Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives.

Lindquist, Evert A.

Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives

By SANDFORD BORINS. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, 2011. Pp. xiv, 291, bibliographic references, index.

Everyday Life in British Government

By R.A.W. RHODES. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 349, bibliographic references, name and subject index.

My first exposure to the application of narrative analysis to public administration issues was at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Public Policy. One of my PhD student colleagues, Emery Roe, assisted another PhD student with processing her massive set of interviews documenting the experiences and views of hundreds of players--from politicians to front-line scientists--in the California Medfly crisis of the early 1980s, which was no small feat. Roe's side-reading in literary criticism and narrative analysis led him to think about this data and what constituted the essential problem in different ways; after completing his dissertation on a different subject, he published Narrative Policy Analysis (Duke University Press 1994). He argued that policy analysts--when dealing with highly complex problems under conditions of high uncertainty, involving multiple actors with diverse viewpoints, and no clear answers--were often left with the important task of analyzing and making sense of the often incomplete stories and anti-stories from actors, which required embracing critical tools for appraising accounts and narratives as part of the policy analyst's toolkit. Moreover, advising, decision making and communications could be seen as efforts to create "meta-narratives."

Then, Emery was a relatively lonely soul; most US public policy and management scholars were skeptical of an approach that embraced uncertainty, values and story-telling, and the notion that interpretive social science might have implications for public policy was just taking root. (1) Even fewer had thought about the implications for public management. Fast-forward to 2011, and the notion of constructing narratives for political leaders, public service executives, and policy analysts is commonplace--a response to new communications technologies and ever-more aggressive efforts to "spin" out messages, counter competing narratives, and to find common ground or use partial stories as wedges. Many of us with passing interest in these areas have awaited publication of books by two highly regarded scholars. Sandford Borin's Governing Fables is the culmination of years of creative teaching and reflection on how to use literature (fiction and non-fiction) as a means for exploring political leadership and public management innovation. Rod Rhodes' Everyday Life in British Government is an outgrowth of both the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)'s Transforming British Government series of his mid-career and his late-career efforts with Mark Bevir to apply narrative and interpretive perspectives and methodology to understand public sector governance. These intriguing contributions vary significantly from each other in terms of focus and methodology, with some intersection, and together shed light on the state of how we teach and undertake research.

Governing Fables challenges and illuminates, bringing a whole different set of perspectives to bear on analyzing and teaching public administration. While Borins' reach is broad, it is important to understand that the book's essential focus is captured in its subtitle "Learning from Public Sector Narratives." Early in my academic career I had the privilege of sitting in on one of Sandy's undergraduate classes on "Fiction and Public Management" at the University of Toronto at Scarborough (the title has changed over the years), and was impressed with the range of teaching devices utilized, from case studies to film clips to guest speakers. Others were aware of his interest in fiction through his seminal article on "Public choice: 'Yes Minister' made it popular, but does winning a Nobel prize make it true?" (CPA 31 [1]: 12-26). But "Yes, Minister" is only one bit of the narrative landscape that Borins covers: Governing Fables showcases more than twenty years of teaching and reflection on this topic, the analytic framework that he gradually developed to analyze an incredible diversity of novels, memoirs, film and television series, and his critiques and comparisons of this corpus of material.

The opening chapter, "Narrative as Object and Method of Study," provides a nice review of the themes, concepts and methodology of the literature on narrative analysis, all the while making a persuasive case for its application to public management insight. The book's core is comprised of six chapters on frontline innovators in schools; British narratives of government; the British narratives of political leadership; American political tables; managing the Cuban missile crisis; and American jury narratives. Each chapter contains accounts and critical commentary of a suite of films, novels and memoirs of key events and challenges, variously associated with public decision making, advising, managing and ethical challenges. One cannot help but be impressed by the diversity and number of works that Borins reviews. The concluding chapter steps back to offer thoughts on how to classify narratives (using them as a data set), to recognize and manage different kinds of narratives in public management and democratic contexts, to construct compelling narratives, and to call for diverse lines of future research.

