Sector Ethos Research Articles

Controlled schools in Northern Ireland – de facto Protestant or de facto secular?

The Controlled Schools’ sector in Northern Ireland is usually described as de facto Protestant. By examining its history and current context, this article considers the veracity of that statement. In many schools RE is often ‘squeezed out’ of an already overcrowded timetable. This results in the quantity and quality of RE teaching varying widely, unlike other areas of the curriculum. The article explores whether the sector's ethos is Protestant, secular, Christian or multi-faith. It concludes that, although perhaps unclear about their Protestant identity and uncomfortable about being deemed secular, schools are clear about their de facto Christian status.

Public Service Innovations and Changing Ethos in Africa

One of the widely held beliefs in public management is that strict commitment to an ideology of public service values, which is a critical factor in the delivery of public services. However, with the introduction of market-oriented reforms-innovations, most of these values face severe and serious challenges. This study, using a comparative and analytical method, examines the principles which underpin the African governments’ program of innovation in public service delivery and in particular the traditional public service ethos. The article reveals that over the years, African public services and those who work in them fall short of the ideal leading to the attempt to innovate by introducing the market values which have equally raised questions about possible threats to the ethos. After identifying some challenges that innovation may pose, the article suggests that traditional public sector ethos should be redefined to allow for innovative ideas in service delivery. Finally, the study concludes that a new “synthesized” ethos that draws on the core elements of bureaucratic principles as well as market based values, would deliver superior public services.

Training in the public sector in a period of austerity: the case of the UK

This article examines what has happened to training in public sector organisations in the UK in a period of austerity. It draws on individual-level data collected over the period 2000–2012 and establishment-level data collected from employer surveys carried out between 2005 and 2012. To understand these data further, 75 qualitative interviews with public sector employers were carried out between mid-2010 and early 2012. This article finds that while training incidence remained relatively high in the public sector, establishment-level control over planning and funding fell faster than in the private sector. Nevertheless, the public sector ethos of serving the community along with the tradition of the public sector as a ‘good employer’ meant that the training system within public sector organisations remained largely intact, even when the availability or frequency of some courses was reduced. The result was that limited training funds were made to go further by reducing the frequency of courses, prioritising courses immediately relevant to front-line services, tightening the application of eligibility criteria among potential trainees and economising on training delivery – summed up by one respondent as ‘training smarter’.

Why We Should Focus on Understanding the Individual in Evaluation

This article1 is drawn from the work of Barry MacDonald and is written as a tribute to him. It addresses an issue he raised some while ago whose relevance intensifies today in a world seeing the demise of independent professional practice and public sector ethos. The ‘portrayal of persons’ relates to a paper MacDonald wrote in 1976 (MacDonald 1976), at a time when the discipline and the practice of evaluation was in rapid emergence and development. He was arguing forcefully that to understand innovation we have to understand innovators. This was not a new message. It had been enunciated elsewhere, including by Schwab (1978) and Schön (1971) whose work revealed individualism, values and exchange as key elements of innovation. But what MacDonald added was a political dimension: using the portrayal of persons to share control of the evaluation by passing responsibilities for interpretation (generalisation) to the evaluand; and by empowering the organisation by enhancing knowledge of itself (for example, against attempts to enforce external values on professional action through external accountability). The rationale was the same as that for case study evaluation: to ground generalisations in the experience of the practitioners and to shape evaluation around issues and dilemmas encountered in their practices. This inevitably leads to working with small samples (cases) but not losing the aim of deriving broad generalisation. This was the key methodological principle that provoked and continues to provoke reaction from those who believe in a quantity theory of generalisation—that systems are made up of patterns of action and phenomena, and that we need sufficiently broad ranges of data to ensure that we have captured the full extension of a pattern. Case theorists argue that even where this is true, it is more important to capture the inherent qualities of the patterning and its contingent relationships with context. MacDonald sought to show, as I do in this article, that it is possible to arrive at important and generalisable (provisional) insights from a sample of one.

Talent management for NHS managers: human resources or resourceful humans?

The need for effective leadership in the UK public sector has been a prominent discourse in recent years. One aspect of this is a growing interest in talent management. This article examines the evolution of processes used for managing talent and developing leaders in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) by applying human resource management theory to an empirical case study. Our aim was to provide a constructive, but critical, analysis of the current role of managerial talent management and to comment on the suitability of the adopted approach in the NHS. Over the past three decades the NHS has come to adopt an increasingly ‘hard’ approach to talent management, i.e. rationalistic, managerial and narrowly focused on leadership competencies and senior management roles. This parallels a more general shift in the NHS from its traditional public sector ethos and humanistic values to more business-oriented values and ways of working.

