How Big A Step Is 'Next Steps'? Industrial Relations Developments In Civil Service Executive Agencies (original) (raw)
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Management Research News, 1994
This paper reports on the impact of the ‘Next Steps’ programme (and other initiatives such as ‘market testing’) on the underlying coherence and unity of the Civil Service. It concentrates on the impact of these changes on the human resource and careers structures within the Civil Service, which has arguably been the single biggest factor under‐pinning a unified Service. It reviews both the nature of the changes imposed from above and the record of their impact as recorded by official, researcher, consultancy and ‘insider’ accounts. Finally, it draws on an ongoing major consortium project (organised by the Cabinet Office) on human resource development strategies in 10 departments and agencies to review how the changes are developing in practice. It draws conclusions about the likely long‐term impact of the changes on the Civil Service.
Reinterpreting Agencies in UK Central Government: On Meaning, Motive and Policymaking
This thesis is a qualitative and interpretive exploration of continuity and change in the role of executive agencies in UK central government. Its three objectives are: (i) to test the longevity of the semi-autonomous agency model first introduced by Conservative governments after 1988; (ii) to explore the department-agency task division in the policymaking processes supposedly fragmented by this ‘agencification’; and (iii) to evaluate the paradigmatic testament of contemporary agency policy and practice in Whitehall. The thesis builds from an extended case study conducted during the 2010 Coalition Government in the Ministry of Justice and three of its agencies – the National Offender Management Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and the Office of the Public Guardian. Social constructivist meta-theory and the application of narrative and discourse analysis together make for an account of interpretive transformation that is theorised by discursive institutionalism. Substantively, the thesis first describes an asymmetric departure from the ‘accountable management’ philosophy which the 1988 Next Steps agency programme originally epitomised. Agency meaning is multivocal, but contemporarily converges towards accountability and transparent corporate governance, rather than managerial empowerment, de-politicisation and decentralisation. Secondly, institutional preservation of the policy-delivery work dichotomy is registered, yet found to be a poor descriptor of both historic and contemporary policy processes. Agency staff act as policy initiators and collaborators, contrary to Next Steps’ quasi- contractual, principal-agent logic, and further evidencing the departmentalisation of the once arm’s-length agency model. Thirdly, and paradigmatically, while no unidirectional trend is found, the thesis adds to the growing literature positing some departure from the former ideological and practical predominance of ‘new public management’. In so doing, it also demonstrates the challenges faced by large-N population ecology and administrative systems analysis – the favoured methodology in much international agencification scholarship – in accounting for continuity and change in policy, practice and paradigm.
Restructuring the civil service: reorganization and relocation 1962-1985
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1990
The importance of industrial restructuring in the service sector as well as in manufacturing industry has increasingly been recognized. However, most analyses to date have focused on the private sector, and in particular private office employment (for example Wood, 1986; Damesick, 1986; Marshall, 1985). Little attention has been paid to restructuring in the various public sector services, even though they have been the subject of repeated attempts at reorganization, both in situ and spatially. This is regrettable for a number of reasons. The public sector warrants analysis in empirical terms, not least because of the sheer numbers of the UK workforce it employs. In 1981 over 35% of employment in the service sector in the UK was in the four public sector-dominated industries of medical and health services, education and national and local government service. Further, the public sector in the UK has seen a number of significant interventions in its structure and organization in recent years, including the wholesale removal of some activities from public control, as part of 'privatization'. I would argue that in overlooking public sector services, key theoretical issues are also being ignored. First, the reorganization of the public sector can tell us a great deal about the processes of industrial restructuring in noncapitalistically organized sectors of the economy. The differences and similarities between restructuring in the public and private sector can indicate the role of the form of organization in responding to change (Sayer, 1985). Secondly, the functionalist notion that there is a neat fit between the needs of capital on the one hand, and uneven regional development on the other (see Warde, 1985 for a critique), is inappropriate in the study of the public sector. Rather, restructuring can be considered to involve different types of response to economic and other pressures. The question then becomes one of the determinants of restructuring strategies, focusing attention on mediating structures instead of functionalist ~ Since this paper was resubmitted (in October 19x8) a further, substantial round of civil service dispersals has been announced, as I suggested might be the case. Whilst the pressures on the civil service are not dissimilar to those of earlier dispersals, the jobs involved appear (in October 1989) to be somewhat higher level than before. This does not invalidate my argument; rather it confirms the historical and social specificity of industrial restructuring involving relocation. ' The precise definition of a civil servant is far from clear and there are many anomalies. Evidence to the House of Commons Treasury and Civil Services Committee 1980 summarizes the difficulties and concludes that a working definition is someone who works for the crown in a civil capacity, is not a holder of judicial, political or other special office, nor is a personal servant (p. 132).