Governing Fables is wide-ranging, interesting, humorous and insightful. I are confident that, even if a reader carefully reviews only twenty pages of this book, they will not consume literary or visual narratives of any kind on public management without deconstructing them in a more sophisticated manner--Borins has made it more difficult for us to suspend disbelief. The book will be especially interesting for instructors who, even if they don't have the privilege of teaching a course on fiction and public management, nevertheless seek to incorporate cases, film, accounts, memoirs, etc., as elements of courses. It will help them to critically appraise the possibilities for inclusion and prepare how to engage students in assessing the chosen material. I suspect that those readers seeking lessons for everyday public management strategies will find the book too discursive for the bottom-line insights, but the relevant strategies and stories captured by Borins are ignored by those readers at their peril. This suggests that a HBR-style article for public service executives is in order. Indeed, those seeking to create meta-narratives as political leaders, executives and their advisors will benefit from carefully reading this book because it captures the diverse competing narratives swirling around in our popular culture that often out-compete government reporting and scholarly accounts of how public decision making works. Indeed, although the point is not explicitly made, Canadian readers need to be acutely aware of British and US narratives from literature, film and television because they are accessible and inform how Canadians interpret our form of Westminster government. This leads to a final question: where are the Canadian television series using public management settings and challenges either as focus or backdrop? I can only recall a few coroner and police shows. What about converting Co]in McAdam's intriguing novel Some Great Thing (Raincoast 2005), a sort of slow-burning Bonfire of the Vanities using a conflict between a fictional National Capital Commission bureaucrat and developer as backdrop, into a mini-series or movie?

Everyday Life in British Government is a very different book, but no less committed to the narrative project. Rod Rhodes is well known for using as a point of departure the precepts of de-centered government, relying on network perspectives to analyze how governance works, and for arguing that the principles and traditions of Westminster government should be understood as a set of evolving interpretations, cultural understandings and practice held by political, public service and other actors, transferred to others over time. His more sustained work on narrative and interpretative approaches and application can be found in Bevir and Rhodes' Interpreting British Governance (2003), Governance Stories (2006) and The State as Cultural Practice (2010) and a host of sole-authored articles. However, this book reports on the findings of an amazing empirical project that involved Rhodes negotiating access to ministers, permanent secretaries and officials in three different departments during the second term of the Blair government. Rhodes' data include real-time observation, interviews, use of memoirs, publicly available accounts of key events and issues, and his considerable previous experience roaming around Whitehall. Even the process of securing access, accounts of whether and how ministers and officials lived up to their commitments, and the none-too-few moments of waiting or getting abruptly excused from meetings get interpreted.

The book begins with a chapter outlining the genesis of the project, a succinct introduction to interpretive concepts and the methodology that Rhodes employs, and the research ambitions and flow of the book. The first section contains two chapters that locate the more specific accounts which follow by providing, respectively, overviews of the era in which the observations were undertaken and the three departments. The second section has chapters focusing on the work-a-day worlds and offices of ministers and permanent secretaries, respectively, beginning by providing readers with a sense of how a day fits into a week or year of work and then exploring specific roles and themes. The third section then probes various activities and themes in more detail with chapters on the departmental court; protocols, rituals and languages; networks and governance among central agencies, departments and other actors; and a minister's resignation. A conclusion skilfully draws together observations and themes animating observations across the book, such as coping with stress and long hours; beliefs, practices and story-telling; responsiveness, gate-keeping and maintaining appearances; and recruitment, training and institutional memory. Throughout the book Rhodes juxtaposes the distinct narratives of managerialism and the more traditional values and understandings of Westminster government, and considers which predominates.

