English Education Policy after New Labour: Big Society or Back to Basics?

This article considers possible future directions for education policy and public service governance under the Conservative‐led coalition government. The article considers the extent to which Conservatives might develop a distinctive strategy for managing public services that breaks decisively with that of the New Labour era. The coalition faces a markedly different political and economic context for public service reform compared to its predecessor. This article argues that these contextual constraints make a continuation of the New Labour governing strategy less viable, but unresolved tensions in the coalition education policies enacted to date may hinder the development of a novel project for education reform. As a consequence, the New Labour education project seems likely to remain largely intact for the foreseeable future.     

Decommodification and the Workfare State

Two related concepts have been used to understand the welfare state –'decommodification' and the 'workfare' or the 'competition' state, as it relates to processes of 'recommodification'. I show how these related literatures may be integrated in order to enhance our understanding of current labour market policies. Applying these concepts to an analysis of the ideas and policies of New Labour leads to the conclusion that state welfare services are being reconfigured to serve more effectively the needs of the market, through a process of 'administrative recommodification'.     

New Labour and Government in Britain: Change or Continuity?

The 1997 British election marks a major change in British government. Eighteen years of Conservative rule had brought about growing inequality and social division and have generated powerful demands for new directions in public policy, especially in the areas of welfare and public administration. On welfare state reform Labour is constrained by election promises to restrain taxation and public expenditure. New Labour ministers influenced by the New Right have in any case largely rejected traditional social democratic redistributive strategies and are seeking instead new ways of reducing welfare dependency.
The virulent spread of quangos at all levels of government and a marked increase in the centralisation of power in Whitehall have given a new impetus to demands for constitutional reform. Labour's response to these demands is a major program of regional devolution, House of Lords reform and open government measures.
This article explains what 'New Labour' means and discusses New Labour policies on welfare and constitutional reform and their implications for the future of public administration in Britain.     

THE PRIVATISATION OF HUMAN SERVICES IN AUSTRALIA: HAS IT HAPPENED?

Abstract: The privatisation of Australia's public services has been one of the major challenges facing public administration since the early 1980s. Its enthusiastic proponents and their equally fervent opponents have generated considerable controversy. Yet its impact may have been exaggerated. A number of writers have deplored its spread in Australia's human services. Yet their evidence for privatisation does not stand scrutiny. As well, if privatisation had occurred, it would have had an impact upon the flow of public finance and that should be reflected in public finance data. An examination of that data provides almost no support for the claim that the 1980s saw significant privatisation of Australia's human services.
The current debate on privatisation … indicates a movement to return social welfare provision to sectors or systems other than government (ACOSS 1989 p.6).
The re-emergence of the voluntary sector has been facilitated by public policies designed to transfer responsibility for welfare services from the government to the non-government sector (Baldock 1990, p. 109).
with the more systematic transfer of services to the non-governmental sector (Baldock 1990, p. 113).
over the past two decades … a number of functions such as service delivery and management have been transferred from the state in a way that in most terms amounts to privatisation (NCOSS 1989, p.2).
This rebirth of the non-government sector can arguably be seen as a privatisation of the welfare state (NCOSS 1989, p.22).
Human services in New South Wales have been and continue to be the subject of a wide range of reviews intended to produce changes which fit under the general rubric of "privatisation" (Evatt Research Centre 1989, p.208).
The moves towards privatisation, if they are to continue, will have serious long term consequences (Graycar & Jamrozik 1989, p.296).     

Choice in Public Services: Crying 'Wolf' in the School Choice Debate

Choice, diversity and personalisation have been key to the New Labour project in public services. With the emergence of a reinvigorated Conservative party as a credible electoral threat, and the end of the Blair era, it seems appropriate to consider the continuing viability and longevity of the New Labour public service project. In this article, I approach the issue of choice in public services through an examination of the long-running controversy over choice in the English secondary school system. I argue that the opponents of choice have been reluctant to engage with the notion of choice in public services due to concerns over the supposed negative effect that consumer choice has on the equity and quality of service provision. This paper aims to challenge the claim that any element of choice in education necessarily has deleterious effects on social justice. I argue that the case against school choice has not been decisively made and that school choice can, in principle, form part of a socially progressive educational project by redistributing power to service users and helping to maintain popular support for public provision of education.     

