The discourse of professional leadership and the practice of management control in public services
From the early 1990s onwards, policy-making elites across a range of national governments have initiated a complex package of programmes, technologies and practices aimed at developing ‘leadership capacity’ within public services (O’Reilly & Reed, 2011; Reed & Wallace, 2015). These programmes, technologies and practices have been framed within a generic rhetoric or discourse – what Fairclough (2010) calls an ‘imaginary’ – of ‘public service modernisation’ that focuses upon a debilitating paucity of ‘leadership capacity’ as constituting the major obstacle to reforms that will make public services more flexible, efficient, consumer-led and organizationally adaptable.
This emergent ‘imaginary’ of ‘leaderism’ has played a crucial role in legitimating a range of institutional and organizational changes that have impacted on public service professionals in complex, and often contradictory, ways (Noordegraaf & Steijn, 2013). Nevertheless, the ‘general direction of travel’ in which these reforms have driven public service professionals is relatively clear in that they have generated a configuration of interconnected structural, cultural and technical innovations that have progressively subjected professional workers to a much more intrusive, demanding and constraining ‘regime of control’ over the last two decades or so (Ackroyd, 2013). While some professional groups may have become relatively adept at ‘creating new spaces of agency within the expanding market of public services’ (Newman, 2013, p. 47), most have found themselves adapting to a new control regime that selectively recombines elements of marketization, surveillance and sanctioning. Again, there may be room for ‘localized mediation and variation’ in the organizational technologies through which policy reforms are implemented within specific sectors and locales – where various forms of ‘network governance’ seem to be playing an increasingly important role Newman (2013). However, most public service professionals now find themselves operating within institutionalized environments in which the imaginary of ‘leaderism’ has progressively challenged the once dominant occupational ideology of ‘professionalism’ and its associated occupational practices of ‘expert judgement’ and ‘regulated autonomy’.
This chapter will trace the process whereby the discourse of ‘leaderism’ and its escalating impact on the organization and management of the work of public service professionals has developed over the last two decades or so. It will set out the key analytical features of ‘leaderism’, contrasting them with both ‘professionalism’ and ‘managerialism’, while drawing on the results of a large-scale empirical study of public service leadership development initiatives in the health and education sectors within England undertaken between 2006 and 2009 (Economic and Social Research Council, grant number RES-000-23-1136 ‘Developing Organization Leaders as Change Agents in the Public Services’; Reed & Wallace, 2015). Finally, it will draw out the wider implications of the preceding analysis for the much more ‘hybridized’ forms of network governance and professional management that have emerged in the course of the last 20 years.
In 2004, the then UK Secretary of State at the Department of Education and Skills (DfES), the Right Honourable Charles Clarke MP, stated that ‘the grit in the oyster is leadership. We need leadership at all levels’ (National College for Schools Leadership (NSCL), 2004, p. 2). He wasn’t alone in his assertion that ‘leadership’, however construed, was the critical mechanism that would transform public services from bureaucratic dystopias into entrepreneurial dynamos. Over a decade, successive reports for the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2001, 2010) identified shortfalls in leadership capacity and development as constituting the major obstacles to achieving much-needed reform of public institutions and organizations. Substantial enhancement of leadership capacity throughout the public services, generated through massively improved leadership development provision, was seen as the key to achieving the ‘quantum leap’ in performance that the former were required to attain within the much more openly competitive and resource-constrained environments in which they were embedded.
Over the last decade or so, many OECD governments have been more than prepared to make major investments in the provision of leadership development programmes for their public services in which private sector management consultancies, often working in tandem with universities and other public providers, ‘have proven to be potent sources of ideas about public service leadership and its development’ (Wallace et al., 2011, p. 2). Irrespective of, potentially significant, differences in history, culture, context and content, public services leadership development programmes have been dominated by a generic paradigm of what ‘leadership is’ and how it might be most appropriately developed that draw their inspiration from the ideas and techniques associated with ‘transformational leadership’ within the private sector. This ‘visionary’ conception of leadership, as originally promulgated by high-profile ‘guru academics’ such as Bennis and Nanus (1985) and Bass (1990), became much more influential, particularly in the UK, during the 1990s, when successive New Labour governments led by Tony Blair ‘promoted a discourse of public service leadership as a means of fostering the kind of system-wide transformation it envisaged, as well as promoting organisational success’ (Newman, 2005, p. 196).
