This note is being written to help me (in the first instance) gain some conceptual clarity about relationships in public management; a field of thought and experience that has become more confused by applying the word ‘modern’ to it. The ‘walking the dog’ notion, which will be explored below, provided instant illumination when it came to me (actually as a cyclist). The issue in that instance is about how best to coordinate potentially divergent interests in the use of public space - a canal tow path - a clear public management problem. At an obvious level it is about the dog management regimes and the inter-person relationships that facilitate a mutually acceptable use of the space (and not about the duty of scooping). At a less obvious level the instance can be used to raise questions about social controls, how they are expressed in partnerships or contracts, and what are the likely behavioural outcomes.
But first, my problem with public management relationships. My experience here is both as a teacher and as a manager of aid assisted projects in developing countries. Development does have its own problems but most of the issues are not dissimilar to those of – let us say – urban regeneration undertakings in the UK. In UK government assisted development projects, as in UK proper, the language of modernisation is pervasive, whatever their country context. Indeed some of the preoccupations of modernisation in the UK – with partnerships, agencies, contracted out services and so on, can also be found in the strategies of the multi-lateral agencies such as the World Bank (World Development Report 2004).
To an academic or a proponent of management theory, the main thrust of public management reform is fairly straightforward; about efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and so on. Each of the concepts can be given an appropriate definition. As a manager however, things are different. Public management is a severely practical matter – although with high moral intentions. It is about getting things done. It is about achieving the necessary degree of co-ordination between diverse parties. It is about finding out how these diverse parties can satisfy diverse interests while achieving common, or at least agreed purposes. ‘Getting things done’ calls for effective working relationships, that come – it can be argued - in three types; command and control, consensual action and decision making or entrepreneurial initiative; or some subtle combinations of these three. Effectiveness is achieved through applying the right type of coordination or a combination suitable to the needs of the situation (Hood 1998).
At first bite the menu available to the modern public manager would seem to be good for social health. Surely there must be ways of achieving new forms of social coordination to meet current management needs. Besides the old fashioned - but sometimes still useful - reliance upon Weberian bureaucratic values and institutions[1], there are now a range of other kinds of structure and relationship through which public purposes can be advanced. Each of these can claim strengths. Partnerships should be effective when there is genuine value added to both sides from an enduring relationship (Hughes and Weiss 2001). Markets should work where the goods and services exchanged are known, specifiable, divisible, etc, as economists indicate. With more difficulty (and often disregarded in current public management discussions) public purpose can be advanced where a representative public body is given responsibility for defining it. Equally, goods that are shared in common between defined beneficiaries can be subject to common or community decision making. However none of the resultant institutional forms (partnerships, markets, public authorities or community institutions) can be regarded as good for all purposes or as good in themselves. Furthermore they are founded in contradictory values; for instance market and community values cannot both govern the same good or service. Yet these terms are applied both widely and loosely in contemporary practice.
The modern public management agenda turns out to be far from straightforward in application. Implementation requires means of achieving coordination as well as values. This takes us to another area of choice; about terms of reference, job specs, performance agreements, and various kinds of contract: spot, classical and relational, the latter two being considered here.
Several writers, who have tried to make sense of modern notions of governance and management, have demonstrated that the great injections of ideas (that came mostly from the private sector (Osborne and Gabler 1993)) were only absorbed with difficulty in the UK (Foster and Plowden 1996), leading to often contradictory outcomes in different parts of the public sector (Hood 1998). Local government in the UK, which tends to be placed at the forefront of the national government’s modernisation thrust, is still engaged in trying to give practicable shape and form to new notions. This is obviously an exploratory process yet would-be innovators often find themselves subject to command and control measures that constrain experimentation (Stewart 2003 p221).
