Description
Case Studies for the Power of Administrative Ethics: Moving Beyond Moral-ism and Instrumental-ism:- The administration of a business is interchangeable with the performance or management of business operations, maybe including important decision making. Thus it is likely to include the efficient organization of people and other resources so as to direct activities toward common goals and objectives.
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Case Studies for the Power of Administrative Ethics: Moving Beyond Mora lism and Instrumentalism
There are two broad traditions in the study of administrative ethics. The moralist tradition is central to most of the contemporary literature on ethics in public administration, and its essence was captured in Dennis F. Thompson's 1985 definition of the field: "Administrative ethics involves the application of moral principles to the conduct of officials in organizations?." For public administration, he continued, it is a "species of political ethics, which applies moral principles to political life more generally" (Thompson 1985, p.555). By contrast, an instrumentalist tradition, which is more prominent in today's generic management literature and less often found in the study of public administration ethics, offers a different perspective, one that highlights the functionality of ethics and its role as a means for coping with dilemmas and other problematic situations that arise in the effort to control and coordinate. Despite the often peripheral (and frequently critical) attention this instrumentalist view receives among public administration ethicists and others, it has deep roots in many of the foundational works of the field, from Woodrow Wilson's often-cited 1887 "The Study of Administration" at least through Herbert Simon's Administrative Behavior (Wilson 1887; Simon 1957). Posing this stark contrast between two traditions serves a number of purposes. First, it highlights a distinction among students of administrative ethics that creates a major barrier to the advancement of our collective endeavor to understand and appreciate the role of ethics in modern organizational contexts. Each tradition regards the other as myopic and lacking perspective due to an intellectual form of "tunnel vision." Second, it fosters a false sense of incommensurability among those who address similar or overlapping issues within each tradition. For those in the moralist tradition, it is often more rewarding to be critical than analytic, while instrumentalists approach their subject matter with less certainty as to the normative criteria that ought to be
2 applied. This, in turn, spills over to a third consequence of the division: while both traditions generate prescriptive action agendas, the moralist school tends toward institutional reform, through law and other regulatory mechanisms, while the instrumentalist is more likely to focus on design and enhancement of problem-solving capacities. We stand aside from this debate and seek to address the complex interplay of instrumental and moralist concerns as they are brought to bear on administration through the language of ethics. We approach ethics less as a guide for individuals or as a tool for managers and more as one component in the unending struggle to define, shape and wield the institutional purpose towards particular ends. These ends emerge in turn from a combination of normative and instrumental concerns and are fundamental in shaping our lives as administrators and indeed as moral persons within our roles. As such we do not argue for a particular 'ethics' as a guide to individual behavior in work. Imperatives for 'personal integrity' (Dobel 1990) or 'patriotic benevolence' (Frederickson & Hart 1985; see also Frederickson 1997) or 'constitutionalism' (Rohr 1998) do not take into account the fungible character of what it is to be human in the context of the modern organization. Nor do we argue for ethics as the solution to some problem of administration. Rather, we ask how ethics, specifically as articulated in the tension between 'thick' and 'thin' standpoints, infuses and shapes administrative life. Our starting point is Alistair MacIntyre's observation about "character" in the modern corporation: In the modern corporate organization character has become more like a mask or a suit of clothing; an agent may have to possess more than one. So the difficulties, indeed the impossibilities, which would result from trying to embody a contradictory and incoherent set of virtues systematically, are avoided; each character is allocated its own place and its own tasks in the corporate world. Nonetheless the corporation Itself delimits the range of possibilities; what it takes to be the good provides a moral horizon (MacIntyre
3 1979, p.125).1 That is, the formal and informal roles we adopt when we act as organizational agents carry within themselves self-contained moral vocabularies: as we discuss below, they describe the 'proper' landscape of work and to a large extent it is up to administrators to obey. In this sense they are both moralist and instrumental: the two cannot be separated out in practice. Administrative ethics is administered: it is part of a script, outlining how we ought to present the self in organizational life.2 The study of administrative ethics, therefore, is the study of administration before it is the study of ethics. It is the study of the enforcement of power through ethics. The language of administrative ethics is of course not totally disconnected from 'ordinary' moral vocabularies. Rather, how ethical landscapes form and are formed in organizations is a function of the complex interplay of internal and external moral, ideological and political debates. Actually existing ethical landscapes are one part of the broader tectonics of political power. They are, in Foucault's terms, related to the administration of administration and the 'conduct of conduct' within administration -- a matter of the 'government' of possibilities for action (Foucault 1994b, pp.340-341). Ethics, in this sense, is rooted in the attempt both to produce amenable mentalities, well disposed towards corporate ends, and failing that, to explain the development of organizational mechanisms that enforce compliance in line with corporate ends. These ends in turn may be drawn from political stances about organizational forms, about the legitimate bases of power over others, the organizational purpose and the role of the public sphere in people's lives. Importantly, therefore, ethics is a matter ultimately of some defined and enacted political stance: it is an articulation of power. Power, simply and broadly defined, is the capacity to get someone to do something they
4 might not otherwise do (Dahl 1957). In Foucaultian terms, it is the capacity to govern -- that is, to exercise the influence of government broadly conceived -- over individuals who are not necessarily inclined to act in accordance with the priorities and preferences of the governing party (Foucault 1994b). This "capacity to govern" can take many forms, ranging from coercion and surveillance to persuasion and the use of carefully designed "nudging" mechanisms (Lindblom 1977; Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Administrative ethics, in other words, is situated in midst of the ongoing struggle to shape organizational governance - it is the administration of administration. We view ethics as a mechanism of governing that falls within that range, especially in regard to organizations that rely primarily on the work of professional communities. Within such organizations,3 professional commitments and norms play a critical role in shaping behavior, and these often take the form of ethical standards in which "thick" peer relationships inform the actions of individuals and the groups within which they work. Organizations which are formed and operated based on those thick relationships -- e.g., hospitals run by doctors, schools run by teachers -- reflect an ideal type for many, although they also represent a challenge to those who seek change, innovation and openness in such key institutions. The latter group often regards thick relationships and the power of ethical consensus around professional norms and practices to be obstacles that require modification, if not complete reorientation. Whether in the form of management focused on efficiency, governing boards committed to profit, or external (or even internal) reformers seeking to alter the social role and function of the organization, these would be change agents frequently pursue strategies focused on breaking the hold of (or at least "thinning out") those thick relationships and the ethical anchors they create and sustain. For present purposes, we will focus on the use of a particular set of mechanisms -- the
5 metrics of accountability -- to reflect the efforts made by reform-oriented actors to bring about organizational and institutional change. These efforts are, in fact, focused on changing the ethical landscape and ethical vocabularies of those professionals who control the core technologies of the organization. What they seek is countering the ethical pull of thick relationships with the standards and preferences of an ethical regime based on a thin (or at least thinner) standpoint. In the next section we discuss moral personhood and its place in institutional and organizational contexts. The second section focuses on the role of metrics and measures in the production of administrative ethics, and how tests and measures act as communicative devices, shaping the styles of favored moral agency as manifested in bureaucratic bodies. In the third section we turn to the concepts of 'thick and thin,' and how they focus our attention on the tensions in bureaucratic life between administrative communities and the external oversight and disciplinary techniques of reformers. We discuss the rise of accountability as the government of conduct rather than as the conduct of government. Finally, in the last section, we use two case studies that reflect our discussion of administrative ethics. Focusing on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies in American public education, we discuss the role of ethics in implementing thin (by our accounts) 'standards' in schools and the manner in which thicker perspectives on educational practice have adjusted to the NCLB regime. We then examine reforms to the English National Health Service4 that are motivated by the desire to 'hand control back to doctors and nurses.' We suggest that, despite the rhetoric of reform, this is not aimed at privileging thick standpoints per se, but at institutional change that seeks to move administration beyond existing ethical standards in the operations of the NHS. The reform initiatives of the current (Cameron) Government is yet another moment in the interplay of thick and thin - in the struggle to define and control organizational conduct. We
6 conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of the study of administrative ethics from this perspective. Moral Personhood and Administrative Life. Ethical stances rarely arise through processes of choice exercised by autonomous individuals. It is important not to think of individuals as coming to each moral predicament 'ready-made' as moral thinkers. Rather our sense of moral personhood may be reformed and redefined by each dilemma we encounter. Each choice is made in a particular moment, in particular circumstances regarding particular persons. "Caught," as David Carr puts it, "in the complex web of human association" (Carr 2003, p.219), we can do little more than attempt to judge an appropriate course through conflicting imperatives and expectations. We might refer ourselves to 'higher' goods. We might keep one eye on the constraints placed on our actions by families, societies or workplace roles. Moral judgment can only exist embedded in a sequence of contexts, even where high principle is invoked. Our standpoints are learned - indeed they are created -- across our lifetimes as we speak, argue and interact with other people, with our communities and with the institutions within which we live and work. The relationships we form around people, communities and institutions are educative, morally speaking, and in this context moral agency is a skill - it does not pre-exist context: it is acquired through context (see Annas 2011). Institutions seek to intervene here, to self-consciously educate and drive us into particular modes of behavior, because they are concerned to recruit us into their ends. They could not function if we resolved our moral dilemmas entirely alone. So they seek to guide us, in subtle and not so subtle ways, whether through conversations or through direct management of our work.
