For nearly 30 years, public sector workplaces and those contracting to the public sector have been subjected to a plethora of imported managerial paradigms, notions and language with which many of us will be familiar. These are invariably wheeled in under the monikers of “best practice”, “the outcomes model”, “total quality management”, “evaluative self-assessment” or just notions such as transparency, sustainability or accountability. One way or another they are sold to us as improvements on existing practice, necessary to fulfil some requirement from above. Once upon a time employees made fun of these; they seemed so ludicrous and spawned games such as “corporate speak bingo”. Now they are just the wallpaper of our workplaces - the way we speak, plan and operate - and a generation of workers has entered the workforce knowing nothing else and simply accepting the unchallengeable rightness of these.

But Where Did These Come From?

Managerialism has a long history. To understand its philosophical underpinnings we need to go back more than two centuries to the Age of Reason. In his study “Voltaire’s Bastards”, Canadian academic John Ralston Saul says that reason, as Voltaire and his enlightened fellow travellers of the 18th Century knew it, was filtered through historical understanding and imbued with common sense and morality.(1) It was this variety of reason which was sharpened into the weapon used to attack the absolutism of the 18th Century European dynasties known collectively as the Ancien Régime. It was directly responsible for the French and American Revolutions and became a dominant thread in the thinking of all 19th Century liberation movements.

But it is the corruption of the notion of reason or rationality that is key to understanding managerialism. Slowly evolving democratic government and administrative process radically improved society over the two and a half centuries between Voltaire and ourselves. But the very success of democratic reform, which was all about process, was gradually favouring bureaucrats with a talent for management. Political ideas and commitment were what had driven the revolutions and created democratic states but, over time, complexity of process meant the administrators of these states assumed a more and more important role. It was their version of “reason” which increasingly held sway.

And by the 20th Century various other strands were being incorporated. Scientific management or Taylorism* had appeared on the industrial scene, emphasising the profits to be made from streamlining industrial workplaces. Such ideas spread to the bureaucracy. Developments in communications technology further strengthened the arm of the managers. Management courses sprang up, first at Harvard and then at many other universities. Gradually it became the umbrella science, arching over all other disciplines. It spawned managerialism with its twin assumptions; that efficient management can solve all problems and private sector models can be applied to the public sector. *Named after Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), it’s a theory of management that analyses and synthesises workflows, aiming to improve economic efficiency, especially labour productivity. Ed.

On the economic front, these developments were complemented by the work of economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman who argued vigorously for the virtues of a free market, individual freedom and responsibility, and a reduced role for government and the public sector. Known as economic rationalism, its bottom line emphasis was inherently anti-democratic and so provided the perfect economic framework for the administratively-based management sciences. Between these two strands, economic rationalism and managerialism, an almost unassailable modern rational methodology was constructed. Ralston Saul (2) contends that Voltaire would not recognise the “reason” or rationality which characterises our modern states. This is a very slimmed down form of reason, thin and skeletal - just methodology or structure. Knowledge, common sense and morality are noticeably absent. Ironically so-called “reason” or rationality now has much in common with the last days of the Ancien Régime - a perfectly self-justifying system, which generates its own logic and effectively rules out any challenges as “offside”.(3)

Before And After Rogernomics

In 1984, New Zealand had a solid, no-nonsense, one-size-fits-all social-democratic-centralist State. Large, sometimes unwieldy, a bit unresponsive, top down and paternalistic by 21st Century standards, but it did the job within the framework of its time. Consultation would have been almost non-existent, and the decisions all made by middle-aged male pakeha politicians and public servants. But Michael Belgrave (4) points out that, despite its various shortcomings, by 1984 the twin pillars of the Welfare State, full employment and social security, had increased individual choice for everyone - women, young people and Maori. It could be quite socially progressive. Driven by the Labour government, the 1972-73 Woodhouse Commission resulted in the establishment of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), the 1972 Royal Commission on Social Security recommended the establishment of the domestic purposes benefit (DPB). In the area of scientific research, the DSIR (the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research), Forest Service and Department of Agriculture scientists led their fields. In the absence of a strong academic or public intellectual tradition, the public service was seen as the natural home for the intelligentsia. At its best the old “benign centralist” public sector was economic driver, builder of social capital and the think tank and launching pad of innovative ideas. And it was ours.

There was a strong sense of the need to balance interests. Interventionist regional development ensured that provincial centres had economic viability. The commitment to full employment and every member of society meant that the “handicapped” were frequently found jobs in the former Post Office, Railways and the Ministry of Works. There was a raft of social security guarantees to help young families get established. The Public Service Association (PSA) was at the heart of all wage fixing and public service rates and practices became the benchmark for the private sector.