However, this government-promoted discourse of ‘radical public service transformation through entrepreneurially empowered public leadership’ didn’t emerge out of thin air. Indeed, it grew out of a discourse and practice of ‘new public management’ (NPM) that had become increasingly influential from the mid 1980s onwards in creative and innovative ways to form a rather different kind of ‘discursive imaginary’ shaping contemporary political debate about public sector reform from that envisaged under NPM (Hood, 1991; Du Gay, 2005; Fairclough, 2010; O’Reilly & Reed, 2011; Ward, 2014). NPM articulated a theory and practice of public service organization and management that promised to transform public service delivery through the diffusion of competitive market mechanisms – or, at the very least, a simulacrum of market competition – and the widespread structural and cultural changes which the latter demanded in relation to performance evaluation and monitoring. By the mid 1990s, what had begun as a relatively prosaic and technocratic series of reforms focused on organizational design and managerial control had become infused with a potpourri of ideas and techniques drawn from neo-liberal ideology which legitimated system-wide changes in the philosophy and practice of public service management.
As Fairclough (2010) maintains, if they are eventually to gather sufficient ideological legitimacy and political momentum to offer a coherent and sustainable vision of the ‘paradigm shift’ which public service organization and management must undergo, discursive imaginaries such as NPM have to be ‘theoretically adequate’ and ‘practically adequate’ – that is, they must carry sufficient intellectual conviction and operational credibility if they are to stand any chance of being translated into organizational reality. He also points out that there are likely to be contradictions and tensions within any discursive imaginary between the demands of ‘theoretical adequacy’ and the constraints of ‘practical adequacy’ insofar as the latter inevitably compromise the integrity of the former and dilute its ideological purity. In the case of NPM, this can be most clearly seen in its failure to design and implement a control regime that effectively emasculates, rather than periodically contains, public service professionalism – both as an occupational ideology and as an organizational reality. Thus, a number of researchers and commentators (Newman, 2001; Dent & Whitehead, 2002; Farrell & Morris, 2003; Flynn, 2004; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011; Ward, 2014) have identified the series of ideological oscillations and organizational compromises that NPM underwent during the 1990s and 2000s as it struggled to come to terms with the institutional resilience of professional power and authority within public services.
Of course, public service professionalism and professionals were forced into making a mirror-image series of adaptations to and compromises with the control regimes that waves of NPM-inspired reforms imposed on the public sector during the 1990s and 2000s – ranging from various forms of audit and performance review to the larger-scale institutional and cultural transitions entailed in business process re-engineering and network governance (McLaughlin et al., 2002; McNulty & Ferlie, 2004; Miller, 2005; Newman, 2005, 2013; Clarke et al., 2007; Pollitt, 2007; Martin et al., 2009; Power, 2014). Yet, professional power and authority, though battered and bruised by more than a decade of ideological, structural and organizational transitions within public services, which undoubtedly strengthened managerial control and weakened professional autonomy, refused to ‘lie down and die’. This was so even in the face of the growing political power and influence of neo-liberalism within elite circles and the pervasive ways in which it began to seep into every institutional nook and cranny of public service provision, organization and management during the 2000s.
The significance of neo-liberalism for reconfiguring and revivifying NPM as a discursive imaginary that would legitimate ‘second-’ and ‘third-’wave public sector reforms, particularly in ‘Anglo-American’ political economies and welfare systems such as the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand during the 2000s, cannot be underestimated (Jessop, 2007, 2014; Peck, 2010; Harvey, 2011; Crouch, 2013; Dardot & Laval, 2013; Mirowski, 2013; Gamble, 2009, 2014; Davies, 2014). Neither should we underestimate the practical/operational significance of neo-liberalism to the extent that it instigated ‘an open-ended and contradictory process of politically assisted market rule … that has always been about the capture and re-use of the state in the interests of a pro-corporate, free-trading market order’ (Peck, 2010, pp. xii–9). By elevating ‘market-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of state-endorsed norms’ (Davies, 2014, p. 6), neo-liberalism advances, through the political, economic and cultural power of its dominant elites occupying command positions within financial, political and administrative institutions, a strategic vision of how public services and their professional workers should be transformed. As Ward has recently suggested:
NPM can be seen as the central mechanism through which neo-liberalism reconfigured not only the larger political economy of nation states but also the ordinary, day-to-day institutions where people receive services and work.… NPM sought to fold or redirect the professionals who work in public organizations under the wing of managerial authority by creating mechanisms that required a shifting of accountability from the internal ethical and disciplinary protocols of the public professionals themselves to either public sector managers or outside auditors who were said to represent the interests of various institutional ‘stakeholders’, taxpayers or the public in general.