7 Any encounter with administrative ethics cannot be driven by an attempt to define a 'good' that individual administrators can apply because our sense of what is appropriate -- indeed our very sense of moral selfhood -- is context-driven, fungible and subject to the power articulated as moral knowledge, as 'justificatory truths' in Richard Rorty's parlance (1980, p.383),5 where normative claims are disseminated as 'facts about the world.' As such, how we construct ourselves in relation to administration is a matter of some concern for the institutions in which we work. In other words , the path we take through everyday predicaments is quite literally the business of modern institutional life. Institutions are intensely concerned with infusing work with particular notions of right and wrong because those notions of right and wrong are underpinned by particular ideas about social and organizational purpose. Institutional technologies are designed to communicate particular senses of the good, whether as constraints on action or as licenses for action because those senses of the good articulate claims to institutional resources and they describe the 'proper' distribution of institutional resources among social groups. Given this, the paraphernalia of institutional life - processes of promotion and demotion; of approbation and admonition, of measurement and management; of surveillance and accounts - and the frameworks of social regulation - law, rules and regulatory conversations - are embedded in moral vocabularies that themselves describe, define, defend and justify particular decisions in pursuit of particular institutional ends. Understanding administrative ethics on these terms, moreover, is key to any analysis of discipline and control, of standards and of the terms of autonomy for bureaucratic communities. The disciplinary mechanisms of bureaucracy are both license and constraint (Hughes 1958, p.78ff). While discipline is most often thought of as a matter of constraint, it is perhaps more difficult to think of it as license. We should recognize however that the rules and processes of
8 administrative life can just as easily confer powers on people as they take them away. Such a license may be mundane and technological - work with electronic equipment, for instance - or it may involve special privileges that shape the individual's entire life. Some people - soldiers, police officers or capital judges for instance - are even licensed to act over life itself. Such licenses indemnify people from having actions ascribed to them in a way that they would be in life beyond their occupations. In administering administration, institutions demand that we actively narrow our thinking as moral agents (see Scott 1998); that we either set aside our moral intelligence and our moral skills6 in favor of adhering to administrative authority, or that we maintain our focus in the workplace on the sense of the good produced by corporate ends. Work becomes the primary moral context and hierarchy replaces individual moral reason (see Wolgast 1992). While organizations and bureaucracies may be more or less formal, and more or less coercive in their disciplinary structures, they cannot seek to produce individual moral autonomy per se. The institution's job is in large part the manufacturing of a commonality of purpose towards institutional ends (Barnard 1938). Institutions and the metrics they employ are thus designed to be educative. The administration of administration may not be performed through direct managerial coercion. Rather, it might be articulated as expectations in the context of metrics and surveillance on the one hand or through the production of professional communities on the other. An organization's demands for a narrowing of moral vision can discourage the kinds of inquisitive account-seeking and account-giving that are characteristic of 'ordinary' moral life at its best and replace it with moral instruments that both legitimates particular standpoints and actions and ensures that those actions take place.
9 Metrics, Measures, Rituals and Rules Given the fungible character of moral agency, we now turn to the question of how institutions communicate and disseminate organizational ends to individuals and how those ends are articulated as moral imperatives. In this regard, administrative ethics is but one element in the struggle to define organizational ends - a struggle that has come to define major governmental reform movements in recent decades. We live in an era of constant reform, and government has increasingly turned its attention to the administration of administration as one of its core functions. Whether through outsourcing, New Public Management-style reforms, "reinvention" or privatization, government has evolved as an intricate relationship between moral vocabularies and reasons, management techniques, monitoring technologies, and a range of accountability mechanisms. Institutions constantly attempt to render and stabilize moral conversations in such a way that centrally defined purposes and priorities can be pursued. They invoke common ends not only through informal 'regulatory conversations,' (cf, Black 2002), but also through formal management control capacities, including through the production of metrics and measures as communicative techniques. Tests, audits, and other techniques aimed at specifically institutional ends are not simply technological: they are statements of regulatory intent driven by specific formulations of institutional ends and are invoked as ethics, particularly about the character and dynamics of administrative work.7 The educative character underpinning regulatory intentions in institutional life is inescapable so long as we seek to organize ourselves in institutional forms. Furthermore, we cannot evade the dance between our moral lives and the moral expectations formed in institutions because our experience of life is entirely wrapped up in our experience of institutions.
10 Regarding the interplay of regulatory metrics and standards in particular, every act of measurement is "marked by the play of power politics," (Scott 1998, p.27) and the kinds of formal order created through within modern institutions are "always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal [social] processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain" (Scott 1998, p.310). Standardization is not brought to bear passively on society: it is constructive of society and recasts individuals in line with the 'narrowing of vision' involved. Measurement does not just shed light on pre-existing facts, on, say, student capacities and teacher successes. It recasts institutional functions in terms of a narrowed sense of what those functions might be. And in that measurement is educative in terms of the institutions and roles it defines. The difficult interplay of multiple and diverse expectations8 are testament to the educative process that the modern organization seeks to bring to bear on the self. In our technology driven era, furthermore, we direct an intense focus on the production of 'fields of visibility' (Foucault 1979, p.202), through the gathering of statistics, accounts and audits (Power 1997). Through these metrics, accountability is often defined, articulated and aimed at discipline through the production gestures of transparency. Gestures, that is, in the sense that they induce vulnerabilities in the name of performance and in line with prevailing myths (Meyer & Rowan 1977) about the proper underpinnings of some particular mode of work. The disciplinary effects of statistics gathering, standards and metrics, moreover, are not presumed to only operate after the moment when the measure is taken. They do not simply weed the non-performers out (though they may do that both indirectly and directly). They also help bring the minds and thoughts of workers into line with organizational objectives. How they hope to do so is very important to note. The first 'pre-hoc' aspect of the information-gathering power
11 of metrics lies in its production of 'approved' vulnerabilities in the informal defining and outlining of roles. Knowing that senior managers and their bosses are armed with new forms of information, rendering work legible in specific and circumscribed ways, workers will be aware of their own vulnerability to managerial oversight. The workings of transparency are, after all, one-way. The existence of upward-moving transparency through metrics is not a good guide for individuals to predict effects. The subject of statistics is not necessarily made party to the 'expert systems' (Giddens 1991, p.18ff) that the statistics produce. Instead, it is assumed that discipline will emerge through each individual being aware that they will be subject to the metric at all. Or, even better, those individuals who are promoted and encouraged will align their moral mentalities to those favored by the institution, whether through judicious pruning of the workforce or through individual conviction. In many ways, this is the ultimate aim of standards and metrics as communicative devices: they aim to align individual and institutional norms. They are processes of normalization. In addition to these directly disciplinary effects, the specific and circumscribed modes of metrics will act as an educative device by normalizing measured activities, setting them as organizational priorities. Measurement is a communicative device in and of itself. Standards do not emerge and are not defined after the act of measurement; they happen before. Individual workers (and new recruits) will likely see new metrics as communicating and normalizing the organizational purpose. They will perceive them as the communication that desired organizational ends be inculcated as primary individual virtues and, through processes of commendation and condemnation, that the metrics will be brought to bear on them, driving promotions, demotions and managerial interventions. Compliance is rewarded or at least promoted whether through formal mechanisms or through the more casual social processes.
