CRASSH

In the talk I  explore certain reforms of the public administration as an institution of government in the UK, and elsewhere, and examine their consequences for the relationship between ‘person’ and ‘office’ in the practice of governmental administration. In particular, attention is focused on the changing ethical template that programmes of ‘responsive’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ managerial reform require of civil servants. I argue that contemporary political demands for responsive public management contain two emotional injunctions to public bureaucrats. The first, derived from populist doctrines of political right, requires bureaucrats to be responsive to the needs of their ‘clients’. Here, it is thought vital to inculcate in bureaucratic conduct a sense of ‘compassion’ or close identification with others feelings. Second, in the name of responsiveness to political superiors and the delivery of their policy objectives, bureaucrats are expected to exhibit ‘ownership’ of and identification with particular policies. They are required to be committed champions for and enthusiastic advocates of those policies.

Both of these injunctions are deemed to be  more in tune with democratic principles and the currents of contemporary ethical culture (‘diversity’ or ‘human rights’, for example) than what is represented as the unlamented Weberian world of rule-bound hierarchy. I seek to question this assessment through an engagement with the ‘ethics of enthusiasm’ in certain recent programmes of public management reform. My argument is that many of the political and administrative virtues associated with the development and reproduction of an ethic of bureaucratic office in public administration – in particular the capacity to act with a ‘spirit of formalistic impersonality’ hence ‘without affection or enthusiasm, and without anger or prejudice’(Weber, 1994a) - are either unappreciated or simply ignored in contemporary programmes designed to inculcate the requisite ‘enthusiasm’ for ‘responsiveness’. This carries with it certain dangers that earlier and now largely neglected critics of enthusiasm in civil and administrative life were more than aware of.