(2014, p. 50)
Ward (2014, pp. 52–58) also argues that ‘under the direction of neo-liberal politicians and ministry and agency heads, NPM introduced a number of wide-ranging changes in the way public organizations around the world operated’. He identifies six key changes lying at the core of NPM as it became more widely infected by neo-liberal discourse and doctrine: first, the legitimation and operationalization of private-sector practices directed to forcing costs down and progressively reducing public expenditure; second, widespread marketization to root out the pathologies of corporatist bureaucracy; third, the introduction of a customer service culture in which consumer choice becomes a practical reality; fourth, a continuous drive towards organizational devolution as exemplified in devolved budgets, outsourcing and contracting; fifth, selective ‘unbundling’ and privatization of services and functions in order to achieve a much reduced ‘operational core’ drawing on agency staff to supplement the core professional employees remaining; and finally, the continuing casualization of professional and support labour through work disaggregation, segmentation and specialization, reversing much of the team-based and networked forms of working that had been previously in vogue.
Overall, Ward (2014, p. 56) concludes that this interrelated package of neo-liberal-driven NPM reforms was strategically focused on disempowering public professionals by directly challenging and undermining their ‘claim over the exclusive control over the domain of expertise and specialized knowledge’. Also, professional autonomy became even further diluted and compromised through the process of corporatizing and casualizing professional work in public service organizations and the consequent power shift towards the auditing system and market-based competition which it necessarily entailed.
While Ward’s analysis provides a powerful interpretation of the generic impact of neo-liberal-driven NPM reforms and their particular implications for public service professionalism and professions, he is not without his critics. For some of the latter (Fergusson, 2000; Pollitt, 2007; Goldfinch & Wallis, 2010), analyses such as that proffered by Ward engage in a form of ‘discursive determinism’ in which the rhetoric of NPM is taken at face value to the extent that it confuses ‘talk’ with ‘action’ and presupposes a political and organizational convergence around a monolithic view of ‘managerialism’ that is belied by real-world practice. Instead of a comprehensive paradigm shift towards a managerially dominated world in which professionals are ‘on tap’ rather than ‘on top’, these critics see a much messier pattern of change in which there is a much more complex and diverse process of interactions between ideas, interest and actors (Goldfinch & Wallis, 2010, p. 1103) in which a ‘post-NPM world’ is emerging that is much less fixed and constraining than analysts such as Ward suggest. Nevertheless, this group of critics indicate that the ‘post-NPM world’ is one in which public service professionals will still struggle to protect their power base and preserve their cultural authority due to further reductions in public expenditure and other structural pressures that reinforce their marginalization under the full force of neo-liberal-style NPM.
Other critics (Currie, 1997; McNulty & Ferlie, 2004; Thomas & Davies, 2005; Noordegraaf & Steijn, 2013) contend that over-deterministic analyses of the internal coherence and external impact of neo-liberal-style NPM substantially underestimate the capacity for ‘professional resistance’ – not simply to stop or at least slow down the torrent of change released by the latter but also to offer alternative conceptions of public service professionalism better suited to the ‘new times’ in which we now live (Clarke et al., 2007). As Newman (2013) has recently argued, the new forms of ‘network governance’ emerging in a post-NPM world seem to offer public service professionals the political and organizational space to reinvent themselves as ‘partnership leaders’ within new configurations of health and social care grounded in civil society and relatively free from the top-down bureaucratic controls symptomatic of neo-liberal-style NPM. However, she also notes that these network forms of governance will blur and sometimes challenge the institutionalized boundaries between established ‘jurisdictional domains’ (Abbott, 1988; Macdonald, 2006) and the external occupational labour market shelters that they supported (Freidson, 1973, 2001). The former are also likely to call for more hybridized forms of work organization, occupational control and institutional governance in which the nature and role of ‘leadership’ and its relationship with ‘professionalism’ becomes even more critical to the future development of public services.
As we have already seen, the turn towards a neo-liberal-driven agenda and programme of NPM reforms within ‘Anglo-American’ welfare systems from the mid 1990s onwards generated a parallel discourse about the nature and role of ‘leadership’ within public services. The latter also opened up further debate about the nature and role of ‘professionalism’ within public services as they began to develop much more complex patterns of institutional governance and organizational design in which ‘hierarchy, markets and networks’ vied for attention as providing the core principles underpinning political decision-making and work co-ordination (Thompson, 2003; Du Gay, 2005; Moran, 2007).
