Faculty
Professor Paul du Gay and Assistant Professor Anne Reff Pedersen

Course Coordinator
Professor Paul du Gay

Students should be working on a project in the relevant research area and operating broadly within a critical sociological, management or organization studies frame of reference.

The PhD student will be required to submit and present a five-page (maximum) English written text in which s/he relates the curriculum literature in the course to his or her project. The presentation must include specific references to the literature applied.

Deadline for submission of presentations is Monday 1st March 2010.

Student presentations will provide material for discussion in the course, and the student must be willing to participate in discussions of other presentations

Over the last two-three decades there has been an enormous amount of management reform in the public services of a wide range of countries throughout the world. In most cases, politicians and their internal and external advisers have made significant claims about the nature and desirability of the reforms they have advocated to the effect that wholesale, radical change was both essential and achievable.

The course has two main goals. The first is conceptual. The course focuses on certain key conceptual questions regarding identity, ethics and change in formal organizations in the public sector. In doing so, it also seeks, secondly, to provide participants with an opportunity to engage with some of the governmental, ethical and organizational issues framing contemporary discussions of public management reform, as well as developing their capacity to analyse these using certain key theoretical resources.

The course thus explores the changing character of public management activity, its relationship to issues of political capacity and statehood, and practices of citizenship, and explores the governmental, ethical and organizational consequences of contemporary programmes of reform of the public service.

The content of the course is divided into three.

First, it focuses upon the purposes and character of public administrative activity and outlines its distinctive bureaucratic style, one that is formed from the unique nature of the tasks it undertakes. In particular, attention focuses upon the role of the public administration as an institution of government and its crucial role in running a state. Special attention is paid to the ‘ethos’ of public bureaucratic office and, in particular, its capacity to provide the public bureaucrat with a distinctive ‘persona’ or ethical bearing and status-conduct.

Second, the course explores the emergence of four different management models: bureaucratic, the new public management, governance and the contemporary reformulation of the bureaucratic and their key characteristics. In particular, it seeks to outline and analyse the ‘management culture’, or organizational norms and techniques that the different models espouse, the characteristic ethics they advocate for the conduct of management, and the new conceptions of what it means to perform ‘public service’ that they introduce.

Finally, the course will also involve a public sector reform case exercise which students will engage with in discreet groups.

The course operates within a broadly critical, sociological, management and organization studies frame of reference. In it we discuss diverse conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of organizational, ethical and personal change. These approaches are associated with the work of a number of ‘key’ theorists, central among whom are, for instance, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Colin Crouch, Nikolas Rose and Christopher Hood.

1. Display an understanding of the major debates concerning the development, contemporary constitution , and possible futures of public sector maangment, and to explore the relations between practices of organizing and the formation of distinctive public sector identities and cultures..

2. Be able to critically analyse the political and ethical and well as institutional implications of contemporary programmes of reform of the public administration

3. Be able to critically interrogate the role of organizations and particular forms of expertise in the promotion and the material construction of public servicce and citizen identities.

4. Display an understanding of the role of organizing practices in stimulating organizational change, and in reforming organizational cultures, ethics and identities.

5. To develop students’ understanding of the tools and techniques used by public organizations to promote certain ends , and to evaluate the effects of these on the wider polity and society

6. To develop students skills in academic communication in both written (eg. essay) and oral forms. Students will have to develop skills in written communication, including communicating academic arguments, critically engaging with different forms of empirical evidence, as well as relevant concepts and theories, and applying these to particular cases.

Lecture plan

Time/period	Faculty	Title
Day 1: 09.00-17.00	Paul du Gay and Anne Reff Pedersen	Why Bureaucracy? & The Anti-Bureaucrats: enter the New Public Management. Seminar Discussion with small group exercise. Student presentations and group discussions.
Day 2: 09.00-18.30	Paul du Gay and Anne Reff Pedersen	A New Governmental Rationality? A New Agencement? & Healthcare Reform: comparing Denmark and the UK. Seminar Discussion with small group exercise. Student presentations and group discussions.
Day 3: 09.00-17.00	Paul du Gay and Anne Reff Pedersen	Rethinking Bureaucracy? Politics, State and Citizenship & Representations of Public Management in the Media: the case of TV Comedy. Seminar Discussion with small group exercise. Student presentations and group discussions.
Day 4: 09.00-13.00	Paul du Gay and Anne Reff Pedersen	Student presentations and group discussions. Conclusions and wrap up.

The course will combine short interactive lectures by Faculty, with break-out sessions where participants discuss specific issues of theory, method and interpretation, in small groups, and in the full group, a case Study Exercise, and student presentations with feedback from other students and faculty. Pertinent matters related to the course themes will also be explored via an examination and discussion of specific texts; these will include: TV shows, as well as government reports and consultancy materials

* Nikolas Rose (1999) Powers of Freedom. Chapter 4 Cambridge University Press.

* Patrick Dunleavy & Christopher Hood (1994) From Old Public Administration to New Public Management. Public Money & Management.

* Christopher Hood (1991) A Public Management for all seasons? Public Administration, vol. 69.

* Charles T. Goodsell (2004) The Case for Bureaucracy, Chapter 1. CQ Press, Washington.

*E. Suleiman (2003) Dismantling Democratic States Princeton University Press Chapters 1, 3 and 12.

* Paul du Gay (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy, Introduction. SAGE Publications, London.

* Charles Perrow (1986) Complex Organizations, Chapter 1. McGraw-Hill Publiching Company.

* Mitchell Dean (1999) Governmentality, Chapter 8. SAGE Publications, London.

* Colin Crouch (2006) Post-Democracy, Chapter 5. Polity Press, Cambridge.

* Christopher Pollitt (2000) Is the emperor in his underwear? Public Management, vol. 2. Taylor & FrancisLtd.

* Charles T. Goodsell (2005) The Bureau as Unit of Governance, in Paul du Gay The values of Bureaucracy. Oxford University Press.

John Rohr (1998) Public Service, Ethics and Constitutional Practice Chapter 14 Kansas University Press

* Johan P. Olsen (2006) Maybe it is time to rediscover bureaucracy?

* Paul du Gay (2003) The Tyranny of the Epochal: Change, Epochalism and Organizational Reform. Organization articles, vol. 18.

*Alan Scott (1996) Bureaucratic revolutions and free market utopias. Economy and Society, vol 25. Routledge.

Suggested readings:

Small Selections from the following:

*P. du Gay (2007) Organizing Identity: persons and organizations after theory Sage

*N. Rose & P. Miller (2008) Governing the Present Polity Press

*J. Clarke & J. Newman (1997) The Managerial State Sage

*B. Latour (2005) Re Assembling the Social OUP

C. Hood (1998) The Art of the State Oxford Oxford University Press

* Christopher Pollitt & Geert Bouckaert (2007) Public Management Reform, Oxford University Press.