On the international scene there has in fact been a long tradition of experimentation with institutional forms and types of management and self-management (Uphoff, Esman and Krishna 1998; Ostrom, Schroeder and Wynne 1993). The common characteristics of these approaches are that they are experimental, medium term, responsive to an ongoing interpretation of needs and to local political-economy realities. One should add that they are pragmatic rather than ideological and require a high degree of managerial discretion and trust. The development community however - always in a hurry for results - has perhaps been more responsive to the bold claims of the modernisers. It was not until its 2004 World Development Report that the World Bank (World Bank 2004) finally moved away from out and out advocacy of market solutions to a more modulated framework that sought to equate public management institutional forms and strategies with the nature of the public goods that are to be achieved; a ‘horses for courses approach’.
My own experience is that, in current usage, many of these contemporary management concepts confuse rather than clarify. The problem is not so much with the words themselves as with their application. Modernisation, in opening up new public management strategies, has also allowed managers to apply and misapply basic concepts and norms. For instance, a public manager can both be expected by superiors to be entrepreneurial and to meet preset performance targets. The words and concepts become especially slippery when used opportunistically by the power-holders in any context. Let me provide an actual instance; focused upon interpretations of contract and performance – two key concepts within the modern governance agenda.
A thumb nail sketch
My organisation bid for a piece of work in South Africa. As the successful bidder we had had to provide an interpretation of the needs of the situation in the SA government department and express how we would respond to the terms of reference that had been drawn up by the donor and agreed by the recipient department. Although our contract was with the donor, the recipient was involved in the selection of our organisation from amongst the competition. So, in several respects there was an apparently good measure of all-round agreement about goal and purpose as well as desired outcomes and the activities through which they should be achieved. A formal (classical) contract was drawn up by the donor specifying a goal, a range of outcomes expected and activities to be managed – set out in that agency’s favourite management tool, the Logical Framework. However, to cut a long story short, the project did not work out as intended. Any one of the parties could have noted that there were basic design faults in the project from the start that duly manifest themselves in delays and frustrations. The usual suspects came to dominate implementation and inhibit effectiveness;
insistence upon the engagement of third party private sector suppliers of consultancy services to achieve outcomes, multiplying transaction costs
over-complex procurement protocols,
market competition requirements that were then regulated out of existence (by fixing prices)
partnership requirements that were in the end overridden by central prescription
All these can be taken as evidence of an over-commitment to simplistic modernisation concepts. None of the parties, ourselves included, did assert critical judgement on these matters at the right time, with the consequence that relationships became strained to eventual breaking point. Well, good manners more or less prevailed eventually and each party has gone its way. However it is the language through which the parties sought to define the relationships which is of interest, and that changed over time.
The prime relationship was between the donor agency and the government of South Africa. This will have taken the form of an Aide Memoir or other formal protocol specifying the agreed form of exchange. The emphasis in aid relationships these days is upon partnership. Partners agree upon a common purpose – in this case a shared commitment to undertaking certain actions together that will lead to development of local management capacity. My agency had been contracted in to assist the partners to achieve this laudable purpose. We were welcomed into this partnership atmosphere. There were of course the formal performance expectations and reporting arrangements, but it was also clear to all that there were many uncertainties within the innovative management arrangements that had been prescribed for this project, so key stakeholders, including the donor, adopted a ‘work it out together’ culture.
‘Working it out together’ however requires give and take. While we had signed up to a classical contract, looking back upon it, what was really required was a ‘relational contract’, founded in trust and an agreement to openly share objectives and mutual learning, rather than the pre-determined outputs and other formalities of the classical contract (Kay 1993) The existing contract management procedures of this donor however do not generally recognise this distinction, leaving the development of appropriate working practices to good fortune and goodwill. In this case it eventually became clear that some of the project lacunae could not be worked out mutually. Then the true underlying relationships come to the surface. Donor acted unilaterally as principal and sought to hold the supplier of services – us - to the letter of the formal terms of contract, although this had been long overtaken by events. The supposed partner (the South African government) reverted to the role of beneficiary claiming to be ‘in the dark’ on the intentions of the principal.
Cyclist, walker and dog
The basic insight behind the metaphor that I am developing here arose from my experience of cycling the towpath along a nearby canal – a daily form of exercise that just occasionally becomes mental exercise also. On this route I encounter numerous walkers with their dogs. The different behaviour patterns of the dogs, in response (or not) to their accompanying walkers is what triggered these thoughts. To make the metaphor fit as a proto-model of the project management situation that I have been sketching, some role changes are necessary;
The cyclist, the intended beneficiary of good dog / walker relations, is in the position of the South African government.
