Andrew Gray

Making indicators perform

Getting to grips with the technical difficulties of performance measurement should not blind us to the fact that political factors can be as important as technical ones in the management of organisations, particularly in the public sector. Government Departments carry out different tasks and work within different traditions. The combination of political and contingent factors should lead us to expect that performance measurement in government will be diverse in its operation.

Bureaucratic Politics and Power: Developments in the Study of Bureaucracy*

This paper argues that the study of bureaucracy should explicitly recognize the latters essential organizational existence, and further, that explanations of bureaucratic behaviour are promoted by adopting dynamic political models of organization. Various literatures which appear to adopt elements of such an approach are discussed. From this a model of bureaucracy is formulated which draws particular attention to power, political bargaining and historical development. Finally, the paper suggests something of the explanatory potential of such a model in the British context.

Human resource management audit in government

While financial management in the Civil Service has improved in the past few years, the management of human resources has lagged behind. The National Audit Office intends to develop human resources management audit in order to give a boost to this activity, but what are the issues to be covered?

Bureaucracy and Political Power

A reviewer is unlikely to be asked to comment on two more different books.’ Despite the apparent similarity of their titles, objectives and subject matter, the one is a quiet, coherent and well-integrated, if partial, piece of scholarship, while the other is a rather busily incoherent, fragmented but wide-ranging edition of conference papers. In many ways they epitomize the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches to what has become over the past few years a very substantial literature, not least in this country, on bureaucracy and political power. Page’s essay is based on a comparative analysis of bureaucracy in France, Great Britain, the United States of America, and West Germany. It is not a critique of Weber but draws on certain strands of his ‘ideal’ type of bureaucracy to facilitate a comparison of its political direction (or, rather, the limits to it) in the selected countries. The topic has three elements: first, the extent to which administrative systems of government in the four countries are bureaucratic in the Weberian sense; second, the constraints on the power of bureaucrats over the machinery of government and political decisions, and third, the scope for political leadership in bureaucracy. As such, this is for Page an essay on the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy rather than one on the nature of the civil service as a social system or as a processor of issues. The subject matter of Suleiman’s edition, however, cannot be so easily summarized. Although more political systems are included than in Page (the same four countries with the addition of Italy, Norway, Chile and Japan), the range does not appear constructed deliberately to emphasize any particular subtheme. Certainly the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy is addressed, yet only implicitly through the various characterizations of higher civil service. The range of more explicit focuses include organizational issues such as recruitment systems and differentiated structures of functional performance, socio-political features such as the representativeness of bureaucracy and its roles (both prescriptive and descriptive) in policy-making and delivery, and a concern with the historical development of bureaucracy in government. Yet such coherence as this summary contains comes largely from a reader’s synthesis of the varied contributions (a feature common to edited symposia).

Government and Administration: Fit for Purpose?

In the summer of 2006, the new Home Secretary, John Reid, told a startled Home Affairs Committee that his department was ‘not fit for purpose’. He had just moved into the job (his sixth Cabinet post in nine years) and reported that the leadership, management systems, processes and information technology of the Home Office were unable to cope with the new age.1 Whatever its motivations, the admission was unusual. Reid’s political critics saw it as an attempt to distance himself from continuing problems, especially the Home Office’s inability to keep track of an increasing number of released foreign prisoners. The episode had deeply embarrassed the government and his predecessor, Charles Clarke. In any event, Reid’s response was to initiate a fundamental review of his department under its new Permanent Secretary, Sir David Normington.

Government and Administration: The Quest for Public Value

In October 2005 Lady Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday with a grand party. The guests included many of the famous from the world of politics and administration including John Major, Norman Tebbit, Lord Carrington, Lord Butler and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Of her former Tory critics, Lord Heseltine, her nemesis, was absent but Lord Howe, presumably forgiven for his treachery a decade and a half ago, praised Mrs Thatcher’s ‘astonishing achievements’ that ‘had shaped the late twentieth century’. His assessment recalled an era when efficiency, markets and choice held sway.