Paperwork and the contradictions of accountability in a South African hospital

This article explores the extent and reach of ‘audit culture’ in a rural government hospital in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa. I describe the institution's efforts at instilling a new public sector ethos that involves intensifying mechanisms of audit and self‐assessment in the workplace. In a context in which ‘accountability’ has become a key trope of institutional bureaucracy, I explore how employees attempt to conform to the normative moral yardstick imposed by ideas of accountability, whilst also expressing a sense of moral uncertainty and discomfort with these. Drawing on anthropological arguments about the role of documents in mediating social relations, I show that the knowledge collated in document form, rather than corresponding to clinical work carried out in the wards, increasingly is viewed as an end in itself. Global features of audit culture combine with existing workplace hierarchies and nursing practices to produce a locally mediated and meaningful version of accountability.RésuméLe présent article explore la portée et l'étendue de la « culture de l'audit » dans un hôpital rural public du KwaZulu‐Natal, en Afrique du Sud. L'auteure décrit les mesures prises par l'établissement pour insuffler une nouvelle éthique du secteur public, avec une intensification des mécanismes d'audit et de l'autoévaluation au travail. Dans ce contexte, où la « responsabilité » est devenue le mot‐clé de la bureaucratie institutionnelle, nous décrivons la manière dont le personnel tente de se conformer aux critères moraux normatifs imposés par la notion de responsabilité, tout en exprimant les incertitudes morales et la gêne que lui inspirent ceux‐ci. Sur la base d'arguments anthropologiques concernant le rôle des documents dans la médiation des relations sociales, nous montrons que les connaissances recueillies sous forme documentaire sont de plus en plus considérées comme une fin en soi, au lieu des informations correspondant au travail clinique effectué dans les services. Les caractères globaux de la culture de l'audit se combinent aux hiérarchies existantes sur le lieu de travail et aux pratiques de soins pour produire une version de la responsabilité localement médiée et signifiante.

Comment Adapting planners' professionalism for inclusive processes in neo-liberal environments

The papers in this Special Issue of Town Planning Review largely analyse the situation of the British planner. Even so, colleagues in many other countries will recognise the seemingly contradictory aims and the concomitant tensions that are discussed. Some of the tensions are hinted at in the title of this 'Comment': professional expertise is challenged both by the participatory democracy imperative of inclusiveness and by the efficient management imperative of neo-liberalism. The professionalism of spatial planners has to be constructed from elements repeatedly reshaped and reinterpreted in the contested field between two conflicting ideological currents, the neo-liberal current leading society towards individualism, privatisation and markets, and the democratising current emphasising collective effort through participation, trust, collaboration and integration. The long-term need for sustainability and shortterm macroeconomic necessities complicate the picture. Planners' professionalism is in flux, as the battlefront in the ideological war rages backwards and forwards. This flux, and the struggle of a vulnerable profession to keep its head above water when squeezed between strong ideological currents, is the leitmotif of the present collection of papers. This 'Comment' is structured in relation to the theme of neo-liberalism. It will be strongly indicated that neo-liberalism is not the only complex of ideas to affect British planning, and, that it is surely not an hegemonic influence on planning professionalism. I start with some remarks to the articles dealing with themes that have obvious references to the discourse on neo-liberalism: public/private (Moore) and citizen/customer (Clifford). This is followed by a response to the article discussing the problem of combining performance management and entrepreneurship (Gunn and Vigar), indicating that planning devoted to the first of these aspects of neo-liberalism may have problems realising the second. Finally, I comment on the two articles clearly showing that neo-liberals have not won the struggle for shaping the professionalism of British planners. The quest for trust (Tait) and a New Vision (Inch) points to other forces of influence. Public/private Changes along this dimension are directly related to the war of ideas mentioned above, and they affect land use, forms of public-private cooperation and institutional innovations. Neo-liberalism leaves its mark on the city through the many ways public space is transferred to private use. Collaboration in public-private partnerships gives the private sector a more prominent role than before, and there are more private planning initiatives. Planning is itself being privatised to some degree when private consultants do planning work, when private developers take over the plan-making, and when planning-related tasks, such as building control, are outsourced (Hawkesworth and Imrie, 2009). Even if the public sector is still huge, many agencies have been separated from the big public organisations they used to be parts of. They are now at arm's length from the politicians and are managed like private businesses in nearly every respect. Planners bring along their public sector ethos to a working environment that demands adaptation to the logic and values of private business. This is likely to create tensions (Sager, 2009). As hypothesised in this issue, hybridisation of professional planner identities will emerge. Citizens/customer Serving customers is relatively easy in that it is mostly about producing goods and services of a standard that is satisfactory considering the price. Serving citizens is comparatively much more difficult. One must satisfy their preferences as political beings who care about the environmental effects of production, for equity aspects of distribution, and for social consequences of consumption. If planners were to be a profession that provides a service to customers, this would downplay their role in mediation of space and making of place. …