The walker who would influence the dog, for the benefit of the cyclist, is the donor.
The dog is....me… (the service provider); who would/should behave in a way that benefits the cyclist.
With this simple transposition the metaphor holds.
Now what happens on this towpath is this. In four cases out of five the walker calls the dog to heal while in the fourth the dog is left to mind its own business (and the cyclist to mind his)[2]. Where the dog is responsive, the usual consequence is that it pays attention to the walker and stops – as often as not directly across the path of the cyclist. Where the dog is left to its own devices it usually pays just sufficient attention to the cyclist to step out of the way. The outcome is that in two cases out of five the cyclist is stopped dead in his tracks, in two he is put at risk by a non-responsive but still distracted dog while in one the mutual regard between animal and cyclist sees the latter through.
The language in which the crucial dog/walker relationship is typically expressed is instructive. Usually the walker is described as owner, sometimes master. As owner of a dog a person has legal responsibilities to keep the animal under control with the good purpose of benefiting other people who use the same environment. The old fashioned (and certainly politically incorrect) term ‘master’ however suggests that the dog should be ‘slave’ to the masters will. Modern dog training manuals go further, insisting that the person must be top dog / wolf (alpha dog, leader of the pack) and behave in an appropriate manner (always walking first through a door, eating first, leaving the mutt to salivate in expectation) that will ensure that the animal submits to domination. The aim is total compliance. I am a bit of a libertarian on such matters and am quite pleased that most of this does not find expression on the towpath. I would not of course want all the animals that I encounter rampaging out of control, but I do assert that there should be room in our towpath relationships for mutual regard between all three parties.
On being the dog
The consultant as dog: how far can I take this element in the metaphor?[3] The advantage of an animal behaviour metaphor is that politically correct language and wishful thinking generally can be stripped away, to reveal underlying behavioural realities. If, as consultant, I am obliged to follow a contract slavishly, paying attention to my (pay)master and not the end beneficiary, I must realise that this could entail stopping across the latter’s path; quite disruptive to progress. If my performance is to be indicated against compliance with (pay)master set indicators and rankings and my reward / punishment is measured out from his hand, then so be it, I will take this as the trigger that wags my tail, but there is no guarantee that the beneficiary will benefit from my success.
On being the beneficiary
Beneficiaries have an interest in securing benefits and are not generally the holders of power even if they are sometimes consulted as to their needs – as should surely be the case when the partner word is used. As a cyclist on the towpath I am well aware that mismanagement of the person / dog relationship by the walker could land me in the water. So I am cautious and polite to both person and beast. This it turns out can be an effective strategy when there is an element of person to person communication – an implicit if not explicit agreement as to what will be a mutually convenient way forward. Yes; the word partner could then apply. Even better would be a tripartite understanding; person, person and dog; extending out into the community of towpath users. In my experience, this is not an outcome of the walker-person seeking absolute compliance from the dog; performance indicator ‘sit’, ‘heal’ or whatever; because the dog is then prevented from acknowledging me, the cyclist. To be a community there would have to be a shared (and probably actively negotiated) understanding between all parties.[4]
On walking the dog
Public managers, like walkers of dogs, do need to have means of influence. If they are looking to advance some worthy public purpose the collaboration of other parties is probably needed. The public management lexicon has provided the words partnership (man and dog in mutual regard), community (bringing the cyclist into a shared understanding) and many others found in the discourse. But what has re-emerged as the dominant notion in public management is the word ‘compliance’. Its reassertion in relation to my South African project is but a small example. It is attached to innumerable regulations, performance contracts, service level agreements, as well as the accompanying targets and indicators. It has led to a widely recognised tendency for managers in the UK public services to pay attention to the indicator and neglect the purpose, to measure the measurable and thereby deny themselves access to the immeasurable. No, the moral of the story is that we need forms of public management that allow parties to interact in ways that harmonise motivation, purpose and outcome, avoiding hype and allowing the inestimable benefits of trust and mutual regard to re-emerge.