Rhodes' writing is personal, assertive, challenging, informed and always interesting. He spent more time with permanent secretaries and officials than with ministers and secretaries, so the analysis for the former is richer, but the reader is left with an indelible impression of the challenge that officials have in briefing and working with ministers. At first the narrative is disconcerting, a literary equivalent to a collage of clips of moments or scenes from a camcorder, a stark contrast to typically more even and supposedly dispassionate accounts of life in government. Although the book is billed as providing "thick" description, (2) the only chapter that does so is the one providing a detailed account of the events leading to a minister's resignation, which is very good indeed. Moreover, Rhodes is very much in the accounts--going beyond other direct-observation studies like Mintzberg and Bourgualt's Managing Publicly (2000)--letting the reader know about his top-of-mind reactions and later reflections, all in the spirit of transparency about what constitute his interpretations and the limited empirical base by which they are informed. However, as one proceeds through the book, Rhodes' kaleidoscopic approach and style are ultimately rewarding because of its breadth in broaching different actors and themes. He is well aware of memoirs and television series about British government, and seeks to contrast popular understanding with the day-to-day realities of bureaucratic and political life.

This review cannot draw attention to all facets of Everyday Life, but many Canadian readers will be interested in how Rhodes explores "departmental courts," a complement to Donald Savoie's conceptualization of modern Westminster practice as "court government." (3) Rhodes provides many examples and analysis of protocol, ritual and language in government, but it seems not to be informed by a considerable literature in organization theory on gossip, ritual, symbol and culture, and their connections to decision making. I remain struck, even years after the ESCR Whitehall research of the mid-to-late 1990s initiative, and with this book, by the novelty that British scholars find in getting "inside" government, which for my generation of Canadian scholars and the one before was never really an issue, although access is now an important issue for scholars in Ottawa. Not surprisingly, the personal accounts and meetings from different vantage points in departments and elsewhere affirm Rhodes' decentered governance perspective, bur he finds that most ministers and officials understand and interpret their roles from a Westminster, as opposed to managerial, perspective. All this said, Everyday Life is not meant to be a definitive analysis of governance nor a platform for offering a reform agenda: Rhodes' goal was to provide real-time glimpses of the pace and tensions in modern government, and to provide preliminary exploration of the themes and issues which arise.

Governing Fables and Everyday Life in British Government are distinctly different but successful invitations to scholars and practitioners alike to employ an additional set of lenses for interpreting various aspects of public sector governance. Together they stand as calls to scholars to be more self-conscious about their own interpretive stances, to proceed with interpretation in a more disciplined manner, and to explore other applications of this approach for research and teaching enterprises alike. For practitioners they serve as chronicles demonstrating what they already know: no matter the good work done by diverse actors in government, their work and actions are interpreted in the media and by citizens not simply on the basis of issues at hand, but also in relation to deeper interpretations lodged in our minds and popular culture from films, television, novels, memoirs and other accounts. These books challenge us to apply ever more skill in analyzing and constructing narratives for use by political leaders and executives alike.

Notes

(1) For example, see Bruce Jennings. 1983. "Interpretive social science and policy analysis." In Ethics, the Social Sciences, and Policy Analysis, edited by Daniel Callahan and Bruce Jennings. New York: Plenum Press, pp.3-35; Paul Healy. 1986. "Interpretive policy inquiry: A response to the limitations of the received view." Policy Sciences 19: 381-96; Douglas Torgerson. 1986. "Interpretive policy inquiry: A response to its limitations." Policy Sciences 19: 397-405; and Emery M. Roe. 1989. "Narrative analysis for the policy analyst: A case study of the 1980-1982 medfly controversy in California." Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 8: 251-73. For a more recent example, see Greg Hampton. 2004. "Enhancing public participation through narrative analysis." Policy Sciences 37: 261-76.

(2) See W.B. Thompson. 2001. "Policy making through thick and thin: Thick description as a methodology for communications and democracy." Policy Sciences 34: 63-77.

(3) Donald J. Savoie. 2008. Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Evert A. Lindquist is Professor and Director, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria.