transit – notes on good governance” – which tried to capture the change….

The life-cycle, pragmatism and attention-span of Ministers and local government leaders (in the post-war period) caused  them generally to adopt what might be called a "blunderbuss" approach to change: that is they assume that desirable change is achieved by a mixture of the following approaches -

·       existing programmes being given more money

·       issuing new policy guidelines - ending previous policies and programmes

·       creating new agencies

·       making new appointments

Once such resources, guidelines or agencies have been set running, it was assumed that politicians would move quickly on to the other issues that were queuing up for their attention.

Of course, they needed some sort of guarantee that the policies and people selected will actually enable the resources and structures used to achieve the desired state. But that was seen as a simple implementation issue. Politicians tend to think in simple "command" terms: and therefore find it difficult to realise that the departments might be structured in a way that denies them the relevant information, support, understanding and/or authority to achieve desired outcomes.

Increasingly, however, in the 1970s and 80s people began to realise that large "hierarchic" organisations - such as Ministries - had serious deficiencies which could and did undermine good policies eg

·       their multiplicity of levels seriously interferes with, indeed perverts, information and communications flows - particularly from the consumer or client.

·       they discourage co-operation and initiative - and therefore good staff. And inertia, apathy and cynicism are not the preconditions for effective, let alone creative, work!

·       they are structured around historical missions (such as the provision of education, law and order etc) whose achievement now requires different skills and inter-agency work.

To move, however, to serious administrative reform is to challenge the powerful interests of bureaucracy itself (on which political leaders depend for advice and implementation) demanding an eccentric mixture of policy conviction, single-mindedness and political security which few leaders possess.

Whatever the appearance of unity and coherence at election time, a Government is a collection of individually ambitious politicians whose career path demands making friends and clients rather than the upsetting of established interests which any real organisational reform demands.

The machinery of government consists of a powerful set of "baronies" (Ministries/ Departments), each with their own (and client) interests to protect or favour. And Governments can - and do - always blame other people for "failure": and distract the public with new games - and faces.

What one might call the "constituency of reform" seemed, therefore, simply too small for major reforms even to be worth attempting. For politicians, the name of the game is reputation and survival. 

COMMENT – looking at this now, 20 years later, this analysis smacks of the influence of the public choice ideologues – also evidenced in the 1997 World Bank Development Report on the State in a Changing World .

The invisible power of the managerial ideology

For some 50 years I’ve been chewing over the question of how the organisations that run our public services might be “managed better”. Indeed, some might say that I “have a bee in my bonnet” about “public management” (ie that I’m fixated about it). To which the only appropriate answer is the Churchillian…

”some bee!….some bonnet”!

Amongst all the confusing talk there has been about “neoliberalism” in the past decade, another animal has lurked ……..multiplying and changing shape until it has insidiously penetrated our very minds…..and that is of “managerialism”. In this post (and others to come) I want to look first at how this has happened; then at the nature of the virus; and finally at what we can do about it.

Over the past decade I have several times alluded to managerialism as the new ideology – the first time as far back as 2009 and, to take another example, in 2014.
But the references have been casual - it is time to do a serious analysis!

It was, of course, James Burnham who first set this ism running with his The Managerial Revolution - published as far back as 1942. When I read his book in the early 60s it was, therefore, still fresh - particularly from the way it had been used by Anthony Crosland to argue that the managerial revolution had transformed the nature of capitalism.... 

Management first came to my attention when I found myself a town councillor in 1968 – representing a neighbourhood whose public services aroused constant complaints and were managed in an off-hand if not arrogant manner by the municipality.

My town had been one of the first to designate its Chief Officer a “Town Manager” or CEO – they had previously been “Town Clerks”! But it was the idea of citizen participation rather than management which was attracting interest in the country – the UK Liberal party indeed used an electoral/tactical form of it known as “pavement politics”.

I decided to beat them at their own game by launching various ward-level campaigns, self-help projects and town-level participation processes (in my capacity by that time as the Chairman of a Social Work committee).

I was also reading up on the community development and organisational change literature and producing academic reports with titles such as “From corporate planning to community action”, “community development – its administrative and political challenge” and, in 1977, a little book called “The Search for Democracy”

In the mid 1970s (at the age of 33) I became one of the leaders of a Region which covered half of Scotland and employed no fewer than 100,000 professionals (teachers, social workers, police, water and sewage engineers etc). Making officials pay attention to “citizen voice” became the core of the innovative Social Strategy for the Eighties which a few of us developed in the late 1970s. I, for one, had been profoundly affected by Ivan Illich’s critique of professionalism 

Management training for officials didn’t really exist in those days (!!) – although the Institute of Local Government Studies (or INLOGOV) had been set up in Birmingham University in 1964 – with John Stewart as an inspirational force. In my dual capacity as an academic and change agent, I made repeated trips there to absorb their thinking….Almost certainly it was that spirit which gave me the confidence to launch in the mid 1970s a new approach called the “member-officer group” which had small groups of middle level officials and politicians jointly assess the quality and effectiveness of a range of council services…

We knew that the majority of the professionals in our service had strong prejudices and myths about the people who lived in the disadvantaged housing estates  and started to build what was almost a “counter culture” not only amongst the community workers but in some younger managers in what was an important new Chief Executive Office which was set up

The 1970s had seen the quiet start to a range of managerial initiatives in national government – triggered by the Fulton Report into the Civil Service commissioned in 1966 by Harold Wilson,

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she brought not just management ideas but business people whom she let loose on a mission to bring a more business-like approach into government. Her huge privatisation programme, of course, involved getting rid of a large range of activities completely from the government sector - but a lot remained and was massively restructured into free-standing Agencies….

By now, the world was beginning to sit up and take notice of what it loosely called “Thatcherism”. It was academic Chris Hood who first suggested (in 1991) that it was more than a political programme of public asset disposal and had become a new managerial doctrine to which he gave the name “New Public Management” and whose 7 features he analysed in this table

New Public Management (NPM) according to Hood (1991)

No.	Doctrine	Meaning	Typical Justification
1	Hands-on professional management of Public Organisations	Visible management at the top; free to manage	Accountability requires clear assignment of responsibility
2.	Explicit standards and measures of performance	Goals and targets defined and measured as indicators of success	Accountability means clearly stated aims
3.	Greater emphasis on output controls	Resource allocation and rewards linked to performance	Need to stress results rather than procedures
4.	Shift to division of labour	Unbundle public sector into units organised by products with devolved budgets	Make units manageable; split provision and production; use contracts
5.	Greater competition	Move to term contracts and tendering procedures	Rivalry as the key to lower costs and better standards
6	Stress on private sector styles of management practice	Move away from military- style ethic to more flexible hiring, pay rules, etc	Need to apply "proven" private sector management tools
7.	Stress on greater discipline and parsimony	Cut direct costs; raise labour discipline	Need to check resource demands; do more with less

Like bees to a honey-pot, such a designation was irresistible to academics who have since spawned a veritable industry on the subject….

It would be wrong to say that NPM is the same as “pop” or “guru” management” which has been the subject of ridicule since such books as Huczynski’s Management Gurus (1993); and Micklewait’s “Witch Doctors” (1996) – but arguably it has played the same ideological role in the ranks of senior civil servants and Think Tankers as Peter Drucker’s and Tom Peters writings did in previous decades for business leaders…

It is impossible for new generations to understand the excitement in those days – Wordworth captured the mood when he wrote these lines in celebration of the French revolution –

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 

But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times, 

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 

The attraction of a country in romance! 

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, 

When most intent on making of herself 

A prime Enchantress—to assist the work 

Which then was going forward in her name!