PAC Conference
I have spent the past few days at the Joint University Council Public Administration Committee Annual Conference (aka PAC conference), which was at the University of York this year (so pretty easy for me to attend!).
Headline speakers included Jocelyne Bourgon (President Emeritus, Canada School of Public Service), who delivered the inaugural National School of Government Lecture, and Rod Rhodes (ANU and University of Tasmania) who delivered the Annual Frank Stacey Memorial Lecture. Both speakers offered some interesting challenges to the audience. Bourgon, whose career has mainly been in public service at the top echelons of the Canadian civil service, gave a talk that was clearly very strong influenced by some of the latest thinking in complexity theory, eschewing standard linear approaches to policy making and governance, and advocating a more networked form of policy management. Rhodes, meanwhile, continued to push his interpretive approach to policy analysis, drawing on his detailed (essentially anthropological) research on senrior staff in Whitehall to offer an intricate narrative of how the modern day civil service operates. Both, however, raised more questions than they offered answers.
Other interesting sessions included two linked panels examining the competition state thesis, in which the key exponents of the thesis (Phil Cerny of Rutgers and Mark Evans of York) both made theoretically focused presentations and others offered more empirically rooted papers testing/extending of the thesis (Sarah Radcliffe, Neil Lunt and Dan Horsfall - all from York). Dan’s paper - From Competition State to Competition States? - won the Sage sponsored prize for best paper presented by a postgraduate. Oliver James (Exter University) gave what I thought was an interesting and carefully crafted presentation on whether top management team turn-over affects public service performance - reporting findings from an ESRC funded project that has involved the collection of a tremendous amount of data - but he got a bit of a rough ride from an audience that appeared largely hostile to quantitative research, which was a shame.
Myself and Jim Goddard (University of Bradford and current JUC Chair) hosted a round table discussion on the links between social policy and public administration - based around a presentation we delivered titled ‘Social Policy and Public Administration: Marriage or Divorce’ (slides below - though the charts won’t work on Slideshare for some reason) - and, hopefully, will lead to the JUC hosting some joint social policy-public administration events in the near future. I’ve always found the split between the subjects a little frustrating, not least because my interests span the two.
