Overview

The 'Little Heresies' seminars - this is the second published collection of the talks given at them - provide an important public platform to debate the future of public services. Now more than ever it seems vital to challenge the 'received wisdom', 'zombie thinking' and old, tired and outdated habits and practices that continue to infest important aspects of our public services. For, as the authors demonstrate, what appear to be well-intentioned policies not only create perverse incentives but frequently cause lasting damage to the social fabric. Private sector management methods, underpinned by neoliberal thinking, were introduced into UK public services by Margaret Thatcher. Many other countries have adopted the same approach. And successive governments continue to be duped into believing, against plenty of evidence to the contrary, that New Public Management, as it is now called, works. It doesn't. In this second publication from the Little Heresies series, nine heretics, all leading thinkers and practitioners in their professional fields, explain the disastrous effects of wrong thinking and ineffective practice in areas like standardisation, professionalisation and measurement in public services, so-called evidence-based policy-making, money creation and, looking more widely, in the troubled waters of philanthropy and the third/charitable sector.

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9781911193777

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Toby Lowe is Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership and Management at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. His aim is to help improve the funding, commissioning, and performance management of social interventions across the public, private, and voluntary sectors. Jan Myers is Associate Professor in the Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University. Her research covers organisational behaviour and HR, and leadership, individual, and organisational development. Charlotte Pell is a visiting fellow at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. She edited Delivering Public Services that Work: Volume 2 and Kittens Are Evil and has written for many blogs and other publications on public services. Rob Wilson is professor at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University with research interests in measurement and performance in public management, co-creation, and collaboration of services, and data and information sharing in public services and public service reform.

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