Conclusions
As the beneficiary on the towpath I have evolved views on what is effective person/dog management – as the beneficiary of international aid no doubt has views on the management style of a donor. My views may be at variance with those of the dominant school of dog training experts, perhaps the dominant trend in public management as well. But I suspect that logic is on my side. My request is for consistency. Where command and control (and its classical contract variant) works; fine. Where mutual benefits are required let ‘partnership’ or a relational contract specify the relationship; based on mutual interest, trust and regard, not prejudged by some central authority. Where a community of interest is to evolve, let it so evolve. But not all muddled up; please.
References
Foster CD and Plowden FJ, 1996 The State under Stress, Open University Press, Buckingham
Hughes J and Weiss J, 2001 Making Partnerships Work Vantage Partners, Brighton MA
Hood, C 1998 The Art of the State Oxford UP, Oxford and New York
Kay J 1993 Foundations of Corporate Success OUP, Oxford
Osbourne D and Gabler T 1993 Reinventing Government, Penguin, NY
Ostrom E, Schroeder L and Wynne, S, 1993 Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado
Stewart J 2003 Modernising British Local Government, Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke
Uphoff N, Esman, MJ and Krishna A, 1998 Reasons for Success Kumarian Press West Hartford ConnecticutWorld Bank 2004, The World Development Report Washington
[1] Bureaucracies that claimed to follow Weberian values relied in practice of course upon personal networks and other informal rules of the game to overcome rigidities, but when managed successfully, the formal framework provided a predictable and stable world of work. The point being made here is that today’s plural value systems allow values to be contested – a recipe for stress and for more inefficiency than managerialist ideology would admit
[2] Note, in this account, my commitment the numerical requirements of evidence based policy.
[3] It does take a bit of imagination to switch roles. One can be led in this by Roy Hattersley or rather by Buster: dog leads politician (Buster’s Diary).
[4] Games theory points to the importance of repeated iteration in building up trust, shared expectations and appropriate behavioural codes in the management of resources that must be held in common. Communication is essential. My bringing the dog into this ‘game’ does of course raise questions about dog to person or person to dog communication that cannot be addressed in this brief discussion. Suffice it to say that if dogs can be persuaded to lead the blind or round up sheep….
But first, my problem with public management relationships. My experience here is both as a teacher and as a manager of aid assisted projects in developing countries. Development does have its own problems but most of the issues are not dissimilar to those of – let us say – urban regeneration undertakings in the UK. In UK government assisted development projects, as in UK proper, the language of modernisation is pervasive, whatever their country context. Indeed some of the preoccupations of modernisation in the UK – with partnerships, agencies, contracted out services and so on, can also be found in the strategies of the multi-lateral agencies such as the World Bank (World Development Report 2004).
To an academic or a proponent of management theory, the main thrust of public management reform is fairly straightforward; about efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and so on. Each of the concepts can be given an appropriate definition. As a manager however, things are different. Public management is a severely practical matter – although with high moral intentions. It is about getting things done. It is about achieving the necessary degree of co-ordination between diverse parties. It is about finding out how these diverse parties can satisfy diverse interests while achieving common, or at least agreed purposes. ‘Getting things done’ calls for effective working relationships, that come – it can be argued - in three types; command and control, consensual action and decision making or entrepreneurial initiative; or some subtle combinations of these three. Effectiveness is achieved through applying the right type of coordination or a combination suitable to the needs of the situation (Hood 1998).
