Editorial: A decade of continuity, change and egregores

This is my final editorial as editor in chief of Public Money & Management (PMM). My concluding day 31 December 2023, a decade since I followed Jane Broadbent into the editor’s chair. Her valedictory editorial (2013) remains highly relevant and as is Jane’s style—emphatically readable and accessible. Jane had called for a re-establishment of the notion of public service and provided as an example her personal experience of working in the National Health Service prior to and during many of the managerialist changes that had taken place; changes that appeared to constantly increase the power of generic corporate managers at the expense of a constant downgrading of the role and prestige of professionals; a move away from consensus management through inter-professional teams of senior leaders. Meanwhile, constant administrative reforms to the NHS in the name of efficiency and economy, habitually and inadvertently caused the opposite effect of that intended. Though it needs to be remembered that scientific and technological innovation in medicine insinuates that all those involved in policy-making and strategic delivery are in a constant rush to maintain a grasp of the impact (and implication) of modernization. In the pages of PMM, Jane and a legion of academics and practitioners lamented the seeming inability of administrative reformers to engage with their communities to deliver efficient, effective and streamlined public services. Examples and case studies included local government, central government, education, social welfare and higher education, as well as health. Over the last decade, as in the previous decades, PMM has charted and analysed these issues and celebrated the successes in reform and innovation, as well as wrestling with the seemingly intractable wicked issues of modern societies.

In my time as editor in chief I have sought to build upon the impressive legacy bequeathed to me by Jane and her predecessors. As I hand over the baton to the current deputy editor, Andreas Bergmann and the new deputy, Karen Johnston, I am confident the journal is in good hands. Especially since the outstanding managing editor, Michaela Lavender, continues her benignly ferocious reign in pursuit of excellence, impact and innovative work, a role only she can so obviously fulfil to such a high standard. Jane’s last editorial noted how PMM has consistently tried to appeal to both an academic and practitioner audience. Micky Lavender has stuck close to that perspective and it is one that I have delighted in pursuing with the journal for the last decade. We have continued and deepened that approach wherever possible, because the disciplines of public management and public finance are irrelevant if not based in the reality of everyday public sector management. Jane also noted how the journal kept abreast of trends in public management and finance and broadened out to a more global appeal, seeking to publish lessons from other countries that may assist the improvement of policy-making and service delivery in other communities.

We have also continued this approach and sought to ensure there is a diversity of work published; diversity in terms of the representation of the different backgrounds, experiences and approaches of scholas and practitioners, but also diversity of case studies and research. Through its debate pieces, new development articles, research articles and themes, each volume has tracked and analysed the waxing and waning of different (and sometimes remarkably constant) trends in public administration: New Public Management; co-creation; co-delivery; gender-based budgeting; social innovation; risk-based accounting; equality and diversity; sustainability; fraud; social investment and so on. If it mattered to communities and to public finance and public administration, then it mattered to PMM and we sought to draw global lessons in these areas of research and public delivery.

While an innovative approach to research and even an entrepreneurial attitude has sometimes been encouraged when dealing with wicked issues, occasionally calling for the reinvention of government (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992), often the reverse is what we find when we look closer. People understand their world through narrative—through stories—and these stories are often remarkably similar both in tone and content and also in the lessons they seek to deliver. I have argued in PMM that:

What we see with the idiosyncratic use of stories, myths and paradigms, however, goes beyond a meme and mimetic isomorphism and is in fact a kind of ‘egregore’—a psychological entity that is constituted by and influences the thought process and understanding of groups of people. It can be in private sector businesses and public sector management. It may be influenced by ideologies, but it also influences the way in which ideologies are operationalized and may be transferred across sectors and groups and institutions. If we think of NPM and PV as egregores containing the perspectives and myths of a particular approach to governance (public and private) it may assist our understanding of why reform occurred in the way that it did. Such an egregore not only structures our approach to issues, it conditions our understanding of them and is intolerant of dissent. Indeed, it does not recognize different world views; the world is either flat, or it is flat! If institutions and individuals operate with an ideologically liberal-structured egregore (even if nominally attached to other ideologies), then this is something akin to ‘liberal authoritarianism’; a phrase borrowed from Fong (2016) applied to Hong Kong, but which has wider currency (Massey, 2019).

In this way we can understand why it is that ‘innovative’ approaches such as ‘social innovation’ or NPM and all its successor fads and fashions, especially when called on to deal with genuine emergencies that threaten social cohesion and public safety, such as the financial crash and Covid 19, all have remarkably similar approaches and fail to deliver much beyond more austerity and inflation, both of which are in and of themselves often wicked issues. Indeed, the egregore that delivered a kind of collective madness in the global approach to Covid 19, or the UK government’s approach to the 2008 financial crisis, is reminiscent of earlier mass hysteria in events such as witch-hunting or phantom dam bursts (Thurber, 1933). Why is this and what is to be done?

The move from welfarist hierarchies and bureaucracies to a more individual, consumerist market led society illustrated the benefits of economic and technological development, as well as the limits to bureaucracy … But with that came a price to be paid in terms of short-termism, rather than strategic planning and structures to ensure the greater needs of society. A return to a more interventionist approach to regulation, a prescriptive public policy with regard to what the private sector may or may not do, does not represent a disavowal of liberalism and NPM. It is a mature reflection that a free economy requires a strong state to balance between deregulation for economic growth with regulation for the public good, which requires improved policy capacity and good governance. It also requires public administrations staffed with competent, honest officials skilled in the art of statehood. The story of the financial crisis and how we got there tells us best how to avoid future dangers, but the egregore of persistent public management reforms demonstrated a preference for liberal authoritarianism (Massey, 2019).

A liberal authoritarianism not confined to liberal democracies. And it is here a re-reading of Jane Broadbent’s call for a return to understanding what it means to have a public service that serves is important. A service that genuinely learns from global best practice, but that also recognizes the importance of context; temporal, historical, geographical and cultural, as well as political. It also recognizes the importance of recruiting, training and retaining high-quality individuals and valuing their difference as well as their ability to collaborate in teams to deliver genuine innovation based on evidence and rooted in the communities they serve.

With that, it is now time for me to hand over to Andreas and Karen. It has been an interesting, enjoyable and fascinating decade, I do hope that you, the readers of PMM have also been engaged with what we have tried to do. I am immensely grateful to all our contributors, to the reviewers, without whom we could not function as a high-quality journal and to our international editorial board and to all the staff I have worked with at our publisher, Routledge. It is not goodbye, but it is, at last, auf weidersehen.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Massey

Andrew Massey is Professor of Government, International School for Government, King’s College London, UK. His main areas of research include comparative public policy, public administration and issues around the reform and modernization of government and governance at all levels in the UK, US, EU and globally. Professor Massey becomes editor emeritus of Public Money & Management (PMM) in January 2024.