Introduction

A core question for this book, which celebrates 40 years of the Policy & Politics journal, is how to use experience to inform future policy. Over the years, Policy & Politics has returned frequently to the topic of public sector and public management reform. So, this chapter addresses matters of central concern to the journal in its anniversary year. Specifically, I ask two questions. What lessons about reforming the British civil service can be learnt from using observational methods to study British government departments? What are the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach in the reform of public administration?

Both questions are unusual in political science. First, observation is not a common research tool because of such obstacles as the addiction to secrecy of British government. Thus, Fine et al (2009) cite no studies by political scientists in their survey of organisational ethnography (and see Rhodes, 2013, for citation and discussion). Second, those relatives of observation such as action research and organisational learning (Argyris and Schon, 1996) are said to have limited applicability in civil service reform because these approaches are compromised by the political environment (Common, 2004, 36–8).

As Geertz (1983, 21) points out, ‘there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in intellectual life’ as ‘social scientists have turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation towards a cases and interpretations one’ and towards ‘analogies drawn from the humanities’. Examples of such analogies include social life as game, as drama, and as text. There is a specific problem for public administration. As we blur genres, we bring ‘the social technologist notion of what a social scientist is… into question’ (Geertz, 1983, 35). Rather, the task becomes to recover the meaning of games, dramas and texts and to tease out their consequences. So, this chapter blurs genres, combining political science and cultural anthropology to explore civil service reform. Then, confronting the ‘social technologist’ issue, I ask, what lessons can public administration draw from this research? Can recovering stories provide lessons for the would-be reformer?

The chapter has three sections. The first section provides a brief account of the main characteristics of public sector reform over the past decade; namely, evidence-based policy making, managerialism, and choice.