As a discourse of public service reform, leaderism emerges in the 1990s as a response to the inherent theoretical limitations and practical failures of NPM. In particular, it offers public service professionals a much more positive position and role in the brave new world of network governance than that assigned to them by NPM as the latter’s turn towards neo-liberal doctrine and practice reinforces its endemic authoritarian and polarizing tendencies (O’Reilly & Reed, 2011; Teelken et al., 2012; Reed &Wallace, 2015). Insofar as neo-liberal NPM pushes towards a ‘low trust’ corporate culture and structure in which increasingly refined control regimes have to be designed and implemented to ensure that the sectional interests of professionals are kept in check, then it promotes a selective segmentation and intensification of expert work that further damages professional collegiality and authority (Ward, 2014). Leaderism promises to counteract these divisive and fragmenting tendencies in that it pushes back against the re-bureaucratization of service provision – now around market competition and performance management – by advocating a much more ‘high trust’, inclusive and self-governing form of public service organization in which professionals are to play a strategic role in co-ordinating and supporting co-produced services.
Neo-liberal NPM may have been the ideological and organizational incubator of leaderism during a period of ‘hyper-innovation’ in public service policy and practice, when successive central governments ‘have strengthened central control but also strengthened sources of opposition to central control’(Moran, 2007, p. 192). Nevertheless, leaderism – once it has gathered sufficient ideological momentum and political support from ‘advocacy coalitions or networks’ of political, economic and professional elites who are increasingly dissatisfied with neo-liberal NPM’s capacity to deliver the substantive reforms that it promises (Goldfinch & Wallace, 2010) –begins to undermine the intellectual coherence and policy standing of its progenitor. This is particularly the case in relation to the latter’s perceived failure to offer any lasting solution to the ‘leadership question’ in public service organization and delivery and to the role that professionals are to play in shaping and co-ordinating the much more complex and hybridized pattern of public service provision that neo-liberal NPM, however unintentionally, has bequeathed.
Leaderism emerges in the 1990s, initially as a response to the perceived rigidity of NPM thinking and practice. Subsequently, it gathers force as an elite-driven discourse that interprets and legitimates narratives of public service reform in which signifiers such as ‘modernization’, ‘co-production’, ‘consumerism’, ‘competition’ and ‘self-governance’ come to play an increasingly strategic role (Newman, 2005, 2013; Clarke, 2005; Clarke et al., 2007). Over time, this increasing emphasis on the critical role of ‘leadership’, within a profoundly changed configuration of contextual conditions wrought by neo-liberal NPM, generates a reorientation of accountability mechanisms and processes within the new pattern of public governance taking shape in ‘Anglo-American’ welfare systems. In particular, public service professionals are increasingly identified, in a wide range of governmental reports and policy documents (O’Reilly & Reed, 2011; Reed & Wallace, 2015), as having a central role to play in shifting the accountability focus away from top-down, technocratic and bureaucratic management and towards bottom-up, consumer and market-driven imperatives. Thus, it’s the newly empowered professionals, rather than the increasingly remote and isolated bureaucratic technocrats, who have the key leadership role to play in taking public service reform forward into a new post-NPM phase in which the ‘citizen-consumer’ (Clarke et al., 2007) becomes the critical provider and arbiter of ‘user choice’ and ‘competitive collaboration’.
By no means does this shift in accountability from ‘management’ to ‘leadership’ entail a dismantling of the auditing and surveillance regimes that neo-liberal NPM has imposed on public service professionals; nor does it facilitate anything like a return to the levels of professional work autonomy and collegiate self-governance enjoyed under ‘bureau-professionalism’ (Newman, 1998; Ward, 2014). But it does suggest a growing ideological accommodation between managerialism and professionalism in which the technocratic ‘theory of leadership’ implicit within the former is firmly rejected and the exclusive ‘theory of expertise’ carried by the latter is modified to form a discursive hybrid within which ‘transformational leadership’ and ‘network governance’ can be selectively recombined in line with the dictates of ‘democratic or militant consumerism’ (O’Reilly & Reed, 2011).
Initially mobilized as an elite-driven discourse of public service reform to correct the authoritarian tendencies and technocratic excesses of neo-liberal NPM, leaderism has developed into a narrative of ‘post-NPM reform’ within which recalcitrant elite and middle-ranking professionals can be co-opted into a modernizing project. The latter is seen as generating a much more complex world of dispersed public service networks focused on satisfying escalating consumer demands in a competitive market environment in which the central state removes itself to a synoptic, overseeing role rather than the highly proactive and interventionist role characteristic of neo-corporatist welfare-state systems (Reed & Wallace 2015). Within this modernizing project, leaderism allocates a crucial role to public service professionals; they become the facilitators of and mediators between dispersed public service networks that provide the vital co-ordinating mechanisms ensuring ‘joined-up’ service provision and governance within a competitive environment in which private sector corporate providers, mutual/non-profit making organizations and various forms of partnership agencies vie for service contracts. Thus, a hybridized world of public service organization and delivery seems to call for a hybridized form of public service professionalism in which core principles of exclusive expert power, authority and control have to be substantially modified to accommodate a much broader spectrum of ‘stakeholder interests and values’ which are significantly more demanding in relation to ‘access’, ‘voice’ and ‘choice’.
