NPM – RIP
It is surely time for a new concept of public services to emerge from the rubble of the increasingly discredited paradigm of New Public Management (NPM)? It will take a generation for a new way of thinking to become dominant and, given the challenge it represents to current practice, there is no guarantee that it will succeed. But – and here the contrast with NPM is stark – the process of challenge and reform can itself mobilise and inspire public servants and wider civil society.
The core ideas of NPM – greater reliance on market based mechanisms and contracting out, greater separation of decision making, professional and process functions – have been in the ascendancy for at least two decades. Today, the evidence of their failure is all around. Public service productivity has stagnated and fallen in the countries where NPM has been most fully applied. In the UK, the Private Finance Initiative – which as well as being a crude way of circumventing short term public spending limits is also heavily influenced by NPM thinking – is now exposed as a disaster (by the way, unless someone in Whitehall gets a grip quickly Payment by Results will be the next PFI). And this morning in The Times we read nurses’ leaders admitting that the professionalisation of nursing and separation of medical and caring functions – again based on NPM ideas of efficiency – has in essence destroyed that quality of their vocation (the combination of vocational skills and caring ethos) the public most valued.
The new paradigm calls for the re-socialisation of public service, a process which requires us to challenge not just the ideas of NPM but the deeper bureaucratic/professional foundations of public service practice. Two examples from current RSA sources make this idea concrete.
Writing in the latest edition of the award winning RSA Journal, Robert Whitaker exposes the disastrous record of modern psychiatric care. Outcomes for people with severe conditions have failed to improve. Indeed the evidence suggests not only that outcomes were better 150 years ago, before modern psychiatry was invented, but that they are also better in developing countries which lack the infrastructure of modern mental health services. In essence, we have turned conditions which were seen by sufferers and communities as challenging but manageable and episodic into conditions which are now seen as chronic, debilitating, and requiring lifelong pharmaceutical and therapeutic intervention. Increasingly the evidence indicates that psychotropic drugs are better at creating mental illness than curing it.
A different approach to vulnerable people with challenging behaviour has been adopted by the RSA Whole Person Recovery project. This seeks to turn post treatment recovery into a community based process. The integration of recovering addicts into the community as full and vocal citizens and the mobilisation of the community as partners in recovery enables better outcomes for individuals and enhances civic capacity.
It is time to re-conceptualise public service goals as the outcome of social processes. The role of politicians, public managers and professionals is to serve and support those social functions. So, for example, instead of children’s learning taking place in schools with the occasional (often tokenistic and patronising) attempt to ‘engage the community’, children’s development into adulthood should be seen as a function of families and communities with schools being judged by how well they support and enhance that social process. Professional norms need to refreshed by reference those things we value and seek to enhance in civil society. The goal of good nursing practice should be to replicate the values of familial care and community compassion in a professional setting.
As in all paradigm shifts, that from new public management to socialised public service will involve continuity and gradualism as well as transformation. The conceptual core will shift but the circles of practice around it will see overlaps between the new and the old. (So, for example, the new paradigm is just as critical of public service producerism as is NPM, but whereas the latter seeks remedy in public servants imitating market actors, the former exhorts respect for the strengths of what Avner Offer calls ‘the economy of regard’.)
Defenders of NPM will fight on. Like post war communists distancing themselves from ‘actual existing socialism’ they will say the problem lies not in the theory but that fact it has not been properly or fully applied. But the question now is what will emerge from NPM’s ashes. Its death exposes both the limitations of the New Labour model of top-down modernisation (of which I was an advocate and architect) and the gaping disconnect between the valuable diagnosis of the Big Society and the dispiriting practice of public service reform under the Coalition.
Most of all, the new paradigm offers the only credible way of addressing the social aspiration gap which exists between our hopes for the future and our current trajectory. Unless we start to close that gap the guiding light of social progress – which is essential to the legitimacy of liberal market societies – will, in time, be extinguished.
Prepare for the Olympics – buy a new couch
I try in this blog to be reasonably dispassionate about issues. But I’m afraid when it comes to London, the Olympics and sporting participation, I find it hard to keep my cool. Let me try to explain why.
Long term readers of this blog may recall that nearly two years ago I tried to get a new Big Society style initiative going. Despite the excellent management of the Olympic project in terms both of preparation for the Games themselves and regeneration, I had started to worry that there was no plan in place to boost sporting participation. Apart from the basic commitment to participation as a good thing for individuals and communities, I felt it was vital that London citizens did something to deliver on the core promise of inclusion made when our city won the bid.
In typical RSA ‘don’t just complain, do something’ style, we worked with a number of public, third sector and private organisations to develop an idea (the development work was kindly subsidised by RSA London Region). This was for an independent campaign (working title ‘Let the games begin’) which would mobilise and organise so that London would be seen by the world to have used the Olympics to boost sporting participation. As well as public marketing campaigns for people to take up sport, ‘Let the Games Begin’ was also going to try to tap ‘hidden assets’ for participation such as making down time in commercial gyms available to school kids or opening up private sector playing fields. We also had plans for a sporting time bank.