Driven by the major political reforms post-1984, New Zealand imported neo-liberal managerial legislation, practices and theories from either the “Washington Consensus” school of the United States or the “New Public Management” school of the United Kingdom. These constituted a cultural revolution in the way public sector services were thought about, talked about and designed. Notions such as duty, rights, collegiality, service, obligation, care, compassion or need that once provided the rhetoric for the public service were eliminated. As early as 1986, the State Owned Enterprises Act changed State enterprises into bottom line focussed businesses. 5,000 became redundant on one day, many thousands more as the years progressed. The “handicapped” were left to fend for themselves. The downstream social impacts, especially for Maori, from the corporatisation of the Ministry of Works and Development, the Post Office, Railways, New Zealand Electricity Department and the Forest Service have yet to be fully assessed. And corporatisation spelt the end of the many small towns in New Zealand dependent on State enterprises and employment for their existence. The 1988 State Sector Act, the 1989 Public Finance Act and the 1994 Fiscal Responsibility Act became the cornerstones of the new legislative infrastructure installing economic rationalism at the heart of the public sector.

Private sector accounting practices came to dominate public accounting. Accrual accounting was introduced, first at Treasury level, and then throughout the public/State sector. This embeds all possible contingencies into forecasts/budgets and thus forces high reported costs onto the current operation. These high reported costs lead to charges of inefficiency, calls for restructuring and ultimately, commercialisation or privatisation of the asset or service. So what was sold to the New Zealand public as a sort of diet for the supposedly overweight public sector was in fact a Rightwing revolution carried out with revolutionary zeal, ferocity and speed. Untrialled economic blueprints from universities in other countries were legislated in with gusto. Democratic debate was completely bypassed. Roger Douglas stated on a proselytising trip to Canada in 1991 that “consensus” for quality decisions is achieved after they are made! (5) This was as much a paradigm shaft as a paradigm shift.

The reality is that both managerialism and economic rationalism are fundamentally anti-democratic in approach. Unwieldy democratic activities such as debate about the substance of ideas, involvement of those affected by policy or investigation of alternatives are simply ruled offside. They are too time-consuming and intellectually demanding. But, more importantly, they involve uncertainty of outcomes and so cannot be fitted into the economic rationalist/managerial paradigm which does not deal in uncertainty of any sort. Structure has replaced ideas, systems analysis has replaced common sense and certainty has replaced democracy. Integrity as we knew it has simply disappeared, with  high moral value being attributed to  minor shop floor characteristics such as efficiency, speed and cost-saving.

Market Model Language

As market model language was applied across all departments, it gained both traction and invisibility. Its invisibility is one of its most pernicious aspects. This language cleverly seems to take the politics out of policy: “We must restructure to sustain a more cost efficient management structure on a per EFTS* basis” or “beneficiary dependence must be discouraged through sharpened incentivisation” Most of those involved in the public sector firmly believe they are operating a non-political model because of this language, which feels business-like, neutral, objective and scientific. The fact that a highly political agenda is being driven through technical instruments is perhaps the ultimate sleight-of-hand of managerialism, since it makes it so invisible. *EFTS= equivalent full time student. Ed.

But it is both alien and alienating. The working lives of public and State servants (including those who hate it) are increasingly given over to auditing, reporting, monitoring, checking, assessing, moderating, feeding back, appraising, meeting targets and deadlines, all of which distract from the substance of the job. If there is any left.  Job descriptions indicate that increasingly these technicist processes have become the “substance” of many jobs. There is less and less space for local ideas, solutions, practices, insights and understandings - what might be called democratic uncertainty. Compliance driven databases are the operational heart, soul and mind of many workplaces. Naturally they embed standardised, globalised, technicist thinking.

Many foreign managers and chief executive officers (CEOs) are appointed on ridiculously high salaries. Public sector employees are often being managed by people who have never done the job concerned and know little of the local environment. Local experience and understandings are perceived as potential obstacles to the standardising, globalising, technicising process. Once these paradigms/practices are established, they dominate workplaces and set agendas. Literally. Meeting agendas are increasingly abstract: they are often concerned with how best to embed the latest managerial fashion or assess the embeddedness of the recently superimposed one. Whether the children are learning anything, whether the community is getting healthier or sicker, whether the prison recidivist figures are really improving, all seem to matter much less than the embedding of the paradigms.