At first bite the menu available to the modern public manager would seem to be good for social health. Surely there must be ways of achieving new forms of social coordination to meet current management needs. Besides the old fashioned - but sometimes still useful - reliance upon Weberian bureaucratic values and institutions[1], there are now a range of other kinds of structure and relationship through which public purposes can be advanced. Each of these can claim strengths. Partnerships should be effective when there is genuine value added to both sides from an enduring relationship (Hughes and Weiss 2001). Markets should work where the goods and services exchanged are known, specifiable, divisible, etc, as economists indicate. With more difficulty (and often disregarded in current public management discussions) public purpose can be advanced where a representative public body is given responsibility for defining it. Equally, goods that are shared in common between defined beneficiaries can be subject to common or community decision making. However none of the resultant institutional forms (partnerships, markets, public authorities or community institutions) can be regarded as good for all purposes or as good in themselves. Furthermore they are founded in contradictory values; for instance market and community values cannot both govern the same good or service. Yet these terms are applied both widely and loosely in contemporary practice.
The modern public management agenda turns out to be far from straightforward in application. Implementation requires means of achieving coordination as well as values. This takes us to another area of choice; about terms of reference, job specs, performance agreements, and various kinds of contract: spot, classical and relational, the latter two being considered here.
Several writers, who have tried to make sense of modern notions of governance and management, have demonstrated that the great injections of ideas (that came mostly from the private sector (Osborne and Gabler 1993)) were only absorbed with difficulty in the UK (Foster and Plowden 1996), leading to often contradictory outcomes in different parts of the public sector (Hood 1998). Local government in the UK, which tends to be placed at the forefront of the national government’s modernisation thrust, is still engaged in trying to give practicable shape and form to new notions. This is obviously an exploratory process yet would-be innovators often find themselves subject to command and control measures that constrain experimentation (Stewart 2003 p221).
On the international scene there has in fact been a long tradition of experimentation with institutional forms and types of management and self-management (Uphoff, Esman and Krishna 1998; Ostrom, Schroeder and Wynne 1993). The common characteristics of these approaches are that they are experimental, medium term, responsive to an ongoing interpretation of needs and to local political-economy realities. One should add that they are pragmatic rather than ideological and require a high degree of managerial discretion and trust. The development community however - always in a hurry for results - has perhaps been more responsive to the bold claims of the modernisers. It was not until its 2004 World Development Report that the World Bank (World Bank 2004) finally moved away from out and out advocacy of market solutions to a more modulated framework that sought to equate public management institutional forms and strategies with the nature of the public goods that are to be achieved; a ‘horses for courses approach’.
My own experience is that, in current usage, many of these contemporary management concepts confuse rather than clarify. The problem is not so much with the words themselves as with their application. Modernisation, in opening up new public management strategies, has also allowed managers to apply and misapply basic concepts and norms. For instance, a public manager can both be expected by superiors to be entrepreneurial and to meet preset performance targets. The words and concepts become especially slippery when used opportunistically by the power-holders in any context. Let me provide an actual instance; focused upon interpretations of contract and performance – two key concepts within the modern governance agenda.
A thumb nail sketch
My organisation bid for a piece of work in South Africa. As the successful bidder we had had to provide an interpretation of the needs of the situation in the SA government department and express how we would respond to the terms of reference that had been drawn up by the donor and agreed by the recipient department. Although our contract was with the donor, the recipient was involved in the selection of our organisation from amongst the competition. So, in several respects there was an apparently good measure of all-round agreement about goal and purpose as well as desired outcomes and the activities through which they should be achieved. A formal (classical) contract was drawn up by the donor specifying a goal, a range of outcomes expected and activities to be managed – set out in that agency’s favourite management tool, the Logical Framework. However, to cut a long story short, the project did not work out as intended. Any one of the parties could have noted that there were basic design faults in the project from the start that duly manifest themselves in delays and frustrations. The usual suspects came to dominate implementation and inhibit effectiveness;
insistence upon the engagement of third party private sector suppliers of consultancy services to achieve outcomes, multiplying transaction costs
over-complex procurement protocols,
market competition requirements that were then regulated out of existence (by fixing prices)
partnership requirements that were in the end overridden by central prescription
All these can be taken as evidence of an over-commitment to simplistic modernisation concepts. None of the parties, ourselves included, did assert critical judgement on these matters at the right time, with the consequence that relationships became strained to eventual breaking point. Well, good manners more or less prevailed eventually and each party has gone its way. However it is the language through which the parties sought to define the relationships which is of interest, and that changed over time.