Polyarchic governance and professional leadership
Previous discussion has suggested that leaderism, as a discourse of public service reform, has exerted a significant impact on reform policy and practice within ‘Anglo-American’ welfare systems since the mid 1990s. As the latter struggle to come to terms with a world of rising consumer demand and expectations, savage cuts in public expenditure, and a neo-liberal governing ideology and practice deeply suspicious of, not to say openly hostile towards, the concept of collective public service provision in any shape or form, then the search for policy initiatives and programmes which speak to this cacophony of voices becomes ever-more urgent and politic.
Leaderism has the protean qualities and ‘brilliant ambiguity’ that are well suited to this complex public service world of hybridized organizational forms and networked governance regimes within which ruling financial, political, administrative and professional elites still retain strategic power and control (Reed, 2012a, 2012b; Reed & Wallace, 2015). Yet, the latter still have to construct and sustain viable governance mechanisms through which they can draw in a much wider and increasingly vociferous range of ‘stakeholder interests and values’, while retaining the political and organizational capacity to ensure that their long-term material interests and ideological predilections are protected.
Some commentators have identified the return of early twentieth-century-style plutocratic elite rule under the ideological hegemony and political dominance of neo-liberal theory and practice in ‘Anglo-American’ welfare systems over the last 30 years or so. Plutocracy is a system of political rule by an economically powerful and socially exclusionary elite unrestrained by any consideration of resistance from middle and lower order groups locked into a hierarchically stratified power structure exhibiting relatively high levels of institutional cohesiveness, stability and continuity (Pahl & Winkler, 1974; Rothkopf, 2008; Mount, 2012; Ward, 2014).
Others have argued for a more complex model of contemporary elite rule in which a hybrid regime of strategic oligarchic control at the centre and delegated pluralistic stakeholder operational control at the periphery begins to emerge in the form of ‘polyarchic governance’ within the more complex and unstable conditions prevailing in contemporary political economies and welfare systems (Dahl, 1971; Courpasson & Clegg, 2012). Courpasson and Clegg (2012, pp. 68–74) define polyarchic rule as a hybrid form of governance that synthesizes selected aspects of oligarchic domination and pluralistic interest group participation:
polyarchic bureaucracy is a model of resistance and competition between resisters for elite inclusion, whose performance as ‘resistance bearers’ establishes their claims for elite inclusion. It therefore dilutes bureaucracy by selecting non-oligarchs among those individuals as potential and competing candidates for elite inclusion. As a result, authority still resides in the bureaucratic control of the organization’s upper echelons, but access to these positions is open to those whose performativity in creative ‘projects of resistance’ is tangible, according to criteria determined by the managerial oligarchy, including leadership of dissenting coalitions.
(Courpasson & Clegg, 2012, pp. 72–73 emphasis in original)
Within polyarchic modes of governance, a central oligarchy unobtrusively retains strategic control over middle- and lower-level elites by opening up the hierarchically containable horizontal exercise of delegated leadership and influence. This is achieved through two, linked, institutional innovations: first, through a controlled decentralization of governing routines within ‘rules of the game’ that proscribe any open and direct challenge to the authority of ‘the centre’ to set and control the political–strategic agenda; second, through the promotion of multiple channels of participation and contestation that allow a range of stakeholder interest groups and their local leaders to pursue their interests in ways that do not threaten the domination of the central oligarchy. In this way, polyarchy establishes a hybrid governance regime through which ruling elites can achieve a modus vivendi between sustaining the structural mechanisms required to retain oligarchical power and facilitating a form of ‘controlled stakeholder engagement’ that gives the impression of grass-roots participation. As Monbiot (2014) notes, it has now become routine practice for both private and public sector corporations to develop polyarchic forms of governance in order ‘to stakeholderise every conflict … they embrace their critics, involving them in a dialogue that is open in the same way that a lobster pot is open, breaking down critical distance and identity until no one knows who they are any more’.