12 Metrics seek to legitimate particular standpoints, and they seek not only to produce compliance, but also active dispositions on the part of their subjects. The institution, through the communicative power of metrics, seeks to 'control the memory of the institution's members,' and "provides the categories of [members'] thoughts, sets the terms of self-knowledge, and fixes identities" (Douglas 1987, p.112). The subjects' roles are defined by the metrics, and the organization actively demands that they accept and internalize the discipline suggested by them. Otherwise, subjects will be left to one side. Thick and Thin Standpoints, Accountability and the Administration of Administration. Individual moral selfhood is a highly fungible thing and shaping moral selfhood is one key element in the administration of administration. The business of metrics is in large part communicative and educative: it is the business of disseminating moral ideals and of 'setting the terms of self-knowledge and fixing identities,' as Mary Douglas (1987, p.112) puts it. Metrics are part of the paraphernalia of governance that focus on narrowing our vision, on devising the institution as sovereign on its own ground -- a kind of Hobbesian Leviathan (Hobbes 1996), setting the terms of moral truth so that order might emerge. The questions we should always ask though are: 'what truth?' and 'whose order?' In this section we set these struggles out in the context of 'thick' and 'thin' moral standpoints. Thick and thin ethics, broadly speaking, provide us with a cartography through which we can navigate such questions and survey the terrain of administration as competing pressures are brought to bear on its purpose. The concepts of thick and thin describe two categories of moral relations, the thin rooted in abstract principles (relations based on justice, desert, duty) and the thick in concrete situations (involving loyalty, commitment to others, love,
13 faith).9 As the philosopher Bernard Williams saw it, the manner in which thicker or 'more specific' ethical notions are applied "is determined by what the world is like (for instance, by how someone has behaved)" in someone's perception (Williams 1985, p.144) and that these notions - e.g., 'treachery;' 'courage' etc. - contain within them both judgment (on a principle) and appraisal (or a person). 'Thin' standpoints, in contrast, make reference to abstracted, universal principles that, despite their generality, ought to be applied in any particular circumstance. It is a 'minimalist' (Walzer 1994, p.1ff) foundation for moral standpoints and is focused on 'procedures justice,' i.e., on justice as being above context to a great extent.10 In an organizational context, the 'ordinary' components of thick and thin are bundled with ideas of discipline and power. How organizations are defined and how those definitions invoke 'justificatory truths' about the organizational purpose is articulated on more or less thick or thin lines. The disciplinary force that comes with those definitions proposes a combination of thin frameworks - e.g., metrics oriented at invoking standards - and thick relations - e.g., fealty to groups. The multiplicity of pressures, norms, metrics, rules, procedures and conflicts to narrow one's thinking of the institutional good provide the backdrop through which the individual must ask the question: How do I work? How do I perform in my work as I engage with authority, with rules, with clients, colleagues and with the multilayered publics of administrative life? Upon what standpoints is my work borne? The concept of thick and thin standpoints allows us to bring two competing forces in organizational life to the fore. Reflecting the more abstract principles in 'ordinary' moral life, the 'thin' organizational theme highlights the drive to focus the organizational purpose on some moral and political imperative. This focus requires a reinvigoration of the disciplinary aspects of organizational life as legal, institutional or 'cultural' reforms are brought to bear on the
14 organization. The thin standpoint imagines the organization as bound by procedures and rules, as subject to hierarchical lines, metrics and standards. It sees itself as constructing rational, even 'scientific,' organizational processes and as rooted in systematic knowledge about the organization, management etc. The 'thick' theme articulates an aspect of organizational life that imagines the organization cohering around as internally validated processes, relationships and meanings. It sees the organizational purpose as necessarily defined by context these relationships and meanings produce, by attention to individuals and by relationships with others. Thick organizational processes are necessarily opaque to reform movements and are met with the suspicion that they mask narrow self-interest. These processes emphasize collective or group autonomy and do not welcome attempts at reform through metrics-driven standardization. Group contexts - e.g., professions, work groups - may define their autonomy against 'outside' intervention, appealing for instance to particular conditions that do not lend themselves to scrutiny. As such, the individual in a thick, particularist work environment does not necessarily stand alone. They stand within a particular way of organizing administrative work. Conversely, while the 'thin' theme is also a matter of organization, its focus is precisely on the 'outsider.' Ends are imagined as externally defined, and means are a matter of aligning action to those ends. Needless to say, in reality organizational life is pursued somewhere between these two broad types and, as we see below, the dynamics of change and reform can be informed by perceptions about the interplay between the two. The parallel tracks described by thick and thin, however, are the source of much of the tension we might experience in organizational life. And how these tracks are defined is the source of a struggle among institutional entrepreneurs who seek to define and shape organizational goals, whether in pursuit of 'standards' and 'discipline'
15 or in pursuit of 'professionalism' and 'discretion.' Thick or thin standpoints, then, are invoked as 'justificatory facts' underpinning the promotion of particular kinds of conduct and of mentalities that are conducive to that conduct. They also propose different methods for administering administration based either on externally validated metrics or on capacities and conduct cohering around groups. The language of administrative ethics, in both cases, will be quite distinct both in how it conveys its focus on ends and on the means to those ends. How processes of promotion, demotion, approbation and admonition are brought to bear on individuals will depend on how administrative bodies are situated on the line between thick and thin. And what those processes communicate to workers about the institutional good will determine to a large extent how those workers define themselves as moral agents vis-à-vis their roles. The performance of administrative ethics in its thick and thin guises, as such, is also the performance of accountability. The construction of 'zones' of accountability (Dubnick & Justice forthcoming) depends upon the degree to which the organization is defined as an internally defined community or as a subject of externally determined discipline. It also depends on how standards are conceived and operationalized - on whether they are formulated within or beyond the organization and on whether and how they are made the subject of processes designed not only to render work legible but, through that legibility, to bring it within the boundaries of the organization's ends. In its institutionalized form, accountability is a matter of enforced expectations. Metrics and measures are wielded in the cause of having the interests of particular constituencies or communities or principals represented in the organizational form. Thus, being accountable is not a simple matter of being 'answerable' for some duty or other. It is a matter of promises: it
16 acknowledges the legitimacy of some principal in its standpoint, recognizes the mechanisms of enforcement that have been brought to bear, and inculcates mentalities that support and sustain those standpoints against alternatives.11 As such, accountability is not a mere technological device. It is the lived experience of the never-ending struggle to define, control and then maintain organizational ends. It articulates expectations about how work ought to be carried out, towards what ends and in what contexts. And as such, it seeks to act upon how individuals think about their jobs. It does so by defining ends and by aligning those ends with processes of commendation and condemnation, of promotions and interventions. Accountability, in other words, maps out a zone of behavior and in doing so is the engine that drives the institution's positioning of individual and teamwork on the thick-thin axis. Given this, if we think of accountability in the context of the kinds of 'zone of indifference' described by Barnard (1938; see also Stewart 1989; Dubnick & Justice forthcoming [or 2011]) we ought not to think of a kind of moral neutrality. Rather, such spaces are intensely moral, circumscribed and defined as they are by ideas of the good. And while normative ideals may be defined and brought to bear through discipline (at least in the first instance), rather than emerging directly from individual 'moral intelligence,' they nonetheless lend institutional ends with a legitimating force that they could otherwise not have. This, in short, is the business of accountability. The thick or thin character of institutional norms is the everyday practice of accountability. Accountability, then, provides the interface between institutional ends, role moralities and the metrics and mechanisms through which institutions articulate their moral presence. The thick-thin nexus is a key part of this interface. It underpins, first, how the licenses and constraints of institutional work are conceived and it justifies, second, the structures of 'power politics'
17 through which regulators or teams will seek to define and stabilize some particular institutional form. The struggle over the institution's normative architecture is perhaps the key tension in the practice and government of public administration. The study of administrative ethics is less a matter of studying norms than it is a matter of studying the power to administer administration. That is, we should recognize 'ethical organizations' as conforming to particular (often contested) definitions of how the organization ought to conduct itself. We should recognize individual administrative ethics, by these lights, as being a matter of compliance (in the ordinary sense) with expectations arising from those definitions. As such, accountability both maps out and administers the territory of good conduct and is infused with implicit and explicit threats directed at those whose conduct is not in keeping with the organization's defined aims. Two Cases. In this section we focus on two brief case studies to demonstrate the manner in which the tensions between thick and thin described above - in other words, the tensions produced by the struggle to define and control an administrative ethics - have played out in the drive for administrative reform. Our discussion of the 'high-stakes' No Child Left Behind reforms in the United States focuses on a number of factors that lie behind the invocation of thin standards, achievable through metrics, primarily the interaction of teachers with the process and their developing sense of alienation from it as tension between thick and thin norms became apparent. In the case of the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) reforms, we examine how local, thick, group expertise is being invoked in pursuit of market-oriented reforms. The NHS case reveals a seeming shift beyond ethics as administrative groups are reconfigured as