The prime relationship was between the donor agency and the government of South Africa. This will have taken the form of an Aide Memoir or other formal protocol specifying the agreed form of exchange. The emphasis in aid relationships these days is upon partnership. Partners agree upon a common purpose – in this case a shared commitment to undertaking certain actions together that will lead to development of local management capacity. My agency had been contracted in to assist the partners to achieve this laudable purpose. We were welcomed into this partnership atmosphere. There were of course the formal performance expectations and reporting arrangements, but it was also clear to all that there were many uncertainties within the innovative management arrangements that had been prescribed for this project, so key stakeholders, including the donor, adopted a ‘work it out together’ culture.
‘Working it out together’ however requires give and take. While we had signed up to a classical contract, looking back upon it, what was really required was a ‘relational contract’, founded in trust and an agreement to openly share objectives and mutual learning, rather than the pre-determined outputs and other formalities of the classical contract (Kay 1993) The existing contract management procedures of this donor however do not generally recognise this distinction, leaving the development of appropriate working practices to good fortune and goodwill. In this case it eventually became clear that some of the project lacunae could not be worked out mutually. Then the true underlying relationships come to the surface. Donor acted unilaterally as principal and sought to hold the supplier of services – us - to the letter of the formal terms of contract, although this had been long overtaken by events. The supposed partner (the South African government) reverted to the role of beneficiary claiming to be ‘in the dark’ on the intentions of the principal.
Cyclist, walker and dog
The basic insight behind the metaphor that I am developing here arose from my experience of cycling the towpath along a nearby canal – a daily form of exercise that just occasionally becomes mental exercise also. On this route I encounter numerous walkers with their dogs. The different behaviour patterns of the dogs, in response (or not) to their accompanying walkers is what triggered these thoughts. To make the metaphor fit as a proto-model of the project management situation that I have been sketching, some role changes are necessary;
The cyclist, the intended beneficiary of good dog / walker relations, is in the position of the South African government.
The walker who would influence the dog, for the benefit of the cyclist, is the donor.
The dog is....me… (the service provider); who would/should behave in a way that benefits the cyclist.
With this simple transposition the metaphor holds.
Now what happens on this towpath is this. In four cases out of five the walker calls the dog to heal while in the fourth the dog is left to mind its own business (and the cyclist to mind his)[2]. Where the dog is responsive, the usual consequence is that it pays attention to the walker and stops – as often as not directly across the path of the cyclist. Where the dog is left to its own devices it usually pays just sufficient attention to the cyclist to step out of the way. The outcome is that in two cases out of five the cyclist is stopped dead in his tracks, in two he is put at risk by a non-responsive but still distracted dog while in one the mutual regard between animal and cyclist sees the latter through.
The language in which the crucial dog/walker relationship is typically expressed is instructive. Usually the walker is described as owner, sometimes master. As owner of a dog a person has legal responsibilities to keep the animal under control with the good purpose of benefiting other people who use the same environment. The old fashioned (and certainly politically incorrect) term ‘master’ however suggests that the dog should be ‘slave’ to the masters will. Modern dog training manuals go further, insisting that the person must be top dog / wolf (alpha dog, leader of the pack) and behave in an appropriate manner (always walking first through a door, eating first, leaving the mutt to salivate in expectation) that will ensure that the animal submits to domination. The aim is total compliance. I am a bit of a libertarian on such matters and am quite pleased that most of this does not find expression on the towpath. I would not of course want all the animals that I encounter rampaging out of control, but I do assert that there should be room in our towpath relationships for mutual regard between all three parties.
On being the dog
The consultant as dog: how far can I take this element in the metaphor?[3] The advantage of an animal behaviour metaphor is that politically correct language and wishful thinking generally can be stripped away, to reveal underlying behavioural realities. If, as consultant, I am obliged to follow a contract slavishly, paying attention to my (pay)master and not the end beneficiary, I must realise that this could entail stopping across the latter’s path; quite disruptive to progress. If my performance is to be indicated against compliance with (pay)master set indicators and rankings and my reward / punishment is measured out from his hand, then so be it, I will take this as the trigger that wags my tail, but there is no guarantee that the beneficiary will benefit from my success.
