what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Miniatures and Matrices

I’ve been reflecting a lot this year on my working experience of organizational change (both managing and advising state bodies) - now equally divided between the UK (the first 25 years) and central Europe and central Asia (the last 25 years).  I do so in a coat of many colours – scholar, community activist, politician, consultant, straddler of various worlds (not least academic disciplines), writer and….blogger.
Conscious that there are very few who have this experience of straddling so many worlds, I thought it would be useful to try to produce some pointers for the general public, using a series of questions which occur to interested citizens about public services 

I have always been a fan of tables, axes and matrices – by which I mean the reduction of ideas and text to the simple format of a 2x2 or 6x3 (or whatever) table. It forces you to whittle text down to the bare essentials. Perhaps that’s why I love these Central Asian and Russian miniatures so much

So I have developed 16 questions and have compressed my answers into such a table with just 2 columns for responses – “how each question has been dealt with in the literature” and “where the clearest answers can be found”. Of course, the literature is predominantly anglo-saxon – although the experience covered is global.
This proved to be an extraordinarily useful discipline – leading to quite a bit of adjustment to the original questions. It’s a long table – so I’ll make a start with the first five questions 
- How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work?
- What can realistically be said about the interests which find expression in “the state”?
- How satisfied are citizens with the outcomes of state activities?
- Why is the state such a contested idea?
- Where can we find out about the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?

Basic Question

How extensively has it been explored
Some Good answers
1. How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work?

How does it define and deal with challenges?
Each country has its own legal and cultural history which affects the shape and funding of services. Globalisation and Europeanisation have posed state bodies with profound challenges since the 1980s – with functions transferring from state to private and third sector sectors (and, in some cases, back again) and an increasing emphasis on mixed provision and “partnerships”
Thousands of books give analytical treatment of each of our public services – some with a focus on policy, some on management.

Measurement and comparison of performance – at both national and international level - have become dominant themes

Less emphasis since 2010 on Capacity building and strategic thinking – seen as luxuries for services under severe pressure because of cuts and austerity…
Public and Social Services in Europe ed Wollman, Kopric and Marcou (2016)



Parliaments and Think
Tanks occasionally report on strategic work
2. What can realistically be said about the interests which find expression in “the state”?
The 1970s and 80s saw an active debate in political science and sociology about the nature of The State (national and local) – and the public, professional, political, commercial and other interests one could find represented there.

As the state has “hollowed out” in the past 30 years – with privatisation and “contracting out” - political scientists became more interested in identifying the narratives which justified the remaining structures (see 8 and 9 below).

It has been left to journalists such as Jones and Monbiot to look at the issue of interests – particularly commercial and ideational – of the new constellation of the state.  


The Captive State; George Monbiot (2000)
3. How satisfied are citizens with the outcomes of state activities?
Despite the constant political and media attacks on public services, the general level of satisfaction of the British public remains high – particularly for local institutions
Opinion polls – Gallup, European Union

Parliamentary Select Committee on PA eg this 2008 report on citizen entitlements
4. Why is the state such a contested idea?

In the 1970s a new school of thinking called “public choice theory” developed a very strong critique not so much of the public sector but of the motives of those who managed it. The argument was not a pragmatic one about performance – but rather that politicians and bureaucrats had  private interests which they always put ahead of any notion of public interest; and that private sector provision (through competition) would therefore always be superior to that of public provision.
Although it was initially treated with derision, it was the basic logic behind Margaret Thatcher’s push for privatisation which became global after the fall of the Berlin Wall
Reinventing Government (by Osborne and Ted Graeber) popularised the new approach in 1992



Public Choice Primer (IEA 2012) is the clearest justification of this powerful school of thinking
5. Where can we find reliable analyses of the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?
In the UK a powerful National Audit Office (with more than 600 staff) investigate Departments of State (inc Hospitals). It is overseen by Parliament’s most powerful Select Committee - the Public Accounts Select Committee. For 25 years local authority budgets in England and Wales were overseen by an Audit Commission which was, very curiously, abolished

Attack on public spending “waste” has long been a favourite subject for the media – with quite a few books devoted to the subject.