18 consumers, their priorities shaped by markets. We argue, however, that the NHS reforms reflect if anything an intensified thin administrative ethical standpoint, where though they may be delegated to organizational groups, imagined market priorities that tend to be at the heart of accountability discourses - efficiency, performance, etc. - are given center stage. Case 1: No Child Left Behind: Education in Targetworld. From the outset, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) represented a significant change in American education policy in two regards. First, its passage reflected a major expansion of the federal government's role in education.12 But of equal, if not greater, significance has been the NCLB's reliance on high-stakes performance metrics as the preferred means for delivering this reform program. The use of metrics in American education has its roots in first decades of the twentieth century, but the passage of NCLB in 2002 represented a major shift. Not only did it involve a "scaling up" to the national level policy initiatives found in some states and localities, but it also put into effect an unproven "default" theory of education that assumed the key factor for the "success" of schooling resided in teachers (see Gunzenhauser 2003). There were two policy-related paths that ultimately lead to NCLB, one following the development and application of metrics-based research to matters of education and intellectual performance (Robarts 1968; Lagemann 2000), and the other winding its way through the political maze of education reform proposals (Ravitch and Vinovskis 1995). The two paths ran in parallel for many decades, until they intersect with the emergence of test-based, high stakes accountability systems that become the state-level education policy standard in the 1980s. Metrics previously used as indices and assessment tools were linked to decisions related to the funding or accreditation of schools, the placement or promotion of students, and the certification and compensation of teachers.13 With NCLB, that approach became nationalized, with all due
19 constitutional deference to the niceties and peculiarities of an American federalism that formally locates authority over education to the states. Put in the context of contemporary education reform in the US, NCLB was (and remains) an open-ended composite of state-based efforts to complete a "second wave" of reforms that began in the 1980s as critics attacked previous attempts at reform (Chubb 1988). The first wave was characterized by programmatic initiatives developed and implemented within the existing education establishment.14 Focusing on funding and the adoption of basic curriculum standards, these reforms altered K-12 schooling in the US, but did little to enhance overall performance as indicated by the various metrics of the day. There were, however, examples of local initiatives that seemed to succeed; yet efforts to reproduce such successes in other districts or to "scale up" those reforms were blocked by structures, procedures and "interests" inherent to the education establishment.15 As a result, the second wave of reforms aimed at breaking through the institutional and political barriers to innovation and change. The adoption of high-stakes accountability systems was a major tool in carrying out that strategy. Given the stress on improving the performance of students, the explicit rationale and logic of high-stakes accountability was initially embraced by many teachers. Playing to the core values of teachers, the rhetoric of these reforms stressed empowering classroom instructors through fostering innovation and professional development. The common enemies of both reformers and teachers were the bureaucratized administrative infrastructure of centralized school districts and the constraints they imposed on instructors, a line that, as we also see in the NHS case study, is common with metric-oriented reform. Turning the focus to results and outcomes was more attractive than obsessive concentration on procedure and constant monitoring, and teachers were willing to adjust and adapt to new realities well before NCLB was signed into law in January
20 2002. Although more than half the states had adopted some forms of high-stakes accountability system prior to 2002, special attention was paid to the high-stakes approaches used in Texas since the mid-1980s.16 Regarded as the exemplary model for reform, at the outset it included a "no pass, no play" rule for student athletes (a powerful incentive in the sports-obsessed state), a strengthening of state wide basic skills testing for students, and test-based recertification for teachers. By the 1995 the testing system had moved from assessing the minimum proficiency of students to rating the performance of schools based on the passing rates for students both in the aggregate and in disaggregated student populations reflecting specified racial and economic groups. Both cash rewards and heavy sanctions (including school closures) were tied to those ratings. The results of this effort were touted in the national media and a proposal based on the model became a centerpiece in the presidential campaign of then Texas Governor George W. Bush in 2000 (see Rudalevige 2003). The "testing" of teachers in Texas began in 1986, when a basic literacy exam was given to more than 210,000 of the state's teachers. A formal survey conducted two years prior by a powerful blue-ribbon committee (chaired by future presidential contender Ross Perot) found that Texas teachers believed at least ten per cent of their colleagues were incompetent. The commission also heard complaints from school administrators about the difficulties of firing or disciplining incompetent teachers, and the media was filled with stories and narratives to support calls for action. As a result, the Texas legislature's omnibus education reform law of 1985 required teachers to take two exams, one focused on basic literacy and the other on proficiency in their subject area. Organizations representing teachers supported the new requirements, in part because it was accompanied by a substantial increase in state funding for teacher salaries, and in
21 part due to its compatibility with the desire of many teachers to weed out the incompetents among them. The first two administrations of the Texas Examination of Current Administrators and Teachers (TECAT) resulted in a 99% passage rate, but observers found the process had a demoralizing effect on teachers who had expected a less time consuming and less onerous test. In addition, the ongoing media coverage highlighting stories of incompetent teaching and unqualified teachers was perceived as demeaning by many teachers who saw their sense of teaching as reliant on professionalism and public standing diminished by a reform effort they initially supported. Post-test surveys and interviews noted that only 5% felt the process made them better teachers, and more than half stressed it negative impact on them both personally and professionally. At the same time, the survey uncovered a basic agreement that the reforms -including those focused on teacher competency -- were necessary and even desirable.17 The Texas experience with high-stakes accountability is well studied and frequently debated, but its status as a model for other states both pre- and post-NCLB offers insights into the impact of such reform efforts on the ethical landscape under which public sector professionals work. Teachers initially embraced the notion of reform-through greater accountability, not merely because of the pecuniary rewards it would bring to them individually and collectively, but also because the reform agenda was highly compatible with what it meant to be a professional educator. However, being subjected to the accountability demands of the reform -- in this instance, being subjected to what was generally perceived as a demeaning and at times publicly humiliating testing process -- proved to be a challenge (on a very personal level) to their sense of identity as members of a professional community. To comprehend the impact of such high-stakes accountability reforms, we can consider the
22 options facing teachers as a classic example of facing the choices of exit, voice or loyalty (Hirschman 1970, 1980). For teachers, exiting by choice effectively meant surrendering one's thick ties with the professional community. Those who remained under conditions of loyalty were essentially choosing to adapt to the ethically thin demands of the reformist agenda. To remain as a vocal sceptic of accountability-based reforms required the ethical stamina to live a life between the conflicting demands of thick and thin relationships. Fast forward 25 years from the initial Texas experience, and issues related to accountability-based reforms remain unresolved at the policy and implementation levels. NCLB, up for renewal in 2012, went into its tenth year with even its supporters calling for changes (see Chubb 2009;Schneider 2011). Its critics, including some prominent former advocates of major K-12 reforms (see Ravitch 2010), have mounted a significant challenge to the policy regime based on the negative impacts of high stakes accountability.18 In light of a potential political stalemate over renewal, the US Department of Education has used a variety of executive power mechanisms to reshape NCLB through grants and waivers from strict implementation guidelines to states that can demonstrate an effective effort to achieve the student proficiency objectives of NCLB by the legislated target date of 2014. At the state and local level, major efforts at school reform move ahead relying increasingly on high stakes methods that increasingly place the burden for "success" on schools and their teachers. What is most important for us, however, is the way this extended process of reform has indelibly altered the ethics regime surrounding teaching and teachers. The classroom and the school are venues where one expects thick relationships to be nurtured and thrive. For teachers, such relationships have hitherto been assumed central to their professional endeavors, and it is those relationships -- with students, with colleagues, with administrators, with parents and the
23 community-at-large -- that, they believe, ought to determine performance and success. Reformers, however, perceive many of those thick relationships as obstacles to achieving the objective of student performance and proficiency. Thinning those relationships by reducing entry into the field, eliminating tenure or modifying (if not eliminating) collective bargaining rights are perceived as corrective actions, and if the result is the undermining of the teaching profession's norms and practices, so be it. For the reformers it is a matter of altering those norms and practices in order to achieve the higher goal of schooling, which is to enhance student performance and proficiency in areas deemed essential for their success and society's wellbeing.19 Well funded by major foundations and supported by politicians from both sides of the partisan divide as well as a sympathetic media, the American education reform movement has a momentum on the policy stage that seems to have already succeeded. And yet reformers such as Michelle Rhee and the leaders of Students First! realize that the ability to bring about real change through alterations of curriculum, governance and sanctions will be insufficient until it undermines and/or replaces the ethical infrastructure of the teaching profession. The struggle is not for teachers to adhere to an 'ethics.' It is to define what those 'ethics' are taken to be. After a quarter century of high-stakes accountability reforms, the reformers are having considerable success but are running into resistance. Their persistence in the use of agendasetting and policymaking powers has made exit and adaptive loyalty more inviting to many teachers, but it has also energized what reformers regard as a reactionary countermovement that is attempting to mobilize opposition to any further changes. But even if that anti-high stakes movement succeeds, it is unlikely that it would call for a return to pre-reform conditions in K-12 education. The ethics of teaching have been forever altered by the power of reform.
24 Case 2: Cultivating Consumers in Britain's National Health Service. The United Kingdom's National Health Service was established as part of the post-war welfare state and continues to provide most healthcare services 'free at the point of use' for all UK residents. The NHS employs 1.7 million people, making it by some measures the world's fifth-largest employer (Daily Telegraph 2012). Its budget for 2011/12 was £106bn (approximately US$166 billion) and it is governed broadly in line with the UK's devolved federalism.20 The NHS in England, by far the largest component in the regionalized organization, treats 3 million people every week (NHS Choices 2011). Our discussion here focuses on the reforms implemented in England and Wales through the Health and Social Care Act 2012.21 Before going into some of the Act's details, it is helpful to situate it in the NHS's twenty-year 'permanent revolution' (Hunter 2005, p.209; see also Pollitt 2007) through which successive reform projects have sought to 'modernise' the service, largely aimed, in classic New Public Management style (Hood 1991; Osborne & Gaebler 1992), at alleviating perceived deficiencies in performance produced through perceived shortcomings in accountability (see Dubnick 2005). That is, the reform attacked clinical teams as interest groups resisting efficiency and patient care. NHS reform has always been Janus-faced, on the one side looking towards marketization in order to produce ostensible efficiencies, and on the other side looking towards centralized bureaucratic coercion as a presumed means of delivering results. Reformers have sought to introduce elements of competition into the Service without the (politically unviable) option of allowing competition on price. Margaret Thatcher's government, finding that they could not privatize the service, introduced an 'internal market' reform featuring some intra-NHS competition. This proved ineffective in terms of outcomes, not helped by the Service's struggles