Mixed Messages: Housing Associations and Corporate Governance

Housing associations have traditionally been bound together by notions of providing for those in housing need, non-profit making and a voluntary ethos. Since the mid- 1980s these understandings have altered when associations began to develop a private sector ethos leading to: increased priority given to the needs of private funders; the professionalization of boards of management, largely at the behest of the state regulator; and a reimaging of tenants as ‘customers’. These changes have raised fundamental questions about the appropriateness of associations’ modes of internal governance through voluntary governing bodies. This article explores those shifts in culture and the ways in which they have created difficult and contradictory subject positions for members of boards, particularly tenant board members. The article raises questions about the application of corporate governance models to the housing association sector, and the appropriateness of applying private sector principles of corporate governance to organizations in the voluntary/quasi-public sector. Using Foucault’s insights on the subject and power the article will consider how tenant board members are constructed by others and themselves, and how these constructions could affect their potential for intervening in the power relations of the board.

Private Passions, the Public Good and Public Service Reform

Abstract There has been considerable recent discussion of the impact of public service reforms on the work ethics and motivations of public service workers. In this article we draw upon recent research on the ethical dilemmas facing regeneration workers in order to look more closely at the role of values in the working lives of public service professionals. Focusing on the commitment to social justice, we argue that such values find expression in two interlinked ways, as something workers have and as a process of giving value to different goods. Our research reveals that while both aspects of values are rooted in people's life experiences the second dimension is more contingent and relational. While public service reforms appear to have less impact upon workers’ pregiven values, they can and do have an impact on the way in which these values find expression in attachment to different goods. To understand the effect of such reform processes on workers’ motivations we therefore need a more complex conceptual framework than that provided by either simple public sector ethos/private sector ethos distinctions or by models of economic individualism offered by writers such as Julian Le Grand.

PPPs and the Changing Public Sector Ethos: Case-Study Evidence from the Health and Local Authority Sectors

This article explores the extent to which a new contractual approach to delivering public services, through public private partnerships (PPPs), is transforming the traditional values underpinning the public sector ethos among both managers and workers. Drawing on two detailed case studies of PPPs - a Private Finance Initiative in the health sector and the outsourcing of housing benefit claims in the local government sector - we identify a range of new pressures impacting on five key elements of a traditional notion of the public sector ethos. Our findings demonstrate that the contractual relations of PPPs have led to a clear weakening of traditional notions of managerial accountability and bureaucratic behaviour, reflecting both a shift to new lines of accountability (private sector shareholders) and a vicious circle of monitoring and distrust between partner organizations, in place of the old faith in bureaucratic process. Among workers, certain traditional values - especially a concern for working in the public interest - continue to inform the way they identify with, and understand, their work in delivering public services. However, the cost cutting and work intensification associated with PPPs present a significant threat to these values.The article identifies examples of short-term resilience of the traditional public sector ethos, as well as developments that threaten its long-term survival.

Charitable trusts: municipal leisure's "third way'?

This paper critically examines whether charitable leisure trusts reflect a "third way' approach to service delivery. The research found that the trust investigated benefited from an enhanced leisure focus and the combination of a "business- like' approach and public sector ethos to produce: £2 million investment in facilities; a substantial reduction in council subsidy; reduced staff absenteeism; and a cultural change that extended middle managers' decision-making responsibilities to generate greater service ownership and customer focus. In addition, the knowledge and experience of those invited onto the trust's board of management provided quicker and better decisions more applicable to the prevailing leisure industry. However, the trust hadn't realized its "third way' potential because the council didn't appreciate the wider implications of New Labour's modernizing agenda. Its prime concern was with the pragmatic (financial) benefits from externalizing leisure facilities, rather than extensive strategic thought about the nature of the new organization being created, its environment, or role in the local area. This led to decisions that mitigated against a joined-up service.

Public sector ethos still alive but undervalued

This report draws on a recent Public Management Foundation study which analysed what 400 senior managers in the public, private and voluntary sectors said about the goals that drive them, about job satisfaction and about the things that increase and hamper their effectiveness at work.

The new housing policy — a critique

Abstract This paper considers whether the Housing Act 1988 and other recent housing measures will succeed in their aims. The 1988 Act is necessary for the revival of private renting and the diversification of choice for low income tenants. But it is unlikely to be sufficient; too many reforms are needed for one Bill. Substantial transfers from council tenure are unlikely until local authority housing finance is reformed by the next housing Act. A long‐term replacement for BES will be needed. Artificial land shortages will continue to hamper the solution of housing problems. Housing associations are inadequate alternatives to local authorities because of their small scale finance structure and public sector ethos. Present arrangements for subsidy and transfers may ensure a housing association monopoly in low rent housing. Suggestions are made for encouraging genuine competition in this sector.