Global league tables for health and education sectors

The Blunders of our Governments (2013) The most accessible and comprehensive treatment 


Wednesday, October 4, 2017

We need to talk about…… “The State”

We need to talk about….the State. Or at least about the “machinery of government” about whose operations I am most familiar – in local and regional government in Scotland from 1968-90 and then in local and national systems of government in some 10 countries of central Europe and central Asia from 1991-2012.
Terminology is admittedly confusing….my first love, for example, was “public administration” since, at one fell swoop in 1968 I became both a Lecturer (officially in Economics) and a locally-elected reformist politician. From the start, I saw a lot wrong with how “public services” impacted on people in the West of Scotland – and I strongly associated with the national reform efforts which got underway from 1966, targeting both local and national systems of government and administration.

Major reforms of the “Civil Service” and of English and Scottish systems of local government were duly enacted – and I duly found myself in a powerful position from the mid 1970s to 1990 to influence strategic change in Europe’s largest Regional authority  
But, by the late 70s, national debate focused on “state overload” and on “ungovernability” and the discourse of private sector management was beginning to take over government.

The 80s may have seen a debate in UK left-wing circles about both the nature of “the local state” and the nature and power of “The State” generally but it was privatization which was driving the agenda by then.  “Public Administration” quickly became “public management” and then “New Public Management”….
Indeed by the 90s the debate was about the respective roles of state, market and society. Come 1997 and even the World Bank recognized that the undermining of the role of the State had gone too far.
But it has taken a long time for voices such as Ha-Joon Chang and Marianna Mazzucato to get leverage……and the space to be given for talk about a positive role for the “public sector”.

In the meantime talk of “platform capitalism”, the P2P “commons” and automation confuses most of us… and the last remnants of European social democratic parties have, with a couple of exceptions, totally collapsed. So do we simply give up on the idea of constructing a State which has some chance of working for the average Joe and Jill?

Because I’m a bit of a geek, I’ve long followed the discussion about Public Admin Reform and PMR…..trying to make sense of it all – initially for myself….but also for those I was working with….For the past 40 years I have been driven to draft and publish – after every “project” or intervention - a reflective piece…..
It’s only now that I feel I am beginning to understand some of them…..particularly those I wrote  a decade or so ago about the possibilities of reform systems of power and government in central Asia…

And then a British book about “the attack on the state” provoked me into identifying some questions about this huge literature which academics hog to themselves - but which need to be put out in the public domain. I found myself putting the questions in a table and drafting answers in the style required by the fascinating series such as “A Very Short Introduction” or “A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably priced book about….”, 

The State (at both local and national levels) is a constellation of diverse interests and power – to which we can give (rather arbitrarily) such terms as  “public”, “professional”, “party”, “commercial” or “security”. But, the questions begin…..

- In what sense can we say that something called the state exists?
- What can realistically be said about the interests which find expression in “the state”?
- How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work?
- How satisfied are citizens with the outcomes of state activities?
- Why is the state such a contested idea?
- Where can we find out about the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?
- Where can we find rigorous assessments of how well the “machinery of government” works?
- What Lessons have people drawn from all the “reform” experience?
- How do countries compare internationally in the performance of their public services ?
- Has privatisation lived up to its hype?
- what alternatives are there to state and private provision?
- why do governments still spend mega bucks on consultants?
- do Think Tanks have anything useful to contribute to the debate?
- whose voices are worth listening to?
- What challenges does the State face?                            

- If we want to improve the way a public service operates, are there any “golden rules”?