The Public Sector’s Use of Agencies: A Dynamic Rather than Static Scene
Public Organization Review, 2009
It is an occupational hazard in the study of organisations and their inter-relationships that we tend to view them as static arrangements, as though what is observed and reported today tells us all we need to know about them. But organisations (and their inter-relationships) are dynamic rather than static phenomena, being constantly affected by adjustments to meet the effects of fading past arrangements or approaching new arrangements. Simple "snapshots" taken at a particular moment in history are never likely to reveal all the relevant nuances.
Bureaucracy or Post-Bureaucracy? Public Sector Organisations in a Changing Context
This article explores the nature of public sector organisational values in the context of wider debates about the shift from bureaucracy to post-bureaucracy. Preference for post-bureaucracy is a characteristic of the discourse of new public management, which has been influential in the public sectors of advanced economies. The article focuses on organisational values, which are ingrained attitudes and beliefs that underlie organisational structures. It might be expected that public sector organisations would reflect post-bureaucratic values in response to changes in dominant management and organisational discourses as well as the external environment. The research reported here does not confirm initial expectations that public sector organisations have become post-bureaucratic. In this regard, the article discusses the possibility that public sector organisations have evolved from one form of bureaucracy based on political controls and values, to a form of bureaucracy associated with market controls and values.
Industrial Relations in Local Government: The Impact of Privatisation
The Political Quarterly, 1993
LOCAL government was one of the primary political and industrial battlegrounds of the 1980s, both in terms of defining the proper role, size and scope of local administrations, and of Conservative attempts to pacify their recalcitrant workforces. This battle was conducted on several fronts throughout the decade, but this article focuses on the policy of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) as an analytical tool to examine the interaction of Conservative ideological and industrial relations objectives.
For much of the last thirty years the main leitmotif animating Civil Service reform in the UK has been that efficiency and effectiveness in public services can be achieved by adapting management methods and practices derived from commercial enterprise. In the process of making the dreams and schemes of that plural singularity we have come to call 'managerialism' operational though, something valuable appears to have been lost, and that something is the Civil Service as a unified 'constitutional bureaucracy'. In this article I explore some of the unfortunate governmental and administrative consequences of these managerially minded reforms. In particular, I seek to highlight the continuing relevance of what have been routinely characterized as outmoded and anachronistic machineries of government, and to stress the importance of the increasingly forgotten core business of public administration: the running of a state and of a constitution.
Developments in UK executive agencies: Re-examining the ‘disaggregation–reaggregation’ thesis
Public Policy and Administration, 2012
Executive agencies remain key players in UK government. However, reflecting their declining political profile, little research has emerged on the longer term evolution of this key new public management (NPM) infrastructure. Although widely cited, the ‘disaggregation–reaggregation’ thesis – which posits that a significant reversal has taken place, following the extensive agencification of the 1990s – has received little systematic evaluation. As political interest in the agency model reawakens under the Coalition Government, it is necessary to understand how the agency landscape has evolved while outside of the limelight. Accordingly, this article examines developments across 1988–2010 along two dimensions: ‘structural’, relating to organisational boundaries; and ‘functional’, relating to the department–agency task division. Viewed within this structural–functional framework, considerable merit is found in the disaggregation–reaggregation thesis, although not entirely in the terms in...