There was a great deal of enthusiasm for the idea and even some tentative funding commitments from large corporates. But the idea could not have succeeded without endorsement from the Mayor, who had at the time commissioned Labour MP Kate Hoey to write a sports strategy for London. Unfortunately, despite my attempts to persuade Boris’ policy advisor and Kate, the Mayor’s office refused to back the proposals and we had to abandon it. Kate Hoey assured me that the RSA idea was unnecessary as her local authority-based plan would deliver higher participation.
So I have been saddened by the regular, and now overwhelming, evidence not only that sporting participation rates are falling, not onlythat is there a growing social divide in sporting activity, but also – perhaps most embarrassing for London – rates are particularly poor in some of the Olympic Boroughs. There is yet more evidence today.
As David Goldblatt writes in a piece in this month’s RSA Journal, between state and market there is huge scope for sport to be part of the Big Society vision. If only we had made 2012 participation a public crusade for the whole of London we could, despite major cuts to community sports budgets, have delivered on the promise made back in 2005.
Maybe even now it’s not too late, especially if London media like the flourishing Evening Standard get behind the idea, but it would take a change of heart from Boris and Kate, something which, I’m afraid, is beyond me.
A bit more on drugs – and an award for the RSA
I posted yesterday about the launch of our Drugs Report. As I was on my way to the launch, I have only just caught up with the Today programme coverage - if you have a moment it is well worth a listen (with a great introduction about the RSA).
And, it’s great to be able to report another piece of good news. The RSA Journal has won a couple of awards at the International Customer Publishing Awards 2010: one for best membership title (not for profit, charities and associations), with the judges commenting that ‘the content is excellent’ and ‘that there is a rich range of subjects that are both thought-provoking and debate-starting; and one for best use of illustration for the recent Frans de Waal feature. I’m sure any RSA Fellow readers will join me in congratulating the Journal team.
The best way to generate social capital – by accident
Once in a while you read something which you know you will find yourself quoting for years. Maybe it’s funny, surprising, shocking but more often it is because it confirms something we have long believed but not found a way of proving and expressing powerfully.
Recently I came across an example in the RSA Journal and today I am going to quote it at length (in blog terms). It is from a piece by Mario Luis Small, Professor of Sociology at Chicago University, and describes the findings of a research study among mothers in New York:
Levels of commitment
Consider the centres that cared for the children of the women we studied for several years. We interviewed the directors of many different kinds of childcare centre – 23 in all, ranging from the commercial to the nonprofit, the secular to the religious, the corporate to the standalone – and observed what staff, children, mothers and fathers (though few of the latter were visible) did over the course of operations.
At the end of our study, nothing surprised us more than how much the centres differed in their social capital. In some, most mothers forged new friendships among the other parents; together, they organised parties, arranged play dates, attended movies and dinners, and developed what many of them referred to as a new community. Joining the centre had measurably transformed their social networks (as we confirmed through statistical analyses of representative data). In other centres, mothers knew few, if any, of the other parents; they did not party or dine with them, or babysit their children. These centres served as little more than drop-off and pick-up locations. In one rare example, the director had even tried to build social capital but failed: she threw a pizza party for parents to socialise and almost none of them attended.
The socially effective centres did not differ from the others in the amount of leisure time the mothers had at their disposal; in all of them, most mothers worked full-time. Race, class, lifestyle and neighbourhood did not explain the difference, and nor did these centres have particularly heroic directors committed to creating a sense of community among the parents. On the contrary, few directors displayed any interest in building social capital for its own sake. Like the rest of us, they were busy; they had a centre to run.
Instead, social capital typically emerged when directors were trying to accomplish some other task, one that gave parents opportunities to interact or incentives to cooperate. For example, many directors believed strongly that children should be exposed to zoos, museums, libraries, children’s parks and farms. But trips to these locations require many more adults than are needed in the classroom, to prevent children from sticking their hands in monkey cages, wandering off in parks or slipping into ponds at apple-picking expeditions. Since hiring more staff for these occasions was costly, the centres needed parents to attend. No parent volunteers, no field trips. Centres needed volunteers for other activities, too, such as sanding and painting playgrounds at the end of the year, contributing food for various ceremonies and raising money to keep tuition fees moderate. In some centres in low-income neighbourhoods, mothers were expected either to raise a certain amount over the course of the year – usually about US$300 – or pay it out of pocket. To avoid paying the fee, parents had to volunteer for group fundraising activities, such as selling baked goods or holding raffles.
All of these activities – field trips, clean-ups, ceremonies and raffles – required interaction and socialisation with others; they obliged parents to meet, talk, exchange phone numbers, arrange schedules and get organised. As a result, the centres that imposed greater demands on parents provided opportunities and incentives that, over the course of weeks and months, stimulated the formation of social capital.