25 in the face of depleting budgets. At the same time, reforms have placed a major emphasis on delivery targets, especially on hospital waiting times, and have witnessed a rise in metrics and monitoring governed by a cadre of what Christopher Hood calls 'econocrats' and 'accountocrats' (Hood 1995, p.94).22 All this has been matched by a broader rise in managerial 'leaderism,' through which managerial 'reform' imperatives are driven through narratives of 'leadership,' and provision is oriented away from ideas of citizenship and towards ideas of the citizen as a consumer of services.23 The NHS, as such, has been torn between budgetary pressures and central policy requirements for two decades. The reform cycle under Tony Blair's premiership set the scene for the current Cameron government reform efforts, hitting the English NHS on four fronts simultaneously. First, capital funding was diverted through the 'Private Finance Initiative,' whereby private providers built and maintained NHS estates that were then rented by the service. Second, organizational reform saw the introduction of new levels of governance through a maze of healthcare trusts, foundation trusts, all overseen by a number of regulators. Third, a series of uniform targets were introduced from the center (see Smith & Busse 2010), for instance producing a 'three star' rating for each regional Health Trust (Bevan 2006)24 to which chief executives could be 'held to account'. Finally, there was a major drive for the introduction of 'patient choice,' through which it was hoped efficiencies would emerge. Choice was predicated, as one ex-policy advisor to Tony Blair put it, on the grounds that "the absence of choice also meant an absence of incentives for providers to improve" and that, without competition "providers who offered a poor or a tardy service could continue do so with impunity; for those badly treated had nowhere else to go"(Le Grand 2006).25 The division of the NHS into regional organizations allowed resources to be
26 delegated down and patients, in collaboration with their General Practitioners (GPs),26 were encouraged to 'shop around' between NHS hospitals for elective procedures. The hope, as expressed, was that patient choice would render hospitals and trusts 'accountable,' would root out failures and would encourage efficiency, innovation and quality improvements. The Cameron reform builds on Blair's work, in particular by combining further organizational change with a shift in the 'market' focus of the NHS. The Cameron government's innovation lies in the sense that healthcare 'choice' may work better in a 'wholesale,' rather than 'retail' environment. That is, if 'patient choice' is replaced by 'GP choice.' Patients proved to be relatively passive consumers. It is hoped that, disciplined by market forces, GPs will do a better job. Organizationally, regional trusts have been abolished, and are to be replaced by 'GP consortia' that will buy services from healthcare providers (both public and private) on behalf of their patient populations. All this is predicated on conventional 'There is No Alternative' narratives, positing rising costs of care and poor outcomes27 as the problem and competition as the solution (Department of Health 2012a). At the same time, the Cameron reform's special innovation, through the Health and Social Care Act, is that it sees itself as putting clinicians in charge of shaping services, enabling NHS funding to be spent more effectively. Previously clinicians in many areas were frustrated by negotiating with primary care trusts to get the right services for their patients. Supported by the NHS Commissioning Board, new clinical commissioning groups will now directly commission services for their populations (Department of Health 2012b, para.6). Doctors and nurses are to be emancipated from central control, with the reform (as Health Minister Andrew Lansley puts it) "giving them overall responsibility in each local area for the NHS budget." And for NHS organizations, the reform "means giving them operational
27 independence from ministers in Whitehall - allowing them to focus on the results they are delivering, rather than the latest central missive from government" (Lansley 2012, p.789). For Lansley, indeed, the key problem the reform is trying to solve is that frontline staff do not have the freedom to deliver care in the way they see best. Perfectly sound clinical decisions taken by doctors and nurses are routinely frustrated by a system that is not clinically led and where trust and power are not placed in the hands of those who treat patients every day (Lansley 2012, p.789). So, the reform is articulated as bringing trust and control back to 'local' levels, and to the groups that, at the NPM-driven beginning of the reform era, were themselves regarded as a significant part of the NHS's problem. As we saw in the case of No Child Left Behind, much of the interaction we are interested in involves the imposition of metrics legitimated on 'thin' ethical frameworks. Testing was predicated on a mistrust of the 'thick' ethical frameworks through which bureaucratic groups were sustained. These teams were presumed to stand in the way of modernizing forces, or were simply deemed to be hostile to accountability and reform where greater accountability (not, say budgetary pressure) was the solution to problems of performance. Team appeals to their obscure and arcane local forms of expertise were dismissed in favor of centralized standards and organizations were reformed towards accounting and managerial imperatives privileging legibility and ultimately towards metrics imposed from outside. In the case of the most recent NHS reform, on the other hand, there is a major emphasis on the local and on group expertise being used on patients' behalf. Are we witnessing a major shift away from previous NPM reform cycles in British healthcare? We think not. The Cameron reform has been met with deep skepticism, not least from within the medical profession, largely on the grounds that the marketization components in the reform will 'put
28
The Power of Administrative Ethics
profit before patients' (Spence 2012), will lead to patients 'being excluded from health services' (Pollock, Price, et al. 2012), and ultimately will 'wreck' the NHS (Bailey 2012; see also Hunter & Williams 2012; Ham 2012). We see the reform less as a radical move but as situated fundamentally within the logic of NPM era reform as we have set it out above. The emphasis on power being transferred to 'doctors and nurses on the ground' relies on the idea that doctors and nurses - the 'thick' groups that administer public services through their expertise - have been tamed by the 20 year reform process and, as subjects of reform, will continue be disciplined through their new independence. Their independence, in other words, is itself a regime. They are to be 'governed through freedom,' in a sense, in that they would "enact the responsibilities that composed their liberties," having been "equipped with a moral agency that would shape their conduct within a space of action that was necessarily indeterminate" (Rose 1999, p.72). The market imperative in the reform is intended, in other words, to replace government and to dissipate the need for the administration of administration - in the 'delivery' of healthcare to patient populations. Rather than taking the kinds of centralized approach favored in No Child Left Behind or in the targets imperatives of the Blair Reforms, this new iteration posits healthcare workers as existing in localized consumer-producer relationships with each other. By remaking healthcare markets on local grounds, characterized by competition over quality, by GPs acting in an 'agency' relationship, consuming healthcare on their patients' behalf, and by NHS hospitals competing with private providers, the system is imagined as self-regulating. This exercise in 'cultivating consumers' is also imagined, as envisaged by the economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek, as being beyond administrative ethics. That is, markets, as institutions that best "encourage the discovery and communication of decentralized practical
29 knowledge" (Gray 1998, p.135), can replace questions of social justice on the outside and loyalties, fidelities and principles on the inside (for his critique of social justice, see Hayek 1976). Duties emerging from market forces, within this ideological scheme, will be sufficient to discipline all players. The GPs consortia that do not serve patients well, or that are not sufficiently active as intermediary consumers of healthcare on patients' behalf, will lose patients to their rivals. Hospitals that are inefficient or ineffective will suffer. The reform, as such, does not rely on the tensions between 'thick and thin.' It replaces them - in its own view - with a more efficient social technology. As such, this reform does not involve a rowing back from the previous attack on 'thick' relations and ethics. It simply assumes that they have either disappeared or are irrelevant. The triumph of this iteration of administrative ethics is that it sees itself as presiding over the withering away of ethical concerns in administration at all. There is a misapprehension at the core of this standpoint. While the marketization of healthcare relationships is imagined as allowing a 'zone of accountablity' to emerge, shorn of ethical concerns but constrained by market forces, the organizational experience will likely involve the intensification of an administrative ethics narrative, in a quasi-corporate governance guise, aimed at orienting mentalities towards 'efficiency,' 'growth,' 'accountability to stakeholders' and 'performance,' where specified outputs are construed as products and from there as outcomes (Gregory 1995). The ethical administration of conduct will continue, because people and the purposes to which they are put will still need to be monitored, performed and controlled. It is likely that we have not escaped Hood's 'accountocrats' yet (Hood 1995, p.94). Attempts to detach organizational goals from 'ethical' concerns, rather than simply situating work in a technocratic space, tend to fold back on themselves, with the internal imperatives of organizations simply reinvigorating administrative ethics for the new market dispensation,
30 characterized by cost controls, by forms of corporate responsibility articulated through reputational and other forms of risk management and by innovation and enterprise situated in market terms. The interplay of thick and thin will play out henceforth in the theatre of markets.
Conclusion
As the two cases above have highlighted, while tensions between 'thick' and 'thin' are inescapable, the NPM generation of reform agendas have sought to set thick relationships aside in favor of and through the enforcement of thin metrics. What's more, the invocation of ethics has to be understood not as an appeal to the good, but as a form through which particular power structures can be enforced. Administrative ethics are a form of administration. While the struggle between thick and thin can never be escaped, the paths along which organizations travel are closely determined by what has gone before. The reform agenda has its impact, whether through the metrics focus of NCLB or through the marketization of the NHS that has come through the Cameron Reform. Organizational path dependencies come about not least because organizations attract and recruit workers in line with whatever 'ethics' holds sway at some particular time. Those who are reluctant to comply will either be turned away or will turn themselves away. On this level at least, organizations and their masters choose their virtues. Administrative ethics is not fully described by the moralist's virtues. Nor is it encompassed by the instrumentalist's designs. It is better understood as a form of, a function of, and a facility of politics. Presentations of ethics as standards to aspire to should lead us to ask 'whose standards?' Behind every such appeal is a demand for the maintenance or overthrow of some organizational status quo. A call to regard administrative ethics as a matter of power is not a call to cynicism. It is, rather, an appeal to subject the bases of administrative ethics to critical
31 analysis. Organizational life is a language of power and we must recognise that this power extends to how ideas of the good are brought to bear on and pervade administrative work. Administrative ethics is thus neither pre-existing good nor simple tool. It is the very stuff of organisational politics and power.
