The recording of the hybrid seminar on the book, held last month at Institute for Government in London, is now available here, together with my slide set, or below. Huge thanks to the sponsors Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development (especially to Peter Davies, Andrea Westall and John Lotherington) for their initiative in developing the […]
The last two months I spent in Europe increasingly gave a feeling of an end of a democratic era. This is the era of representative social democracy which followed the second world war, survived counterculture movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s and emerged as a broad neo-liberal consensus from the 1990s (with the […]
I’ve been working on a paper for the upcoming European Consortium for Policital Research annual conference in which I link changing views of public administration with thinking about sustainable development governance and I find myself reflecting on the continuing legacy of Max Weber’s description of bureaucracy. There are many things to appreciate in his early […]
So, the UK Prime Minister has announced that civil service numbers should drop by nearly 20% over the next three years (a reduction of 91,000). This would return them to the 2016 level of peak austerity cuts (and the lowest since World War II), a level achieved before the implications of Brexit and, to a […]
‘The task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more human experience in which all share and to which all contribute.’ – John Dewey, The public and its problems (1927) I was kindly invited to participate in a graduate seminar this morning at CU Denver School of Public Affairs, given as […]
Towards a New Civic Bureaucrcay is published in North and South America today (29 March). Copies are available from the publisher here. You can also find it as an epub on a number of websites and as a hard copy through retailers. If your academic library hasn’t ordered it yet, do drop them an email!
I’ve just completed a co-edited Special Issue of Sustainability on the theme of troubled times. You can view it here. When Susan Baker and I started on the task in 2019/2020, the troubled times we envisaged were government austerity policies (which had so refocused governance and reduced public sector capacity) and the rise of right […]
‘Towards a new civic bureaucracy’ is now formally published in the UK and Europe. It is available as a hardback, e-publication or for kindle. There is a launch offer of 20% off the hardback and e-publication via the Policy Press website. The book is formally available in North America, Canada and South America in March. […]
Two of my blog posts exploring themes from the book have been published on external sites whose theme, appropriately enough, is transformation. The first is on the Transforming Places website, run by colleagues at Groningen University. The post considers why public bureaucracy struggles to accommodate place-based working and how it needs to embrace it as […]
The idea of New Public Management which was adopted almost worldwide from the 1990s – and which still casts its shadow today – saw the problem of public administration as one of efficiency and long-term affordability. If only services could be provided more cheaply and quicker, then all would be well. For the right, the […]