Selznick (1949) anticipates many of the key features of polyarchic governance in his classic study of the complex ways in which formal and informal mechanisms of ‘co-optation’ were deployed by policy and administrative elites within the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to neuter the agency’s more radical founding policies and programmes (Reed, 2009). However, more recent research on the worsening position of ‘knowledge professionals’ under the pressures exerted by neo-liberal NPM (Ackroyd, 2013; Ward, 2014) suggests that these mechanisms of co-optation have become even more well developed and now constitute the main levers of ‘soft power’ that are increasingly combined with more conventional ‘hard power’ systems of surveillance and control required to sustain polyarchic modes of governance in public services.
Indeed, the more hybridized institutional forms that polyarchy generates assigns a pivotal role to ‘leadership’ at all levels of the, now streamlined and flattened, hierarchical authority structures through which elite rule is reproduced and legitimated. ‘Leadership’ becomes the key process through which the much more internally complex, dynamic and unstable forms of network governing that polyarchy instantiates are contained and controlled in ways that enable public service organizations to survive within institutional environments characterized by much higher levels of economic insecurity and political uncertainty (Newman, 2005, 2013). Effective political leadership and management, within and across national, sectoral and local levels of public service organization and delivery, looms large within institutional environments in which competing, and often conflicting, ‘institutional logics’ based on markets, hierarchies and networks have to be brought into some sort of viable organizational alignment. Once open contestation, opposition and resistance to established policy orthodoxy becomes acceptable to the ‘powers that be’ – as long as it does not seem to threaten their structural domination and strategic control – in ways that would have been inconceivable under the ‘club regulation’ of public services which emerged in the late Victorian era and dominated for much of the next century (Moran, 2007). Conversely, under polyarchic governance, effective political leadership and management, at all levels, is at a premium to the extent that it provides the key co-ordinating and control mechanism through which some semblance of continuity and cohesion emerges out of bewildering organizational complexity.
Increasingly, it is public service professionals who are being offered, trained and developed for these overarching leadership roles because they are seen as occupying the key co-ordinating nodes within the governance regimes which are taking shape in contemporary public service networks, and only they have the required expertise and skill to make the latter work under conditions of extreme economic constraint and political instability (O’Reilly & Reed, 2011). Our research (Wallace et al., 2011; Reed & Wallace 2015) indicates that this is increasingly the current institutional context and organizational situation within which growing numbers of UK public service professionals find themselves – that is, being required to take on leadership roles and relationships within hybridized, polyarchic governance regimes which involve a considerable degree of political risk and insecurity for them and their organizations. In a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded, qualitative study – involving a critical discourse analysis of 128 policy documents and 218 semi-structured interviews with 163 informants (55 informants were interviewed twice) from within UK central government, national leadership development bodies, service organizations, senior managers and professional leaders in the English health and education service sectors – we attempted to trace the development and impact of ‘leaderism’ under a succession of New Labour governments between the mid 1990s and early 2000s.
What we discovered was a highly complex pattern of polyarchic governance emerging in these two sectors where senior health and educational professionals were incrementally being drawn into a political process where they were expected, by policy elites, to ‘make the hybrid happen’ due to their technical expertise, organizational centrality and cultural status. Whatever the decline in occupational power and operational autonomy that ‘rank-and-file’ public service professionals were suffering under a neo-liberal NPM regime that imposed more intensive and intrusive controls on their organizational lives, these very same public service professionals were expected to ‘hold the system together’ and to convince service users, or ‘customers’, that all was well with the integrity and quality of the service they were receiving. While UK central government policy elites orchestrated a ‘twin-track approach’ to public service reform – that is, an approach focused simultaneously on service marketization and re-regulation – they also directed much of their attention and effort to the resourcing, design and management of the national leadership development bodies (NLDBs) through which this new vision of ‘leaderism’ was to be inculcated and legitimated. In turn, this demanded that much of the pre-existing organizational architecture of local government-based control and management of education and health services be dismantled and replaced with a panoply of devolved budgets, local initiatives and delegated accountability overseen by a neo-liberal state elite exercising ‘remote control’ through various quasi-independent agencies. It was the senior public service professionals in schools, hospitals, general medical practices and universities who were now expected to provide the cultural and organizational leadership through which this increasingly fragmented and fissured hybrid governance system could achieve at least some degree of operational integration and strategic coherence.
At the core of this discourse of leaderism – which a substantial majority of our interview informants ‘bought into’, admittedly with varying degrees of sector-specific and occupation-specific variation and mediation – lay an eliding of sectional interests with supposedly universally shared collective interests which both ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ were required to harness and pursue. By glossing over and subsuming seemingly intractable conflicts of interests and values between different groups within an overarching discourse of ‘mediated consensus’ that homogenizes and neutralizes the structural sources of such conflicts, leaderism provides an ideological mechanism through which neo-liberal elites can reproduce their power and control within polyarchic governance systems.