Notes 1. Such thinking has been key for MacIntyre throughout his career (see especially his thoughts on effectiveness in MacIntyre 1985, p.73ff; see also MacIntyre 1999). We do note that the conclusions we draw from MacIntyre's diagnosis are different to those drawn by MacIntyre himself. He is concerned with the erosion of the virtues in the face of modernity. We are concerned solely with production of administration and administrative selves through the production of administrative ethics. 2. We do not claim that the self outside organizational life is any less a presentation (on which see Goffman 1969). 3. On professional organizations, see Bucher and Stelling 1969; also Satow 1975. 4. As we discuss below, the United Kingdom's National Health Service works on broadly federal lines. The latest reform is, at least initially, targeted at England. 5. We are following Michel Foucault's work on power/knowledge and on 'governmentality' here (See for instance Foucault 1994a; Foucault 2008; Rose 1992; Rose et al. 2006; Miller & O'Leary 1987; Miller & O'Leary 1994; Dean 2010). 6. On virtues as skills, see Annas 2011. 7. See Suchman & Edelman 1996; see Edelman & Suchman 1997). 8. See Dubnick & Romzek 1993; Dubnick 2005; 2006. 9. Much has been written on this, not least in the fields of virtue ethics and of political philosophy (See for instance Williams 1985 from a virtue ethics standpoint; see Walzer 1994 for an argument on "thick and thin" from a political philosophy perspective.) 10. See Dubnick & O'Kelly 2005 and 2006. 11. Mark Bovens (2010, p.962) has posited that there are 'two concepts of accountability,' one promoted as a virtue and the other offering it as a mechanism to generate compliance. These two views of accountability bear more than a 'family resemblance'. Virtue and mechanism are, in the institutional context, effectively the same thing in that the mechanism is held to measure a series of products (metrics) that are held in turn to reflect the desired virtues (see Gregory 1995). 12. Historians trace national education policies back to the pre-Constitution Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which required that territorial governments set aside land in each town for public schools if they wished to be considered for statehood. And while the Constitution itself makes no explicit allocation of national authority in the area of education, over the past two hundred twenty years there has been increasing federal involvement in matters of expanding access to education, providing funding and related support, and promoting curriculum content standards. With NCLB, however, the federal
32 government extended it reach by focusing on educational quality and specifically the improvement of teaching. 13. On various "high stakes" mechanisms, see Wohlstetter 1991. 14. The "waves" perspective has taken several forms. Also see Linn 2000. 15. For an analysis of the obstacles to "scaling up," See Bruns, Filmer and Petrinos 2011. 16. The analysis that follows draws on Shepard and Keitzer 1987 and Haney 2000. Also see Helig and Darling-Hammond 2008 and Palmer and Rangel 2011. 17. Specifics on this study, including excerpts from interviews, are found in Shepard and Kreitzer 1987. 18. For an exchange between Chubb and Ravitch, see Ravitch and Chubb 2009. 19. As an example, one of the most active and vocal advocacy groups for extending accountability-based reforms puts what they perceive to be the primary purpose of teaching right in their name: "Students First!" Their explicit mission objectives are stated simply as "elevating teachers, empowering parents, and spending wisely," Their policy objectives are rhetorically elevated as well: "Ending seniority based layoffs is a matter of social justice" proclaims their web site (seehttp://www.studentsfirst.org/, accessed 7-9-2012) 20. The United Kingdom has three 'devolved' regions, each with varying levels of autonomy: Wales, with very limited powers, Northern Ireland with unique powers rooted in its 'peace process' and Scotland, with more substantial powers. Strangely to American eyes perhaps, England, the largest of the UK's nations by a large margin, does not have any self-governing institutions. The NHS has separate governance structures for each region. The UK also has three separate legal systems: England and Wales's legal system is based on common law, as is that of Northern Ireland. Scotland's legal system is based in Roman Law. Public Sector reform, following these complex institutional structures, is often targeted on England and Wales, with devolved institutions in Scotland and in Northern Ireland implementing reforms quasi-autonomously. 21. We call it 'the Cameron reform,' in order to distinguish it from the previous, related cycle of reform instituted under Tony Blair's government ('the Blair reform') from 2002. 22. See also for instance (Hood 1991; Hood 1995; Bevan & Hood 2006; for an account of targets in European healthcare as a whole, with a special emphasis on the UK, see Smith & Busse 2010). 23. On leaderism see O'Reilly & Reed 2010; on citizen-consumers, see Clarke et al. 2007; on choice in the NHS see Greener 2003. 24. On targets, see also (Cutler & Waine 2000; Smith 2002; Bevan & Hood 2006; Hood 2006; McMurray 2007). 25. Julian Le Grand has been active in defending this aspect of Blair's legacy, both on efficiency grounds and on social justice grounds (see Le Grand 2007; Le Grand 2009a; David J. Hunter 2009; Dixon 2009; Le Grand 2009b). It is unclear how his claim that social exclusion in state services can be resolved by competition between state services is to be understood. On choice in general see the work of Ian Greener (2003; 2009) and see also (Clarke 2005; Newman & Kuhlmann 2007; Clarke et al. 2008; Needham 2008; D.
33 Hughes & Griffiths 2008; D. Hughes et al. 2009; Tritter 2011; Simmons 2011; Simmons et al. 2012). As the most recent cycle of reform was progressing through Parliament, controversy emerged on blogs, through newspapers and in journal publications between health economists over the evidence base for the choice agenda. See (Cooper et al. 2010; Cooper 2010; Beckford 2011; Ramesh 2011; Cooper et al. 2011; Bloom, Propper, et al. 2011; Pollock, Macfarlane, et al. 2011; Bloom, Cooper, et al. 2011; Pollock, Majeed, et al. 2011; Gibbons 2012; Pollock, Macfarlane, et al. 2012; Cooper et al. 2012). Methodological debates aside, it should be noted that the evidence produced by Cooper et al was focused on the Blair reform, rather than on the 2011-12 proposals, so provides lessons about competition between state hospitals under a regime supposedly driven by 'retail' consumption, whereas the Cameron reform introduces both private providers and a more 'wholesale' mode of consumption by GPs' Consortiums. 26. The GP is the primary interface between individuals and the NHS. 27. Although, on many measures, the NHS fares as well as European comparators, on less money. References Annas, Julia. 2011. Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bailey, Peter. 2012. "Primary care duped: the government's bill will wreck the NHS." British Medical Journal 344. February 14: e998-e998. Barnard, Chester. 1938. The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Beckford, Martin. 2011. "300 Heart Attack Patients Saved a Year Under Competitive NHS." Daily Telegraph. 28 July. Available at:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h...ients-saved-a-year-under-competitive-NHS.html [Accessed July 10 2012]. Bevan, Gwyn. 2006. "Setting Targets for Health Care Performance Lessons from a Case Study of the English NHS." National Institute Economic Review 197, no. 1: 67-79. Bevan, Gwyn and Christohper Hood. 2006. "What's Measured is What Matters: Targets and Gaming in the English Public Health Care System." Public Administration 84, no. 3: 517-538. Black, Julia. 2002. "Regulatory Conversations." Journal of Law and Society 29, no. 1: 163-196. Bloom, Nicholas, Zach Cooper, Martin Gaynor, Stephen Gibbons, Simon Jones, Alistair McGuire, Rotrigo Monero-Serra, Carol Propper, John Van Reenen, and Stephan Seiler. 2011. "In defence of our research on competition in England's National Health Service." The Lancet 378, no. 9809: 2064-2065. Bloom, Nicholas; Carol Propper, Stephan Seiler and John Van Reenen. 2011. The Impact of Competition on Management Quality: Evidence from Public Hospitals, London: London School of Economics. Working paper. Available at:http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0983.pdf [Accessed July 10, 2012]. Bovens, Mark. 2010. "Two Concepts of Accountability: Accountability as a Virtue and as a Mechanism." West European Politics 33, no. 5: 946-967. Bruns, Barbara, Deon Filmer, and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds. 2011. Making Schools Work: New Evidence on Accountability Reforms (Human Development Perspectives). Washington DC:
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doc_663656870.docx
Case Studies for the Power of Administrative Ethics: Moving Beyond Moral-ism and Instrumental-ism:- The administration of a business is interchangeable with the performance or management of business operations, maybe including important decision making. Thus it is likely to include the efficient organization of people and other resources so as to direct activities toward common goals and objectives.
1
Case Studies for the Power of Administrative Ethics: Moving Beyond Mora lism and Instrumentalism
There are two broad traditions in the study of administrative ethics. The moralist tradition is central to most of the contemporary literature on ethics in public administration, and its essence was captured in Dennis F. Thompson's 1985 definition of the field: "Administrative ethics involves the application of moral principles to the conduct of officials in organizations?." For public administration, he continued, it is a "species of political ethics, which applies moral principles to political life more generally" (Thompson 1985, p.555). By contrast, an instrumentalist tradition, which is more prominent in today's generic management literature and less often found in the study of public administration ethics, offers a different perspective, one that highlights the functionality of ethics and its role as a means for coping with dilemmas and other problematic situations that arise in the effort to control and coordinate. Despite the often peripheral (and frequently critical) attention this instrumentalist view receives among public administration ethicists and others, it has deep roots in many of the foundational works of the field, from Woodrow Wilson's often-cited 1887 "The Study of Administration" at least through Herbert Simon's Administrative Behavior (Wilson 1887; Simon 1957). Posing this stark contrast between two traditions serves a number of purposes. First, it highlights a distinction among students of administrative ethics that creates a major barrier to the advancement of our collective endeavor to understand and appreciate the role of ethics in modern organizational contexts. Each tradition regards the other as myopic and lacking perspective due to an intellectual form of "tunnel vision." Second, it fosters a false sense of incommensurability among those who address similar or overlapping issues within each tradition. For those in the moralist tradition, it is often more rewarding to be critical than analytic, while instrumentalists approach their subject matter with less certainty as to the normative criteria that ought to be
2 applied. This, in turn, spills over to a third consequence of the division: while both traditions generate prescriptive action agendas, the moralist school tends toward institutional reform, through law and other regulatory mechanisms, while the instrumentalist is more likely to focus on design and enhancement of problem-solving capacities. We stand aside from this debate and seek to address the complex interplay of instrumental and moralist concerns as they are brought to bear on administration through the language of ethics. We approach ethics less as a guide for individuals or as a tool for managers and more as one component in the unending struggle to define, shape and wield the institutional purpose towards particular ends. These ends emerge in turn from a combination of normative and instrumental concerns and are fundamental in shaping our lives as administrators and indeed as moral persons within our roles. As such we do not argue for a particular 'ethics' as a guide to individual behavior in work. Imperatives for 'personal integrity' (Dobel 1990) or 'patriotic benevolence' (Frederickson & Hart 1985; see also Frederickson 1997) or 'constitutionalism' (Rohr 1998) do not take into account the fungible character of what it is to be human in the context of the modern organization. Nor do we argue for ethics as the solution to some problem of administration. Rather, we ask how ethics, specifically as articulated in the tension between 'thick' and 'thin' standpoints, infuses and shapes administrative life. Our starting point is Alistair MacIntyre's observation about "character" in the modern corporation: In the modern corporate organization character has become more like a mask or a suit of clothing; an agent may have to possess more than one. So the difficulties, indeed the impossibilities, which would result from trying to embody a contradictory and incoherent set of virtues systematically, are avoided; each character is allocated its own place and its own tasks in the corporate world. Nonetheless the corporation Itself delimits the range of possibilities; what it takes to be the good provides a moral horizon (MacIntyre