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS AS IMPLEMENTORS OF PUBLIC POLICY

This study expands the growing literature in comparative public policy that examines welfare services. By now, it is accepted that a combination of economic, social, and political factors are influential in the delivery of these services by the 60 states. This paper finds that similar factors are also operating at the county level in New York state. Most notably, political factors affect the distribution of welfare benefits–despite federal and state mandates that require distribution to be based solely on need. This raises a number of issues. concerning the nature of political influence and the autonomy of local bureaucracies, which require further exploration.     

Contracts, Compacts and Control: New Labour and Personal Responsibility

The 2004 report Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: The State of Knowledge and its Implications for Public Policy by the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit is an attempt to draw together social science literature that explains why it is difficult for governments to influence individual citizens. Underlying this is the idea that across diverse areas of policy, state provision of services often has much less impact on outcomes than does an individual's behaviour. Therefore to improve outcomes, government needs to be able to encourage 'personal responsibility'. The authors focus mainly on the role of contracts in changing behaviour in a whole range of different areas; from ASBOs and crime prevention, to home-school agreements and education policy. This report appears to underpin much of the thinking within New Labour as to future policy, and reveals how ideas of personal responsibility are likely to be key to New Labour's manifesto commitments prior to the 2005 general election.     

Mandelafying the public service in South Africa: Towards a new theory

A surfeit of service delivery disapprovals in South Africa is a clear reflection of the failure of the Public Service of South from the local, provincial, and national government to effectively and efficiently deliver service to its citizenry. The rise in a dissatisfied citizenry stems from a precise social realization, which envisions the failure of the state to deliver services to the public in an impartial, responsible, translucent, and befitting manner. This has resulted in widespread service delivery protests, which has become the most famous form of response to poor service delivery by frustrated citizens. This article argues for the mandelafication of the South African public service against the background of a cocktail of factors ranging from corruption, lack of transparency and accountability, incompetence, and lack of commitment to work ethics personified by Mandela. The article further argues for the upholding of the dominant constructs in which this mandelafication is grounded in such as proper ethics, humanitarianism, transparency, accountability, empathy, and selflessness, which characterized Nelson Mandela.     

Concede and Move On? One Nation Labour and the Welfare State

The idea that Labour has already lost the argument on welfare with the Conservatives, and with it the general election, is probably overplayed. If truth be told, Labour's construction and subsequent defence of the welfare state has always been something of a double‐edged sword for the Party, earning it brickbats as well as support, and sometimes as stranding it in the past, committing it to promises that were undeliverable and ultimately self‐defeating. The political response by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to the welfare trap set for them by David Cameron and George Osborne owes as much to New Labour as it does to ‘One Nation Labour’. That said, the latter does seem to be informing the Party's policy response, in particular its emphasis on restoring the contributory principle. Whether, however, this is practical politics given the inherently hybrid nature of Britain's welfare state and its heavy skew toward help for the elderly is a moot point. And whether ‘One Nation’ actually helps or hinders the Party in its quest for workable policies and a winning electoral formula is similarly debateable. Certainly, however much it is tempted to do so, Labour shouldn't waste too much valuable time trying to counter widespread myths about welfare. Nor should it overreact and obsess about the issue—or, indeed, pour out detailed policy too soon, if at all. Obviously, Labour needs to provide a direction of travel. However, that should focus not so much on welfare itself but on what the Party is proposing on the economy, on housing and on wages.     

Policy Consulting and Public Policy

The changing nature of governance in Australia over the last two decades has given rise to a broad range of new strategies to review the development and delivery of government policies and programs. Key factors affecting the relationship between citizens and the state have been the deregulation and liberalisation of the Australian economy, with its focus on the market for the delivery of services, once the exclusive domain of public sector organisations. The increased use of consultants over this period is an example of governments going to the market for professional services. Effective policy development and review by consultants requires that they be well versed both in the substantive issues surrounding the policy field as well as in the process required to properly frame and evaluate these issues.     

Different Roads to Unfamiliar Places: UK Experience in Comparative Perspective

This article views the new public management (NPM) as a prime example of the sour laws of unintended consequences in action. Section 1 places the UK in international context by arguing there is no such thing as NPM and suggesting recent public sector reforms vary along six dimensions: privatisation, marketisation, corporate management, regulation, decentralisation and political control. Section 2 updates the UK story by describing developments under New Labour. Section 3 identifies the unintended consequences of reform: fragmentation, steering, accountability, co-ordination, and public service ethics. Section 4 argues the conventional story of public sector reform as marketization and corporate management omits significant changes. British government differentiated its service delivery systems and now employs at least three governing structures: bureaucracy, markets and networks. The final section discusses whether British experience is different. I argue a satisfactory explanation of the differences must include an analysis of governmental traditions that make public sector reform distinctive everywhere.     

The language of politics and the politics of language: Unpacking ‘social exclusion’ in new labour policy

Since the election to power of New Labour in 1997, the concept of social exclusion has played a defining role in framing welfare policy. The rapid absorption of its terminology in government discourse has signalled a shift away from existing notions of inequality and disadvantage to a broader understanding of material poverty, which also includes (or instead prioritises) other social, cultural and political factors. This has important implications for New Labour policy-making. In particular, it allows for problems of inequality and disadvantage to be reinterpreted and new political measures to be introduced. Such measures produce different effects across space and society, which may be argued to disadvantage policy subjects. The aims of this paper are to explore how social exclusion has become installed as the primary framework of welfare policy in the UK and to examine the key assumptions embedded within specific policy formulations using discourse and content analysis. It thus points towards the importance of language in stipulating relatively enduring and stable sets of socio-political connections, and its role in mediating a particular (political) vision of the relationship(s) between state, economy and society as implicit in New Labour's ‘Third Way’.     

Leaving the Australian Labor Force: An Extended Encounter with the State

This article seeks to demonstrate the way in which labor market choices are shaped by institutional arrangements devised by the state. Since these arrangements differ markedly from country to country, much that is distinctive about national labor market outcomes is a function of diverse encounters with the state. This argument is illustrated by an account that explains why Australia, a country which apparently devotes little in the way of public resources to the old, manifests an exceptionally high level of early retirement. This account shows that, in contrast to the standard European welfare state strategy of public pensions, the Australian state has over many decades tackled the need for provision for the old by encouraging retirement strategies that are not subsidized directly from the public purse. These strategies include the encouragement of widely dispersed home ownership and occupational pensions. Read broadly, the article suggests that the extremity of contrasts frequently made between the advanced welfare states of Western Europe and the miserable social policy outcomes in the democracies of the New World have been far too extreme. The article experiments with novel presentational techniques designed to focus attention on individual choices and on policy outcomes for the individual rather than policy outputs by governments.     

When Does Service Delivery Improve the Legitimacy of a Fragile or Conflict‐Affected State?

Received wisdom holds that the provision of vital public services necessarily improves the legitimacy of a fragile or conflict‐affected state. In practice, however, the relationship between a state's performance in delivering services and its degree of legitimacy is nonlinear. Specifically, this relationship is conditioned by expectations of what the state should provide, subjective assessments of impartiality and distributive justice, the relational aspects of provision, how easy it is to attribute (credit or blame) performance to the state, and the characteristics of the service. This questions the dominant institutional model, which reduces the role of services in (re)building state legitimacy to an instrumental one. A more rounded account of the significance of service delivery for state legitimacy would look beyond the material to the ideational and relational significance of services, and engage with the normative criteria by which citizens judge them.     

New Hampshire's tax-base limits: An example of the Leviathan model

This study views the lack of an income tax on wages and salaries and a general sales tax in New Hampshire as tax-base limits. I use the Leviathan model to analyze the differences between the fiscal system in New Hampshire and the fiscal systems in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts. Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts do not have the tax-base limits that New Hampshire has. From 1957 to 1989, New Hampshire had lower state and local government tax and expenditure levels than the other three states, more rapid population growth, lower welfare expenditures but comparable levels of expenditures for several of the major public services, and a more competitive structure of state and local government.     

