Paul Corrigan

Reconstructing public management

Argues that user involvement can provide the best basis for reforming the internal and external relationships of local government, supporting both the reinvigoration of public accountability and providing the only secure foundation for improvements in operational effectiveness. Considers and criticizes other models for improving public management. Focuses particularly on the core processes of local government ‐ the democratic, management and service delivery processes ‐ and the primary interactions with politicians and service users, through which managers must function. Examines survey evidence on the extent of quality initiatives in local authorities and goes on to speculate about the organizational arrangements needed to support a user‐involvement approach. Concludes that the fundamental problem of public management centres on the alienation of the public and that public managers have a critical responsibility in reconstructing the public through reforms of service delivery.

Reconnecting to the Public

New information and communication technology can be used to improve the productivity of public services and the responsiveness of government. However, as this paper suggests, without substantial re-engineering of the organisational relationship to the public, IT on its own will achieve little. The paper examines three issues about the use of ICT to reconnect the government and the public. Why is reconnecting so important? What are the issues standing in the way of this reconnection using ICT? And what can be done to address these issues? The paper examines the whole nexus of the nature of government-public interactions rather than simply exploring the strategic utility of IT in the governmental sector.

Preparing for best value

Best Value marks a strategic shift in local government policy making. This paper analyses how two local authorities prepared its implementation. CCT aimed to make authorities more innovative but failed because it was highly prescriptive. Best Value provides the opportunity for authorities to make more strategic choices. The two case studies show evidence of greater partnership development and examples of political and technical implementation problems. The paper also analyses opportunities for organisational learning and the role of members and the public. Best Value is seen as an incomplete idea and therefore has the possibility of resulting in a new form of bureaucratisation. Alternatively, if the focus is on community problems then it may enable authorities to be more innovative and dynamic.

Equality at Work

Discrimination in the labour market is a longstanding problem. It exists because employers make recruitment, training and promotion decisions on grounds which are irrelevant from the point of view of the economic performance of the labour concerned. Their decisions should be based on characteristics such as price and productiveness, but instead they are guided by ones to which they should be indifferent such as gender, race, age, and able-bodiedness. The specific labour involved — the people subject to discrimination — is devalued. Under the pure model of market forces, this devaluation should not exist, in reality it does, and has existed for a very long time.

Democracy and the Public Sector

We ended our theoretical section by pointing out the significance of the local state as the set of specific institutions that employ state social workers. This must mean that the experience, practice and policy of social work represents a small part of what is known as ‘politics’, and the same is true of the trade unionism that it has constructed. Working for the public sector in general, and for social work in particular, any understanding of what can or cannot be achieved is inevitably ‘political’.

The Training Gap

By the end of the 1980s it was universally agreed that there was a national training problem. A serious gap existed between the level and extent of the training which was being carried out and the training which was needed for a labour force in a dynamic, successful economy.

Education, Training and Industry

This book’s main concern is to demonstrate the complexity of the social relationships of the labour market. And yet, even given that complexity, we are also committed to exploring the simplistic way in which various Government policies have simulated an understanding of that labour market. We are demonstrating that within the labour market, and within the lives and morality of the people that make up that market, it is not possible to assume that human activity can be turned into labour in an unproblematic way. People cannot be made into the commodity labour in the straightforward way steel can be shaped into cars and blank paper shaped into forms or letters.

Political and Social Policies for Valued Labour

The problems of Britain’s labour markets, the skill shortages, recruitment difficulties, the discrimination, have deep roots in history. Tracing these roots has led further and further into the social relations of Britain, and into the evolution of cultural conditions. At first sight these essentially economic problems seemed bad enough, but looked at economically they could be seen as small ripples on the calm surface of orthodox labour market theory. As their fuller nature was theoretically brought to light they suggested that the social economy of Britain is confronted by a contradiction which can only be developed through social and political action.

Why Don’t People Want to Work?

The labour market in Britain is in crisis and, at its heart, the crisis is one coming out of the cultural nature of labour. It is this issue that we will raise in this first chapter, where we demonstrate the interaction between the economic and the social sides of labour.

An Assessment of the Cultural Conditions of Labour Today

In the previous chapter we distinguished the processes which labour takes part in. These were production, simple circulation, political and social distribution, social consumption, and the whole network of social relations. Through these processes, people make things and consume them. Philosophically speaking they express themselves through their labour, indeed externalise themselves through their labour, and then their products return to them as objects of consumption, whether as products or services. This consumption takes place in the wider society.