3 1979, p.125).1 That is, the formal and informal roles we adopt when we act as organizational agents carry within themselves self-contained moral vocabularies: as we discuss below, they describe the 'proper' landscape of work and to a large extent it is up to administrators to obey. In this sense they are both moralist and instrumental: the two cannot be separated out in practice. Administrative ethics is administered: it is part of a script, outlining how we ought to present the self in organizational life.2 The study of administrative ethics, therefore, is the study of administration before it is the study of ethics. It is the study of the enforcement of power through ethics. The language of administrative ethics is of course not totally disconnected from 'ordinary' moral vocabularies. Rather, how ethical landscapes form and are formed in organizations is a function of the complex interplay of internal and external moral, ideological and political debates. Actually existing ethical landscapes are one part of the broader tectonics of political power. They are, in Foucault's terms, related to the administration of administration and the 'conduct of conduct' within administration -- a matter of the 'government' of possibilities for action (Foucault 1994b, pp.340-341). Ethics, in this sense, is rooted in the attempt both to produce amenable mentalities, well disposed towards corporate ends, and failing that, to explain the development of organizational mechanisms that enforce compliance in line with corporate ends. These ends in turn may be drawn from political stances about organizational forms, about the legitimate bases of power over others, the organizational purpose and the role of the public sphere in people's lives. Importantly, therefore, ethics is a matter ultimately of some defined and enacted political stance: it is an articulation of power. Power, simply and broadly defined, is the capacity to get someone to do something they
4 might not otherwise do (Dahl 1957). In Foucaultian terms, it is the capacity to govern -- that is, to exercise the influence of government broadly conceived -- over individuals who are not necessarily inclined to act in accordance with the priorities and preferences of the governing party (Foucault 1994b). This "capacity to govern" can take many forms, ranging from coercion and surveillance to persuasion and the use of carefully designed "nudging" mechanisms (Lindblom 1977; Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Administrative ethics, in other words, is situated in midst of the ongoing struggle to shape organizational governance - it is the administration of administration. We view ethics as a mechanism of governing that falls within that range, especially in regard to organizations that rely primarily on the work of professional communities. Within such organizations,3 professional commitments and norms play a critical role in shaping behavior, and these often take the form of ethical standards in which "thick" peer relationships inform the actions of individuals and the groups within which they work. Organizations which are formed and operated based on those thick relationships -- e.g., hospitals run by doctors, schools run by teachers -- reflect an ideal type for many, although they also represent a challenge to those who seek change, innovation and openness in such key institutions. The latter group often regards thick relationships and the power of ethical consensus around professional norms and practices to be obstacles that require modification, if not complete reorientation. Whether in the form of management focused on efficiency, governing boards committed to profit, or external (or even internal) reformers seeking to alter the social role and function of the organization, these would be change agents frequently pursue strategies focused on breaking the hold of (or at least "thinning out") those thick relationships and the ethical anchors they create and sustain. For present purposes, we will focus on the use of a particular set of mechanisms -- the
5 metrics of accountability -- to reflect the efforts made by reform-oriented actors to bring about organizational and institutional change. These efforts are, in fact, focused on changing the ethical landscape and ethical vocabularies of those professionals who control the core technologies of the organization. What they seek is countering the ethical pull of thick relationships with the standards and preferences of an ethical regime based on a thin (or at least thinner) standpoint. In the next section we discuss moral personhood and its place in institutional and organizational contexts. The second section focuses on the role of metrics and measures in the production of administrative ethics, and how tests and measures act as communicative devices, shaping the styles of favored moral agency as manifested in bureaucratic bodies. In the third section we turn to the concepts of 'thick and thin,' and how they focus our attention on the tensions in bureaucratic life between administrative communities and the external oversight and disciplinary techniques of reformers. We discuss the rise of accountability as the government of conduct rather than as the conduct of government. Finally, in the last section, we use two case studies that reflect our discussion of administrative ethics. Focusing on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies in American public education, we discuss the role of ethics in implementing thin (by our accounts) 'standards' in schools and the manner in which thicker perspectives on educational practice have adjusted to the NCLB regime. We then examine reforms to the English National Health Service4 that are motivated by the desire to 'hand control back to doctors and nurses.' We suggest that, despite the rhetoric of reform, this is not aimed at privileging thick standpoints per se, but at institutional change that seeks to move administration beyond existing ethical standards in the operations of the NHS. The reform initiatives of the current (Cameron) Government is yet another moment in the interplay of thick and thin - in the struggle to define and control organizational conduct. We
6 conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of the study of administrative ethics from this perspective. Moral Personhood and Administrative Life. Ethical stances rarely arise through processes of choice exercised by autonomous individuals. It is important not to think of individuals as coming to each moral predicament 'ready-made' as moral thinkers. Rather our sense of moral personhood may be reformed and redefined by each dilemma we encounter. Each choice is made in a particular moment, in particular circumstances regarding particular persons. "Caught," as David Carr puts it, "in the complex web of human association" (Carr 2003, p.219), we can do little more than attempt to judge an appropriate course through conflicting imperatives and expectations. We might refer ourselves to 'higher' goods. We might keep one eye on the constraints placed on our actions by families, societies or workplace roles. Moral judgment can only exist embedded in a sequence of contexts, even where high principle is invoked. Our standpoints are learned - indeed they are created -- across our lifetimes as we speak, argue and interact with other people, with our communities and with the institutions within which we live and work. The relationships we form around people, communities and institutions are educative, morally speaking, and in this context moral agency is a skill - it does not pre-exist context: it is acquired through context (see Annas 2011). Institutions seek to intervene here, to self-consciously educate and drive us into particular modes of behavior, because they are concerned to recruit us into their ends. They could not function if we resolved our moral dilemmas entirely alone. So they seek to guide us, in subtle and not so subtle ways, whether through conversations or through direct management of our work.
7 Any encounter with administrative ethics cannot be driven by an attempt to define a 'good' that individual administrators can apply because our sense of what is appropriate -- indeed our very sense of moral selfhood -- is context-driven, fungible and subject to the power articulated as moral knowledge, as 'justificatory truths' in Richard Rorty's parlance (1980, p.383),5 where normative claims are disseminated as 'facts about the world.' As such, how we construct ourselves in relation to administration is a matter of some concern for the institutions in which we work. In other words , the path we take through everyday predicaments is quite literally the business of modern institutional life. Institutions are intensely concerned with infusing work with particular notions of right and wrong because those notions of right and wrong are underpinned by particular ideas about social and organizational purpose. Institutional technologies are designed to communicate particular senses of the good, whether as constraints on action or as licenses for action because those senses of the good articulate claims to institutional resources and they describe the 'proper' distribution of institutional resources among social groups. Given this, the paraphernalia of institutional life - processes of promotion and demotion; of approbation and admonition, of measurement and management; of surveillance and accounts - and the frameworks of social regulation - law, rules and regulatory conversations - are embedded in moral vocabularies that themselves describe, define, defend and justify particular decisions in pursuit of particular institutional ends. Understanding administrative ethics on these terms, moreover, is key to any analysis of discipline and control, of standards and of the terms of autonomy for bureaucratic communities. The disciplinary mechanisms of bureaucracy are both license and constraint (Hughes 1958, p.78ff). While discipline is most often thought of as a matter of constraint, it is perhaps more difficult to think of it as license. We should recognize however that the rules and processes of
8 administrative life can just as easily confer powers on people as they take them away. Such a license may be mundane and technological - work with electronic equipment, for instance - or it may involve special privileges that shape the individual's entire life. Some people - soldiers, police officers or capital judges for instance - are even licensed to act over life itself. Such licenses indemnify people from having actions ascribed to them in a way that they would be in life beyond their occupations. In administering administration, institutions demand that we actively narrow our thinking as moral agents (see Scott 1998); that we either set aside our moral intelligence and our moral skills6 in favor of adhering to administrative authority, or that we maintain our focus in the workplace on the sense of the good produced by corporate ends. Work becomes the primary moral context and hierarchy replaces individual moral reason (see Wolgast 1992). While organizations and bureaucracies may be more or less formal, and more or less coercive in their disciplinary structures, they cannot seek to produce individual moral autonomy per se. The institution's job is in large part the manufacturing of a commonality of purpose towards institutional ends (Barnard 1938). Institutions and the metrics they employ are thus designed to be educative. The administration of administration may not be performed through direct managerial coercion. Rather, it might be articulated as expectations in the context of metrics and surveillance on the one hand or through the production of professional communities on the other. An organization's demands for a narrowing of moral vision can discourage the kinds of inquisitive account-seeking and account-giving that are characteristic of 'ordinary' moral life at its best and replace it with moral instruments that both legitimates particular standpoints and actions and ensures that those actions take place.
9 Metrics, Measures, Rituals and Rules Given the fungible character of moral agency, we now turn to the question of how institutions communicate and disseminate organizational ends to individuals and how those ends are articulated as moral imperatives. In this regard, administrative ethics is but one element in the struggle to define organizational ends - a struggle that has come to define major governmental reform movements in recent decades. We live in an era of constant reform, and government has increasingly turned its attention to the administration of administration as one of its core functions. Whether through outsourcing, New Public Management-style reforms, "reinvention" or privatization, government has evolved as an intricate relationship between moral vocabularies and reasons, management techniques, monitoring technologies, and a range of accountability mechanisms. Institutions constantly attempt to render and stabilize moral conversations in such a way that centrally defined purposes and priorities can be pursued. They invoke common ends not only through informal 'regulatory conversations,' (cf, Black 2002), but also through formal management control capacities, including through the production of metrics and measures as communicative techniques. Tests, audits, and other techniques aimed at specifically institutional ends are not simply technological: they are statements of regulatory intent driven by specific formulations of institutional ends and are invoked as ethics, particularly about the character and dynamics of administrative work.7 The educative character underpinning regulatory intentions in institutional life is inescapable so long as we seek to organize ourselves in institutional forms. Furthermore, we cannot evade the dance between our moral lives and the moral expectations formed in institutions because our experience of life is entirely wrapped up in our experience of institutions.