So, organisations can generate social capital. Indeed, organisational behaviour is crucial to the overall level of social capital in a society. But the degree to which organisations act as social capital generators is a function not of the organisations’s commitment to social capital per se (forget engagement for engagement’s sake) but of its attempt to provide a better service through engaging citizens in co-producing that service.
It’s as obvious as it is powerful. And as austerity means that more and more existing and potential services rely on citizen engagement and participation this research offers concrete reasons: (a) to hope that to some extent austerity might generate new social capital and (b) to explore how we must change organisational cultures and incentives to enable managers and front line workers to engage citizens as co-producers of public value.
Maths, small children and neural pathways – ‘proving cultural theory’
I promised yesterday to offer some evidence that the four categories of cultural theory are fundamental and ubiquitous. I will stick to this despite the temptation to respond to the fascinating conversation about CT taking place on my comment pages.
I offer three ways of supporting the claims made by cultural theorists. The first comes from game theory, mathematical modelling and computer simulation. This comprises various ‘proofs’ that cultural theory’s four paradigms are the only types of solution that can emerge from organisational problem solving.
Michael Thompson refers to the modelling of mathematically minded sociologists Manfred Schmutzer and Wylles Bandler which he says identified the four paradigms before cultural theory had even named them. Michael also describes in the book and in his RSA Journal article some modelling he did with Paul Tayler in which 30 firms followed the four strategies:
‘To our delight, this stylised ‘world’ with its few and simple micro level rules, once set in motion gave rise to some remarkable,…life like, whole system behaviour’
Lacking expertise in modelling and maths I don’t know how strong this evidence is. I’ll leave it to Marco and Michael to comment on whether there is more compelling, and more recent, evidence of this kind.
The second kind of evidence lies in real world examples of cultural theory. Here, cultural theorists tend to be better at identifying cases of failure than ‘clumsy’ success. Even in the one example Michael provides – the successful relocation of Arsenal football ground – it turns out that the critical factor was not just the engagement of the different paradigmatic actors but that one – the egalitarians – has enough sympathy with another (the club) to temper its instinctive oppositionalism.
However, there is a cute piece of evidence that the paradigms naturally emerge from human interactions. This comes from research with children undertaken by the philosopher Mark Nowacki. When primary school pupils who had been asked to answer questions were suddenly told that their performance would now result in an allocation of sweets, Nowacki found the same basic patterns of response emerged every time:
Nascent Egalitarian – “We should all get the same. We have to share the candy with those who didn’t get any.”
Nascent Individualist – “The candy is mine. I got it because I answered the questions.” (A fairly typical response to the Egalitarian.)
Nascent Hierarchist – “Teacher, is this right?” (These kids looked to their regular teacher to see if I was playing by the class rules)
Nascent Fatalist – “I never get any candy anyways.”
Nascent Hermit – One student exempted herself from the discussion entirely and went off to play with the toys in the corner. She wanted nothing to do with all the fuss and was perfectly happy without the candy.
Finally, and where I hope the RSA can make its own contribution, there is the idea that the paradigms are associated with hard wired neural pathways. If the five are reduced to elemental psychological responses to a problem they are:
Hierarchical – I’ll do what I’m told
Egalitarian – I’ll do what the group says
Individualist – I’ll do what I want
Fatalist – it doesn’t matter what I do
Hermit (not sure about this one) – I’m not part of this problem
I was told that Alan Fiske at UCLA had done some research that showed different activity in different parts of the brain when subjects were confronted by stories/images that reinforced different paradigms, but I can’t locate this in Fiske’s web references.
My big and highly speculative question is whether the experience we have of free will (nb ‘experience’ – I am not here asserting the existence of free will) is structured by these five basic options (although the content of any actual decision will be much richer as well as context dependent).
We hope to test these ideas in a collaboration on cultural theory and neuro-science we are developing with colleagues at UCL.
Sorry, this has been so long. Next week I want to explore the ways things go wrong when we ignore clumsiness and some idea about how managers and other social problem solvers might use CT to develop creative and inclusive organisations.
PS There is one part of the conversation on my comment pages I can’t resist mentioning. Marco Verweij admits that the term cultural theory is confusing, he prefers the clearer but more cumbersome ‘theory of plural rationality’. That’s not the only terminological problem. Trying unsuccessfully yesterday to persuade the great Steven Lukes of the value of CT I couldn’t get past his objections to the word ‘egalitarian’ especially when I suggested egalitarian impulses could sometimes be seen in right of centre political movements, for example against the European Union or opposing immigration. He offered ‘solidaristic’ as an alternative which does strike me as a more accurate term. However, Michael Thompson calls the four/five paradigms ‘solidarities’, so that may not work. One thing is clear – if social theories can’t be easily explained in clear language they are unlikely to gain purchase. Is that why CT keeps popping up in interesting places but never quite makes it to the mainstream?
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