The next post will try to present a table which addresses these questions – with all the hyperlinks which my readers now expect……

Sunday, October 1, 2017

How the attack on the state harms us all

We’re all ambivalent about “the State”….We slag it off with pejorative terms…and often profess to anarchistic and libertarian tendencies….In my formative period in the early 70s I was very taken with the concept of The Local State whose corporatist tentacles we saw strangling everything in Scotland. Cynthia Cockburn’s 1977 book on the subject and the products of the national CDP Project were the most powerful expression of this critique – although Newcastle sociologists such as Jon Davies and Norman Dennis had led the way with their books of 1972.
And yet I was an active social democrat, consciously using the levers of (local) state power open to me to push the boundaries of opportunity for people I saw as marginalized and disenfranchised
That period of my life lasted from 1974-90 and is captured in From Multiple Deprivation to Social Exclusion

Since then, my focus has been more single-mindedly on the development of institutional capacity in the state bodies of ex-communist countries. The World Bank reflected the prevailing opinion of the early 90s in asserting that the state should simply be allowed to crumble….. and only came to is senses (partly due to Japanese pressure) with its 1997 Report – the State in a Changing World
  
By the time of my exodus from Britain, the country had already had a full decade of Thatcher – and of privatisation. I confess that part of me felt that a bit of a shake-up had been necessary…..but it was George Monbiot’s The Captive State (2000) – 3 years after New Labour’s stunning victory - which alerted me to the full scale of the corporate capture of our institutions and elites regardless of political affiliation …

And why did this capture take place? Simply because of a set of insidious ideas about freedom which I felt as I grew up and have seen weld itself into the almost irresistible force we now call “neoliberalism”……..But it is a word we should be very careful of using….partly because it is not easy to explain but mainly because it carries that implication of being beyond human resistance….
The sociologists talk of “reification” when our use of abstract nouns gives away such power – abstracting us as human agents out of the picture. 
Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate is apparently quite a famous book published in 2004 by American psychologist George Lakoff - which gives a wonderful insight into how words and phrases can gain this sort of power – and can be used deliberately in the sorts of campaigns which are now being waged all around us…    

Amidst all the causes which vie for our attention, it has become clear to me that the central one must be for the integrity of the State – whether local or national….I know all the counter-arguments – I am still a huge fan of community power and social enterprise. And the state’s increasingly militaristic profile threatens to undermine what’s left of our trust. But those profiled in “Dismembered – how the attack on the State harms us all” are the millions who work in public services which are our lifeblood – not just the teachers and health workers but all the others on whom we depend, even the much maligned inspectorates - all suffering from cutbacks, monstrous organizational upheavals and structures….
I am amazed that more books like this one have not been forthcoming…

Coincidentally, I have also been reading the confessions of a few political scientists who argue that it lost its way in the 70s and, for decades, has not been dealing with real issues. I do remember Gerry Stoker saying this to the American professional body in 2010 and am delighted that more have now joined him in a quest for relevance 
And I’m looking forward to the publication in a few weeks of The Next Public Administration – debates and dilemmas; by Guy Peters (and Jon Pierre) who is one of the best political scientists of his generation.

For too long, “the State” has been the focus of irrelevant academic scribbling….at last there are some stirrings of change!

Monday, September 25, 2017

Making Sense of the Global Crisis

Earlier this year, I ran a series of ten posts which started with a simple question – why are we so badly served with books about the economic crisis? I bemoaned the fact that authors –
-  seem to have made up their mind up about the explanation before they started to write
- make little attempt to analyse previous efforts at explanation
- generally spend their time on diagnosis
- leaving prescriptions to the last few pages

Of course, there are exceptions – in particular Howard Davies’ The Financial Crisis (2010) which identified and briefly assessed no fewer than 39 different explanations for the crisis. And I have just been reading Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures a book by Paul Kennedy which appeared only a few months ago. 
An academic sociologist, Kennedy earns high points by stating in the very first sentence that he has 
stood on the shoulders of so many giants that I am dizzy” 

and then proves the point by each chapter of his book having extensive notes (often with hyperlinks) and concluding with a bibliography of 25 pages…
More to the point, the book covers pretty extensively a lot of subjects, such as the ecological crisis and the future of work, which are normally ignored in such texts. You really feel that the guy has made a real effort to track down and summarise for us the most important texts in the field – a quite exceptional approach….which so few others attempt. You can check for yourself since the book can be downloaded in its entirety here.