Our research revealed the various, sometimes subtle sometimes not-so-subtle, mechanisms and modes through which this overarching ‘discursive imaginary’ of leaderism – as the key process facilitating public service modernization – was constructed, promoted and legitimated.
First, leaderism is promulgated through a wide range of, usually, central government-generated policy and training and development documents (48 central government, health and education documents; 7 documents addressed to NLDBs; 56 NLDB documents and 17 sectoral professional association and other ‘stakeholder documents’) analysed in our research. The latter revealed a consistent pattern of central government departments and devolved agencies advocating and orchestrating a much closer partnership, indeed ‘advocacy coalition’, between policy elites and professional leaders to drive through a programme of change in schools, universities, hospitals, general medical practices and primary care trusts that would transform them from professional bureaucracies into entrepreneurial networks. It also revealed the ideological significance of leaderism as providing a crucial discursive mechanism whereby sectional interests and conflicts, within and between political, administrative and professional groups, are dissolved in favour of a greater collective good defined and communicated by superordinate elites who are presumed to embody the latter. Thus, ‘transformational public service reform’ requires strong, customer-focused and performance-driven leadership from senior professionals within and across different sectors and levels of public service delivery in order to ensure that it becomes more than a paper exercise and metamorphoses into an operational reality (UK Treasury, 2000; Office of Public Services Reform, 2002; Strategy Unit, 2006, 2008).
Second, in order to mobilize the ‘right kind of leaders’ who will take the public service reform agenda forward in ways that central government departments approve of, they establish ‘national leadership development bodies’ for schools, universities, colleges, hospitals and other health-care agencies that are tasked with identifying, training and developing the new professional leadership cadres who will deliver modernized services keenly attuned to the demands of globalized market competition and the organizational flexibility it requires. These NLDBs, at least in their initial set-up phase, are allowed some degree of intellectual and organizational space to be creative and innovative in terms of the design and delivery of the training and development packages they offer to the new cohorts of incoming public service professionals – usually recruited from public service professionals already performing management roles within their respective sectors. However, this space is, in most cases, relatively quickly closed down and colonized by standardized forms of training and development focused on delivering neo-liberal-driven reform initiatives and programmes.
Third, our programme of qualitative, in-depth interviewing undertaken with over 200 public service professionals in health and education (in some cases involving ‘before’ and ‘after’ interviews with those who had been on training and development courses offered by their NLDBs), as well as a small group of policy elites located within the central government apparatus involved in orchestrating and delivering this change agenda, demonstrated that the majority of them had been acculturated into a broad acceptance of the values and norms prioritized by leaderism (Reed & Wallace, 2015). Again, while there is some degree of sector-specific mediation and variation evident in our informants’ interview responses, these can still be accommodated within a generic narrative of public service reform in which they see themselves as playing the key strategic role of ‘change agents’ carrying through a long-term process of cultural and organizational transformation in which competitive markets, tight performance management, entrepreneurial flexibility and network-mediated delivery are the dominant values and realities. While they retain a strong allegiance to their core professional service values and claim to have played a mediating role by implementing required changes in a sympathetic way within their particular occupational domains and organizational jurisdictions, they are also politically astute concerning the overall direction and trajectory of public service change and the much ‘harder’ accountability regimes that will delimit the room for manoeuvre in delivering the latter.
Leaderism is a highly versatile and dynamic discursive imaginary which allows public service professionals to see themselves as change agents within an overarching process of public sector reform in which the policy priorities embodied in neo-liberal ideology and the values embedded in delegated professional autonomy can be creatively recombined within a hybridized form of polyarchic governance. As a reform discourse within public services, leaderism has the capacity to span intra-professional and extra-professional boundaries at a time when managerialism seems to be waning as a primary source of occupational identity and organizational status (Carroll & Levy, 2008; Ford & Harding, 2007).