Local government grants and income tax revenue: Redistributive politics in Norway 1900–1990

An important aspect of the welfare state is public provision of private goods, primarily education and health care. In Norway the provision of these services has been organized through the local public sector. The development of the welfare state has to a large extent been the development of welfare communes. The important revenue sources of the local and county governments, grants and income tax revenue, have been controlled nationally, and the paper addresses the determinants of these revenues during 1900–1990. The approach combines a demand model of local public services emphasizing price and income-elasticities with a political economy model of central government ideology and strength. The decision making is understood as bargaining between the government and interest groups, and the political structure consequently is of importance for the policy outcome. The analysis shows how politics matter, and the results indicate that a minority coalition government implies 30% more grant and income tax revenue to local and county governments than one party majority in the long run.     

Tackling unemployment in China: state capacity and governance issues

Abstract

This paper considers China's state capacity and changing governance as revealed through its policies to tackle unemployment. Despite high levels of growth, economic restructuring has resulted in rising unemployment over the last decade. The Chinese state has been able to manage job losses from state enterprises, demonstrating some state capacity in relation to this sector and some persistent command economy governance mechanisms. However both design and implementation of policies to compensate and assist particular groups among the unemployed have been shaped by weak state capacity in several other areas. First, capacity to gather accurate employment data is limited, meaning local and central governments do not have a good understanding of the extent and nature of unemployment. Second, the sustainability of supposedly mandatory unemployment insurance schemes is threatened by poor capacity to enforce participation. Third, poor central state capacity to ensure local governments implement policies effectively leads to poor unemployment insurance fund capacity, resulting in provision for only a narrow segment of the unemployed and low quality employment services. Although the adoption of unemployment insurance (and its extension to employers and employees in the private sector), the introduction of a Labour Contract Law in 2007, and the delivery of employment services by private businesses indicate a shift towards the use of new governance mechanisms based on entitlement, contract and private sector delivery of public-sector goods, that shift is undermined by poor state capacity in relation to some of these new mechanisms.     

The Vicious Circle of Cutback Policies: Citizens' Attitudes Toward Cutbacks in Finnish Welfare Services

In most western countries, public services have been the target of cur-backs during the past few years. It is often argued that support for a strong welfare slate has declined. In this article, attitudes towards public services in Finland are examined. Factors affecting the willingness to accept cuts were studied using a structural equation model and correspondence analysis. The analysis revealed that piecemeal deterioration in public services can form a vicious circle. The lower the quality of public services, the more citizens are willing to accept cuts in them. The results also lend some support to the argument that the new middle classes are most willing to see market-based options implemented in service production.     

John Macmurray and the'Forgotten'Lessons on Capitalism and Community

Tony Blair has made no secret of his admiration for the philosophical works of John Macmurray. This article shows that Blair recognises Macmurray's contribution to the understanding of the individual in society. Blair readily acknowledges Macmurray's overriding desire for philosophy to place individuals in their rightful social setting. Yet Blair views this philosophical shift as a reinforcement of modern notions of community that emphasise an obligation to others as well as to oneself. It is my contention that this may be a misreading of the specifics that lay behind the works of Macmurray. By implication, this error in understanding could have led New Labour to pursue a social policy direction that contradicts Macmurray's visions of capitalism and its effects upon human agency, behaviour, rationality and morality. Consequently, this article examines the works of Macmurray in an attempt to show that Tony Blair and New Labour are in danger of making false assumptions on how to revive a contemporary sense of community through the bedrock of a traditional family unit supported by the model of the 'rational economic man'.     

The Engage programme and the Government Communication Network in the UK, 2006–2010

The Engage programme was launched in April 2006 by the Government Communication Network (GCN) in the UK. As a civil service body supporting those in government working as press officers and in marketing roles, the GCN under the New Labour government in the period 2006–2010 was involved with the extension of the logic of marketisation to government communication. This article charts this process by examining key government policy documents from this period. The rationale for Engage rested on the assumption that government in the UK needed to adapt its communication approach to reach what were perceived as individualised consumers in society. The extension of the logic of marketisation to government communication that happened under Engage is shown to be consistent with the New Public Management approach to public services under New Labour. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.