I thought this as interesting enough to share….. especially as an awful lot of public management reform is predicated on trying to replicate in the public sector the sort of outmoded private sector practices discussed below….
July 30, 201312:49 PM
In his New York Times Magazine column this week, Adam Davidson writes about the challenges of measuring productivity in today’s economy. Here’s an excerpt. Continue reading “NYT Excerpt: Radical Accounting And The Value Of Ideas”
Hi all,
I thought I should give you a quick update. Over the summer Whitehall Watch will be changing.
First of all, Whitehall Watch will slowly become more of a multi-author blog, drawing on our community of “Whitehall Watchers” at Manchester, and, we hope more widely. We will be inviting anyone who shares our interest in Whitehall, and public administration and public management more widely, to send us posts (for now you can send them to policy@manchester.ac.uk but we will have dedicated email shortly). I’ll still be here, blogging away, but hopefully the voices you hear here will become a bit more diverse. Continue reading “Whitehall Watch is changing”
This was something I wrote on Whitehall Watch 4 years ago, but it says something useful, I hope, about my approach to applied social sciences.
This is a fairly common derogatory phrase in the UK – meaning whatever is being talked about is somehow irrelevant to real life and of no real consequence. ( I am not sure how current it is in other countries).
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We, as a country, are failing dismally to provide a proper broadband infrastructure. While debate rages around whether or not we’ll have HS2 sometime in the dim and distant future, right here right now we are lagging behind in our 21st century cyber infrastructure.
I suppose I ought to declare an interest. I used to work for BT. As a telephone engineer, from 1979 to 1986. And for part of that time I was a full-time Branch Secretary for Westminster branch of the old POEU (Post Office Engineering Union) – long since merged into the CWU. Continue reading “BT: To Infinity and Beyond, or not”
Many of us who study public policy academically often discuss just what impact our work has – do we influence anything?
With the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise fast approaching, academics across Britain are busily putting together ‘impact’ statements to show just how much impact they have had. And one crucial area of ‘impact’ is on public policy. Everyone has been thrashing around for metrics.
So it was with great interest that I started playing around with the ‘Who’s Lobbying’ database (after my colleague at Manchester, Alex Waddington, spotted it). Continue reading “Engaging with Policy: Whitehall, Westminster and the Academy”
My Mum always used to say, when I was a teenager, I’d end up either in prison or in parliament. Little did she realise that they were not mutually exclusive categories these days! Or that I’d end up avoiding both (just) and finding a third, alternative, “P” – being a Professor. Continue reading “Prison, Parliament or Professor?”
by Colin R. Talbot and Carole L. Talbot[1] University of Manchester
Originally published in a CIPFA/PMPA pamphlet here (April 2011). Some of the data may be slightly dated, but the thrust of the argument remains valid and even more topical as a fresh round of 10% local government cuts in 2015-16 has been announced.
Local government in England is faced with probably the biggest challenges it has had since at least the end of World War II, if not longer. Not only is it facing front-loaded cuts to its income of an unprecedented scale, but the demand for services, especially for the elderly, continue to rise and in many areas the return of mass unemployment, especially amongst young people, threatens new problems. Continue reading “Local Government Strategies in an Age of Austerity”
STATECRAFT - improving government 