Yet, we should not underestimate how pervasive neo-liberal NPM has become within contemporary public services organizations and the much-changed institutional contexts in which they are located. Leaderism may have been grafted on to the former as an innovative discursive imaginary which softens and mediates the harshness, if not brutality, of the free-market populism that neo-liberal NPM has brought in its wake. Political and administrative elites located within the central government machinery of ‘Anglo-American welfare systems’ have co-opted public service professional elites into an ideology of institutional leadership and organizational change in which they play the key role of facilitating and protecting a process of rolling cultural transformations where market competition, enhanced private sector provision, semi-independent service delivery networks, intrusive performance management regimes and consumer choice move from the periphery to the core of public service ethos and order. Also, there is increasing evidence to suggest (Buchanan et al., 2007; Bolden et al., 2008; Ferlie et al., 2013) that further hybridization of governance structures and organizational forms has occurred where the ideological remit of neo-liberal NPM and leaderism runs strongest and seems to have pushed and pulled public service professionals into a closer accommodation with market-based reforms.
Of course, there is considerable system-level and sector-level variation in the extent to which public service professionals have been forced into ‘making the hybrid happen’. Recent research on ‘Continental European’, as opposed to ‘Anglo-American’ welfare systems (Noordegraaf & Steijn, 2013), indicates that the former provide public service professionals with the ideological resources and discursive imaginaries to resist the worst excesses of neo-liberal NPM and leaderism. Organizational professionals located in certain European public services systems operate within an institutional context in which corporatist-style ‘bureau professionalism’ has been significantly more ideologically robust and organizationally resilient in the face of the neo-liberal NPM onslaught. Consequently, they have been better placed to maintain sector-level regimes and local-level practices in which professional autonomy, often working in collaboration with community groups and other interested stakeholders, can be sustained as a core ingredient of public service provision and organization.
It is also true to say that the hybrid system of managed markets and professional leadership that has emerged within polyarchic governance regimes has its own internal tensions and external pressures. Neo-liberal NPM continues to push, relentlessly, in the direction of marketized public services coupled with performance management systems that deracinate professional work autonomy and threaten to reduce ‘professionals’ to the status of ‘technicians’ or ‘bureaucrats’, as predicted by Freidson (2001). On the other hand, leaderism strives to preserve whatever vestiges of professional occupational control and work discretion remain as necessary prerequisites for the continuance of (at least the façade of) organizational self-governance and co-produced services. By emphasizing the vital importance of ‘practice-based leadership’ of a distributed or collaborative kind, selective mediations and interpretations of leaderism can be made more appealing to established public service professions and professionals prepared to take on hybrid ‘professional/leader’ roles and the space they can open up for creative innovation.
In this way, the underlying stability of polyarchic governance regimes within public services now dominated by neo-liberal NPM, never that secure at the best of times, depends on maintaining a complex and delicate balancing act between ‘strategic control’ from the centre and ‘delegated control’ at the periphery. While strategic control from the centre keeps sector- and local-level innovation within acceptable bounds, delegated control at the periphery sustains the semblance of professional leadership required to convince voters, clients and customers that their needs and demands remain a vital part of the equation determining how, when and where their public services are provided and organized.
This delicate but crucial balancing act between strategic and delegated control under polyarchic governance is likely to come under increasing strain as the, seemingly ineluctable, pressures for further substantial, not to say savage, reductions in public expenditure intensify (for example, see UK Chancellor’s Autumn Statement presented to the House of Commons on 3 November 2014). Public sector professionals will be at the ‘organizational sharp-end’ of these intensifying pressures for more public spending cuts under an expenditure regime of ‘permanent austerity’ (Ackroyd, 2013). The ideological attractiveness and the discursive versatility of leaderism may begin to wane somewhat under these conditions as the space for creative innovations in occupational collaboration and organizational innovation begins to narrow once more.
Much will depend on the willingness and capacity of professional groups throughout the public services to adapt selected elements of their core occupational structures and practices to the ‘logic of consumerism’ that neo-liberal NPM has imposed with some considerable political force and organizational acumen in recent years. However, this process of selective adaptation will need to ensure that whatever hybrid discursive imaginary emerges out of it – such as the ‘citizen-consumer’ and the concept of ‘civic professionalism’ which accompanies it (Clarke et al., 2007) – it will need to be robust enough to sustain the structural and cultural preconditions of professionalism as constituting the ‘third logic’ of occupational ordering within public service organizations in the twenty-first century. There is little doubt that the more apocalyptic predictions about the deprofessionalization and proletarianization of expert work in the twenty-first century considerably underestimate the structural power and cultural capital that professionalism continues to enjoy (Reed, 2007). Nevertheless, it is also the case that public service professionals, certainly within Anglo-American welfare systems, have faced, and will continue to face, major challenges to their authority and control which will further constrain their organizational autonomy and weaken their occupational identity.
The research reported in this chapter was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Award No: R-000-23-1136 ‘Developing Organization Leaders as Change Agents in the Public Services’. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ESRC.
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