Targets, percentages, scores, registers, profiles, standards and tick boxes have become all important to feed up the chain of command to the Minister so he/she can answer questions in Parliament about exactly how taxpayer money is being spent. They also determine funding to a department or contractor. But these are very manipulable and frequently bear no relationship at all to what is actually happening. For example, the Ministries of Justice, Child Youth and Family, and Corrections all work in very tight time frames to meet the designated targets which are absolutes for them. But all manner of strange work practices take place to reach these. Categories of offenders/clients/at risk youth are redefined and people are shifted across categories if the target demands it. Police do not arrest as they used to; they use pre-charge warnings instead which keeps crime figures down. In the case of education funding, where progress must be achieved for the renewal of a stream of funding, then learners’ scores are simply raised. An “event”,  for example  a murder committed by a parolee or a case of serious benefit fraud, will likely lead to an outbreak of more targets, percentages, scores, registers, profiles, standards and tick boxes. And so long as these are recorded on a database and can be rapidly accessed by an auditor at any time, the quality of the work or the real outcomes are never assessed. In the land of total quality management, there is none.

While it might seem as though means and ends have got hopelessly mixed up, in fact these means have a very clear end in view. Embedded in all of these bureaucratic processes is a narrow economic rationalist agenda that we know all too well from the political arena. The subtext of “best practice”, “the outcomes model”, “total quality management”, “results orientation”, etc,  is discipline, tightness and financial rigour, much less pleasant sounding notions - no wonder these are translated into terms with which no one can argue. But perhaps the most sinister aspect is privatisation by stealth which, not surprisingly, is never mentioned. Increasingly it is just the normal modus operandi.

Public Services As Profitable Investments

And if we thought corporatisation and contractualism were bad enough, if we thought sovereignty was already badly under threat, an even more extreme neo-liberal agenda is now being rolled out within the public service - the investment approach to public services. Though emanating from our very own Productivity Commission based in Wellington, (Graham Scott, 1986-92 Treasury Secretary, is one of the triumvirate there) this is even more foreign in every sense. Large corporate enterprises, often from overseas, will be charged with taking care of our most vulnerable citizens. We have already seen this in the privatisation of prisons - the Wiri contract awarded to Serco (a British transnational corporation which also runs the detention centres for asylum seekers in Australia). Its target? It must achieve 10% better than the public sector in terms of rehabilitation of ex-prisoners. How this is managed or measured or for how long it applies or whether there is any quality staffing or rehabilitation involved is all in the realm of bureaucratic massage. Fixing child abuse is about to be contracted out to private companies, the likes of Serco. “Social bonds”, whereby those with money can invest with mental health providers, which may well be from overseas, sounds like something out of “1984” (in a sense it is). Already we know that the Australian banks Westpac and ANZ are very keen to buy into these bonds.(6) It would be laughable if it were not so dangerous and ideologically driven. In the satirical “National Party Cookbook” (2014) Anne Tolley (then Minister of Corrections) is quoted as saying (7) “I’ve been using a RAT (risk assessment tool) to try to establish the ARSE (automated recidivism scale) of the PRICC (private corrections contracts). And what do you know? We’ve discovered electronic fraud, misreporting, falsification of documents, multiple contract breaches on all fronts…and I’m just talking about our private partners, that self-regulating corrections operation (SERCO)”.

Sadly, this is not too wide of the mark. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money has already lined the pockets of contractors to the public service. The opportunity for fraud and misreporting by overseas corporates driven only by targets with absolutely no loyalty to us or our vulnerable citizens is now enormous. But more importantly our most vulnerable should not be farmed. Or floated on the stock market. As already happens with the aged-care industry. There are still intelligent and innovative people within the public service challenging the paradigms and trying hard to get common sense to prevail. They realise that the substance or defining characteristics of the public service have been stripped away and the emphasis put on architecture, process and technicalities in order to avoid a contest of ideas. Those brave enough to challenge the prevailing hegemony will be told “it’s not our brief to deal with that here” or “that’s a matter for management (or governance)” or vice versa or “we’ve met all our targets”. And advocacy is a dangerous business - it will threaten upcoming funding and could threaten the individual (advocate’s) job. Bullying is now endemic. Resistance seems increasingly futile.

But Resist We Must

Nicky Hager points out in “Dirty Politics” that public employees should be encouraged to participate in pressing social and political issues and should be protected in their careers when they do so.(8) The fact is that our present public policy is based on values completely at odds with our national egalitarian self-image - “a fair go for the average bloke/sheila”. We must reclaim our public policy and dismiss the distasteful, foreign models which prevent proper analysis of, and solutions to, our very real problems. This, of course, is a question of political process and legislation. Nonetheless, to be aware of the workings of these stripped down, skeletal, dehumanised, market-oriented grids  and the need to return to local, practical solutions free of the constraints of managerial paradigms, is the first step towards change.