I suspect that one reason for this feature is that the book is based on a much longer textbook he did a few years back called  Global Sociology – which would perhaps explain the lightness of some of the discussion dealing with the feasibility of “green solutions” to the ecological aspects of the crisis. Surprisingly, there is no reference to Capitalism 3.0 (2006) by Peter Barnes – a very fair-minded entrepreneur sensitive to the evils of unregulated capitalism. Nor to people such Paul Hawkens….whose Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution made such an impact when it came out as far as back as 1999. Hawkens indeed has just released an intensive analysis of 100 “feasible solutions” – assessed by a credible advisory team over the past 3 years…… Drawdown

But I didn ‘t actually mean any takedown with these remarks – because at least the man has been courageous enough to aim high, write clearly and put his stuff out there for us to assess…..I so much wish others would do likewise…….
 
In that spirit, let me return to the effort I made earlier this year to identify, in some ten posts, about 200 of the key books which try to explain the economics of the modern world – you can find them dealt with from pages 35-58 of Common Endeavour

Somewhere I have made the comment that the best books on the subject for me are actually not written by economists - so I thought I would test that throwaway remark and came up with the following table which simply identifies (very subjectively) some seminal titles which are then placed not quite in a left-right spectrum but more in a “tonal” spectrum…..

 Key Texts on the Crisis - by category of writing - and "tone"
Discipline
Critical
Moderate
Apologiae

Economics
Globalisation and its Discontents; Joseph Stiglitz (2002)

Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012)


Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004)

most of the discipline
Political economy

The discipline still rediscovering itself
Political science
Paul Hirst (stakeholding)

Peter Mair
Few pol scientists trespass into the economic field
Sociology
End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013)
A lot of sociologists seduced into polling work
The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills – although divided a  bit by the French school
geography
A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism – David Harvey (2005).
Injustice ; Daniel Dorling 2014)

The geographers are a bolshie lot!
Environment
                            
Although most of this bunch have been geographers, they pride themselves on their technocracy
Journalism


They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics – and therefore have to pay attention to their mealticket
Management and mant studies
Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014)

Peter Senge
Charles Handy
Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)
Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
Religious studies
Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here

Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)
A more ecumenical bunch!

My apologies to all those who may feel demeaned……but, as I hope my next post will make clear, there is a very serious point I will be trying to make……  

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Close Encounters of the…..”bureaucratic” kind

Next year will mark 50 years for me of “close encounters” with “state structures” or (more emotively expressed) with “bureaucracy”. Except that I am a political “scientist” and was trained in the 1960s in the Weberian tradition – to understand that term in a more analytic way as “the exercise of rational-legal authority”. 
Weber – like most classical philosophers and sociologists – was intrigued a hundred years ago by the source of social obedience. Why do people obey the rulers? And he produced the most satisfactory answer – with a famous three-fold classification – traditional, charismatic and rational-legal authority…..

By 1945 the world had had its fill of charismatic authority and settled amicably in the 1950s, for the most part, for “rational-legal” authority – although, in the 1960s, clever people such as JK Galbraith started to mock it and such as Ivan Illich and Paole Freire to critique it. Toffler’s “Future Shock” (1970) was probably the real warning shot that the old certainties were gone – and “change” has been non-stop since then. 
I’ve operated at the community, municipal, Regional and national levels of public management – in some ten countries in Europe and Central Asia and have tried, over this half-century, to keep track of the more important of the texts with which we have been deluged (in the English language) about the efforts of administrative reform.