On being the beneficiary
Beneficiaries have an interest in securing benefits and are not generally the holders of power even if they are sometimes consulted as to their needs – as should surely be the case when the partner word is used. As a cyclist on the towpath I am well aware that mismanagement of the person / dog relationship by the walker could land me in the water. So I am cautious and polite to both person and beast. This it turns out can be an effective strategy when there is an element of person to person communication – an implicit if not explicit agreement as to what will be a mutually convenient way forward. Yes; the word partner could then apply. Even better would be a tripartite understanding; person, person and dog; extending out into the community of towpath users. In my experience, this is not an outcome of the walker-person seeking absolute compliance from the dog; performance indicator ‘sit’, ‘heal’ or whatever; because the dog is then prevented from acknowledging me, the cyclist. To be a community there would have to be a shared (and probably actively negotiated) understanding between all parties.[4]
On walking the dog
Public managers, like walkers of dogs, do need to have means of influence. If they are looking to advance some worthy public purpose the collaboration of other parties is probably needed. The public management lexicon has provided the words partnership (man and dog in mutual regard), community (bringing the cyclist into a shared understanding) and many others found in the discourse. But what has re-emerged as the dominant notion in public management is the word ‘compliance’. Its reassertion in relation to my South African project is but a small example. It is attached to innumerable regulations, performance contracts, service level agreements, as well as the accompanying targets and indicators. It has led to a widely recognised tendency for managers in the UK public services to pay attention to the indicator and neglect the purpose, to measure the measurable and thereby deny themselves access to the immeasurable. No, the moral of the story is that we need forms of public management that allow parties to interact in ways that harmonise motivation, purpose and outcome, avoiding hype and allowing the inestimable benefits of trust and mutual regard to re-emerge.
Conclusions
As the beneficiary on the towpath I have evolved views on what is effective person/dog management – as the beneficiary of international aid no doubt has views on the management style of a donor. My views may be at variance with those of the dominant school of dog training experts, perhaps the dominant trend in public management as well. But I suspect that logic is on my side. My request is for consistency. Where command and control (and its classical contract variant) works; fine. Where mutual benefits are required let ‘partnership’ or a relational contract specify the relationship; based on mutual interest, trust and regard, not prejudged by some central authority. Where a community of interest is to evolve, let it so evolve. But not all muddled up; please.
References
Foster CD and Plowden FJ, 1996 The State under Stress, Open University Press, Buckingham
Hughes J and Weiss J, 2001 Making Partnerships Work Vantage Partners, Brighton MA
Hood, C 1998 The Art of the State Oxford UP, Oxford and New York
Kay J 1993 Foundations of Corporate Success OUP, Oxford
Osbourne D and Gabler T 1993 Reinventing Government, Penguin, NY
Ostrom E, Schroeder L and Wynne, S, 1993 Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado
Stewart J 2003 Modernising British Local Government, Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke
Uphoff N, Esman, MJ and Krishna A, 1998 Reasons for Success Kumarian Press West Hartford ConnecticutWorld Bank 2004, The World Development Report Washington
[1] Bureaucracies that claimed to follow Weberian values relied in practice of course upon personal networks and other informal rules of the game to overcome rigidities, but when managed successfully, the formal framework provided a predictable and stable world of work. The point being made here is that today’s plural value systems allow values to be contested – a recipe for stress and for more inefficiency than managerialist ideology would admit
[2] Note, in this account, my commitment the numerical requirements of evidence based policy.
[3] It does take a bit of imagination to switch roles. One can be led in this by Roy Hattersley or rather by Buster: dog leads politician (Buster’s Diary).
[4] Games theory points to the importance of repeated iteration in building up trust, shared expectations and appropriate behavioural codes in the management of resources that must be held in common. Communication is essential. My bringing the dog into this ‘game’ does of course raise questions about dog to person or person to dog communication that cannot be addressed in this brief discussion. Suffice it to say that if dogs can be persuaded to lead the blind or round up sheep….
No comments:
Post a Comment