Ten down; reflections postscript

These essays have been about governance, public management and that very odd thing called modernisation.

Reflection, as against bits of research or theoretical exposition, lets thoughts arise as they will; allowing concern to define what is valuable. I find, when I have let it happen - on the canal side, aeroplane, art gallery, night time wakefulness - that reflection draws upon different pools of thought; bits of experience in ‘doing’ public management, or attempting to be an active citizen, or being an academic and consultant who necessarily peddles current ideas or practices in the trade, as well as what comes to mind when ‘walking the dog’. Like research, reflection grounds observation in comparison, but is free to discover likenesses and contrasts in everyday experience, media reports, journals as well as the occasional poem, picture, or wayside landscape[1]. Reflection on events and happenings at home - wherever counts as home - is sharpened and brought into focus by seeing sameness and difference in other people’s societies; known or half-known as traveller, consultant, friend, in several interesting corners of the world.

Findings? No knew theory, thankfully, but, looking back on the series - incomplete as it is - I suppose that I can be pinned down to some observations. Modernisation I still find to be an almost entirely unhelpful word into which politicians and other advocates pour both inconsistent meaning and high moral enthusiasm - which academics then elaborate; a very dangerous substitute for thought-through ideologies or consistent social, economic or environmental objectives and strategies.

The much used governance word, on the other hand, usefully expands the idea of social control for public wellbeing. From a bounded thing called ‘government’ we now must recognise the roles of other agents in the process. A good economy, a sound environment, a participative democracy is always the outcome of a balance of contradictory agents; a triumvirate of hierarchical, collective and individualistic agents, variously labelled ‘State, Market and Civil Society’ or Public Management, Private Sector, and Community, etc[2]. They represent distinctly different sets of social values and ways of thinking about priorities and loyalties in coordinating social life. The only sociological generalisation used in this set - well, the most important anyway - is that all three are always present, always conflicting, always necessary and often failing in different ways.

Both New Labour’s Third Way and the World Bank’s post 2000 policy commitments were promoted as a response to this enlarged idea about what makes for governance in society. Both sound logical and, when not wrapped in too much jargon, quite convincing but in fact allow for new forms of policy perversity. Third Way perversities include; centralisation in the name of ‘decentralisation’, ‘managers free to manage’ but tightly controlled by mechanistic target setting and monitoring, the ‘measurement’ imperative driving out immeasurable value, ‘choice’ leading to dithering[3], and an overall tendency to detach established meanings from once respected words.

To detach meanings from words is to go a stage beyond what is useful. It is useful, in fact necessary, for there to be some elasticity in the labelling of roles, institutions and structures; this because these social institutions have to be lived in, argued about and fought for[4] if they are to remain vital. As soon as they become reduced to mere abstractions they can be taken for granted, corrupted or simply ignored and no longer serve their purpose. Parliament, for instance, with associated roles; MP’s, Ministers, Speaker, etc, and familiar processes; PM’s Question Time, etc. is largely ignored by most of the electorate most of the time, until some crisis calls for action[5]. Then the life-blood of democracy stirs. Nevertheless, abstraction is unavoidable; once a principle is established, a rule enacted, a precedent created, we have a structure and a structure is an abstraction. Another generalisation: expect tension between established structures and processes, with several consequences.

Some structures have evolved, some are adopted through imitation, some are transplanted and thrust upon an unsuspecting population - the colonial experience everywhere but not unknown elsewhere - think of recent UK imports form American. Whichever: they are inevitably complex. Being complex they don’t ‘work’ without a bit of rule bending or informal recognition of contradictory principles that I label, ‘eccentricity’[6],[7]. Too much rule bending and they don’t ‘work’ at all. Complexity is enhanced due to the multiple functions that arise in any formal institution - getting things done, maintaining the system, exercising authority, motivating and rewarding staff, dealing with others, etc.. Complexity can lead to the almost complete detachment of institution from purpose, the use of power to defend the interests of power rather than purpose[8], the misapplication of power to negate purported outcomes[9]. Oh, yes; the obverse too, the hope that charisma can transform[10] and the fear that it can’t.





[1] See; ‘‘N’ ways of modernisation; not all bad’
[2] See; ‘Monocrops, etc., mindsets in governance’
[3] See; ‘The Other Side of the Fence: the perversities of choice’
[4] See; ‘Constitutionalism and rolling roads’
[5] See; ‘Sense, sound and fury, the dialectic of public choice’
[6] See; ‘Let local be different’
[7] See; ‘The sometimes missing Jester’
[8] See. ‘Walking the dog’; how and how not to control
[9] See; ‘Governing the Professors’
[10] See; Dangers and hopes in charisma’