I do realize that I am a bit naïve in the faith I still pin on the written word – in my continual search for the holy grail. After all, it was as long ago as 1975 – when I wrote my own first little book - when I first realized that few writers of books are seriously in the business of helping the public understand an issue – the motive is generally to make a reputation or sell a particular world view…. 
Still I persist in believing that the next book on the reading list will help the scales fall from my eyes!
So it’s taken me a long time to develop this little table about patterns of writing about admin reform…… 

Communicating administrative reform

Source
Activity
Who they write for
In what format
With what “Tone”

Academics
Too many!
One another – and students
Academic journal articles; and books
Aloof, qualified and opaque
Journalists
 Fair number
The public – and professionals
PR handouts generally; more rarely an article
Breathless; More rarely critical
Politicians
A few
The electorate
PR handouts; more rarely a pamphlet
Critical of past; optimistic of the future
Think-Tankers
A lot
Opinion-makers
Booklets; and PR material
Ditto
Consultants
Even more!
Senior civil servants

Confidential reports; very rarely booklets and even a few books
Celebrating their “product”
Officials
Few
One another; OECD wonks

Descriptive papers and reports
Ditto
Global organs (eg World Bank, ADB, WHO
More than we think
A global network inc Cabinet Offices, Ministers, think-tanks; journalists;
well-researched, well-produced reports and websites
Omniscient, dry


Mugwumps – sitting on fences
Very few
The poor middle-ranking official who is expected to achieve the required change
Toolkits; manuals; roadmaps; notebooks
Open, humorous

The fads and fashions of organizational “reform” include “reengineering”, “transformation”……even “revolution” and we no longer know who to believe or trust – let alone obey…..  
From time to time I try to make sense of this avalanche of material eg in the early part of the In Transit – notes on good governance book which I wrote in 1999 for young Central European reformers – or The Long Game – not the log-frame - where I tried to capture a sense of the various organisational models with which consultants were trying to entice central European policy-makers. 

More recently I’ve tried to incorporate such texts with relevant blogposts in a draft book about “Crafting Effective Public Management” – but have had to accept that it didn't read well....too scrappy certainly,,,,but something else too....
But, as I said, a few weeks back, someone with my experience of straddling all these worlds must (and does) have something distinctive to say about all this organisational effort. 

And I think I have perhaps cracked what’s been wrong – I’ve been using the wrong “tone” in those efforts…the text is too abstract – for the most part “writing about writing”!!
In the last few days I've been experimenting with a different approach to my reflections about the experiences of organisational change ....  It consists of -
…..“telling a story”…..of the times when a few of us came together and, through a combination of imagination, discussion, networking and sheer inspiration, were able to raft something (a project) which gave the system a bit of a jolt…..

In fact I had written a lot about these occasions – they were all in various folders. But I have never given the papers the profile and legitimacy I now realize they deserve. I’ll give some examples in the next post

Most of the writing about reform cuts out that human factor – so what you get is a profound sense of inanimate concepts and forces……And to be fair, a lot of changes are like that – a few people at the top think something is a good idea; announce it; and expect to see it implemented and working. Effective change, however, requires not hierarchy and obedience - but open dialogue and negotiation. There was a time when we thought we had learned that ….eg from the Japanese…. But that memory faded and, in these autocratic days, too many people in organisations still act like the couriers in Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the Emperor’s New Clothes …..developing the groupthink and suspension of disbelief to be able to ignore the Emperor’s actual sartorial condition!

But, at my level, all effective changes I have seen have come from a few individuals coming together to explore deeply how they can improve a problematic situation - and then developing a constituency of change around a vision which emerges as consensual. Never by one person at the top imposing a fad or idea!

Perhaps that’s why charlatans like Michael Barber have been able recently to make such a global impact with his “deliverology” – for which Justin Trudeau is the latest to fall prey…..A new central Unit….reporting to the boss….a few simple messages….a few targets…..big data crunching…..sticks and carrots……..and hey presto…we’ve solved the perennial problem of implementation!!