Professional News
Moving
From March 2012, I will be Professor of Government (Research) at the University of Southampton (UK) and Professor of Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia).
Published in 2011
Everyday Life in British Government
It took far longer than I intended but, at last, it is out.
As citizens, why do we care about the everyday life of ministers and civil servants? We care because the decisions of the great and the good affect all our lives for good or ill. For all their personal, political, and policy failings and foibles, they make a difference. So, we want to know what ministers and bureaucrats do, why, and how. We are interested in their beliefs and practices. This book ploughs virgin territory in the analysis of British central government because it is an exercise in political anthropology. It reports on the shadowing of ministers and senior civil servants in three British government departments and seeks to answer the question ‘what do they do?’ and to describe their everyday life.
Public Administration: 25 years of analysis and debate
Public Administration was first published in 1923. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in its field. This collection provides:
• a history of the journal;
• a portrait of its work; and
• a source book of key articles in the field for undergraduates and postgraduates.
Over the past twenty-five years Public Administration has pioneered new approaches and published many leading articles in the field. A mere 12 articles cannot ‘represent’ the scope and coverage of the journal and, inevitably, the editor makes a personal selection. However, these articles are also the most cited articles since 1986 and include prize winners of the best article of the year. They also reflect the changing subject matter of the journal and its shift from a practitioner to an international academic readership. So, Part 1 comprises theoretical articles, Part 2 contains comparative material, and Part 3 focuses on public management.
Public Administration
The Irrepressible Rod Rhodes: Contesting Traditions and Blurring Genres
Go to: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padm.2011.89.issue-1/issuetoc
Published in 2010: The state as cultural practice
My third book with Mark Bevir was published by Oxford University Press in March. We foreswore trees for the cover. Instead, we have used Gustave Doré ’s ‘The destruction of Leviathan’.
Published in 2009
I chose the pictures for the covers and for no conscious reason, just happenstance, the recurrent motif was trees. So, for Comparing Westminster, we have trees on the plains.
For the Australian Political Science Association’s The Australian Study of Politics, the Australian National University gave us permission to reproduce Basil Hadley’s ‘ Almost a lizard under every tree’
‘Public Administration in an Age of Austerity: the future of the discipline’, Aston University, 11th May
I gave the keynote address on ‘Where we have come from’ to this colloquium organised by the Aston Centre for Europe and the Public Administration Committee of the Joint University Council for Social and Public Administration.
Public Policy Network (University of Edinburgh), 26th April
At the invitation of Richard Freeman, I gave a public lecture on ‘”How do things work around here?” Protocols and rituals in the everyday life of a government department’, and it was held in this magnificent old room.
Utrecht School of Governance (USG)
For the next three months I am ensconced as a Visiting Professor in the USG. It is the number one school of public administration in the Netherlands. The rankings are published by Elsevier (9 October 2010: 86), the Dutch equivalent of the Times Higher Education survey. They are the result of a national survey of academic peers and USG has been top in teaching for the past ten years and in research for the past five years, ever since the research rankings began.
Political Studies 60th anniversary virtual issue
My article entitled ‘The New Governance: governing without Government’ Political Studies (44) 1996: 652-67 was included in this virtual issue of Political Studies. My article was one of the two top voted articles for the 1990s.
Prize
The public announcement may be a year late but the Institute of Public Administration Australia has awarded John Wanna and me the Sam Richardson Award for the most influential article published in 2007. See:
‘The Limits to Public Value, or Rescuing Responsible Government from the Platonic Guardians’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 66 (4) 2007: 406-421.
For information on the prize go to: http://www.ipaa.org.au/01_cms/details.asp?ID=222
175 Heroes
Bradford College, or as I knew it, the Tech, has been providing education and training in the city since 1832. In 2008-9, it celebrated a 175 years of providing education and training in Bradford and as part of its celebrations it has web site with 175 of its alumni and, of course, a birthday cake.
I am one of the so-called ‘heroes, see: http://www.175heroes.org.uk/rod_rhodes.html. As I attended for three hours a night after a day’s work for three nights a week, I prefer the description ’survivor’!