10 Regarding the interplay of regulatory metrics and standards in particular, every act of measurement is "marked by the play of power politics," (Scott 1998, p.27) and the kinds of formal order created through within modern institutions are "always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal [social] processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain" (Scott 1998, p.310). Standardization is not brought to bear passively on society: it is constructive of society and recasts individuals in line with the 'narrowing of vision' involved. Measurement does not just shed light on pre-existing facts, on, say, student capacities and teacher successes. It recasts institutional functions in terms of a narrowed sense of what those functions might be. And in that measurement is educative in terms of the institutions and roles it defines. The difficult interplay of multiple and diverse expectations8 are testament to the educative process that the modern organization seeks to bring to bear on the self. In our technology driven era, furthermore, we direct an intense focus on the production of 'fields of visibility' (Foucault 1979, p.202), through the gathering of statistics, accounts and audits (Power 1997). Through these metrics, accountability is often defined, articulated and aimed at discipline through the production gestures of transparency. Gestures, that is, in the sense that they induce vulnerabilities in the name of performance and in line with prevailing myths (Meyer & Rowan 1977) about the proper underpinnings of some particular mode of work. The disciplinary effects of statistics gathering, standards and metrics, moreover, are not presumed to only operate after the moment when the measure is taken. They do not simply weed the non-performers out (though they may do that both indirectly and directly). They also help bring the minds and thoughts of workers into line with organizational objectives. How they hope to do so is very important to note. The first 'pre-hoc' aspect of the information-gathering power
11 of metrics lies in its production of 'approved' vulnerabilities in the informal defining and outlining of roles. Knowing that senior managers and their bosses are armed with new forms of information, rendering work legible in specific and circumscribed ways, workers will be aware of their own vulnerability to managerial oversight. The workings of transparency are, after all, one-way. The existence of upward-moving transparency through metrics is not a good guide for individuals to predict effects. The subject of statistics is not necessarily made party to the 'expert systems' (Giddens 1991, p.18ff) that the statistics produce. Instead, it is assumed that discipline will emerge through each individual being aware that they will be subject to the metric at all. Or, even better, those individuals who are promoted and encouraged will align their moral mentalities to those favored by the institution, whether through judicious pruning of the workforce or through individual conviction. In many ways, this is the ultimate aim of standards and metrics as communicative devices: they aim to align individual and institutional norms. They are processes of normalization. In addition to these directly disciplinary effects, the specific and circumscribed modes of metrics will act as an educative device by normalizing measured activities, setting them as organizational priorities. Measurement is a communicative device in and of itself. Standards do not emerge and are not defined after the act of measurement; they happen before. Individual workers (and new recruits) will likely see new metrics as communicating and normalizing the organizational purpose. They will perceive them as the communication that desired organizational ends be inculcated as primary individual virtues and, through processes of commendation and condemnation, that the metrics will be brought to bear on them, driving promotions, demotions and managerial interventions. Compliance is rewarded or at least promoted whether through formal mechanisms or through the more casual social processes.
12 Metrics seek to legitimate particular standpoints, and they seek not only to produce compliance, but also active dispositions on the part of their subjects. The institution, through the communicative power of metrics, seeks to 'control the memory of the institution's members,' and "provides the categories of [members'] thoughts, sets the terms of self-knowledge, and fixes identities" (Douglas 1987, p.112). The subjects' roles are defined by the metrics, and the organization actively demands that they accept and internalize the discipline suggested by them. Otherwise, subjects will be left to one side. Thick and Thin Standpoints, Accountability and the Administration of Administration. Individual moral selfhood is a highly fungible thing and shaping moral selfhood is one key element in the administration of administration. The business of metrics is in large part communicative and educative: it is the business of disseminating moral ideals and of 'setting the terms of self-knowledge and fixing identities,' as Mary Douglas (1987, p.112) puts it. Metrics are part of the paraphernalia of governance that focus on narrowing our vision, on devising the institution as sovereign on its own ground -- a kind of Hobbesian Leviathan (Hobbes 1996), setting the terms of moral truth so that order might emerge. The questions we should always ask though are: 'what truth?' and 'whose order?' In this section we set these struggles out in the context of 'thick' and 'thin' moral standpoints. Thick and thin ethics, broadly speaking, provide us with a cartography through which we can navigate such questions and survey the terrain of administration as competing pressures are brought to bear on its purpose. The concepts of thick and thin describe two categories of moral relations, the thin rooted in abstract principles (relations based on justice, desert, duty) and the thick in concrete situations (involving loyalty, commitment to others, love,
13 faith).9 As the philosopher Bernard Williams saw it, the manner in which thicker or 'more specific' ethical notions are applied "is determined by what the world is like (for instance, by how someone has behaved)" in someone's perception (Williams 1985, p.144) and that these notions - e.g., 'treachery;' 'courage' etc. - contain within them both judgment (on a principle) and appraisal (or a person). 'Thin' standpoints, in contrast, make reference to abstracted, universal principles that, despite their generality, ought to be applied in any particular circumstance. It is a 'minimalist' (Walzer 1994, p.1ff) foundation for moral standpoints and is focused on 'procedures justice,' i.e., on justice as being above context to a great extent.10 In an organizational context, the 'ordinary' components of thick and thin are bundled with ideas of discipline and power. How organizations are defined and how those definitions invoke 'justificatory truths' about the organizational purpose is articulated on more or less thick or thin lines. The disciplinary force that comes with those definitions proposes a combination of thin frameworks - e.g., metrics oriented at invoking standards - and thick relations - e.g., fealty to groups. The multiplicity of pressures, norms, metrics, rules, procedures and conflicts to narrow one's thinking of the institutional good provide the backdrop through which the individual must ask the question: How do I work? How do I perform in my work as I engage with authority, with rules, with clients, colleagues and with the multilayered publics of administrative life? Upon what standpoints is my work borne? The concept of thick and thin standpoints allows us to bring two competing forces in organizational life to the fore. Reflecting the more abstract principles in 'ordinary' moral life, the 'thin' organizational theme highlights the drive to focus the organizational purpose on some moral and political imperative. This focus requires a reinvigoration of the disciplinary aspects of organizational life as legal, institutional or 'cultural' reforms are brought to bear on the
14 organization. The thin standpoint imagines the organization as bound by procedures and rules, as subject to hierarchical lines, metrics and standards. It sees itself as constructing rational, even 'scientific,' organizational processes and as rooted in systematic knowledge about the organization, management etc. The 'thick' theme articulates an aspect of organizational life that imagines the organization cohering around as internally validated processes, relationships and meanings. It sees the organizational purpose as necessarily defined by context these relationships and meanings produce, by attention to individuals and by relationships with others. Thick organizational processes are necessarily opaque to reform movements and are met with the suspicion that they mask narrow self-interest. These processes emphasize collective or group autonomy and do not welcome attempts at reform through metrics-driven standardization. Group contexts - e.g., professions, work groups - may define their autonomy against 'outside' intervention, appealing for instance to particular conditions that do not lend themselves to scrutiny. As such, the individual in a thick, particularist work environment does not necessarily stand alone. They stand within a particular way of organizing administrative work. Conversely, while the 'thin' theme is also a matter of organization, its focus is precisely on the 'outsider.' Ends are imagined as externally defined, and means are a matter of aligning action to those ends. Needless to say, in reality organizational life is pursued somewhere between these two broad types and, as we see below, the dynamics of change and reform can be informed by perceptions about the interplay between the two. The parallel tracks described by thick and thin, however, are the source of much of the tension we might experience in organizational life. And how these tracks are defined is the source of a struggle among institutional entrepreneurs who seek to define and shape organizational goals, whether in pursuit of 'standards' and 'discipline'
15 or in pursuit of 'professionalism' and 'discretion.' Thick or thin standpoints, then, are invoked as 'justificatory facts' underpinning the promotion of particular kinds of conduct and of mentalities that are conducive to that conduct. They also propose different methods for administering administration based either on externally validated metrics or on capacities and conduct cohering around groups. The language of administrative ethics, in both cases, will be quite distinct both in how it conveys its focus on ends and on the means to those ends. How processes of promotion, demotion, approbation and admonition are brought to bear on individuals will depend on how administrative bodies are situated on the line between thick and thin. And what those processes communicate to workers about the institutional good will determine to a large extent how those workers define themselves as moral agents vis-à-vis their roles. The performance of administrative ethics in its thick and thin guises, as such, is also the performance of accountability. The construction of 'zones' of accountability (Dubnick & Justice forthcoming) depends upon the degree to which the organization is defined as an internally defined community or as a subject of externally determined discipline. It also depends on how standards are conceived and operationalized - on whether they are formulated within or beyond the organization and on whether and how they are made the subject of processes designed not only to render work legible but, through that legibility, to bring it within the boundaries of the organization's ends. In its institutionalized form, accountability is a matter of enforced expectations. Metrics and measures are wielded in the cause of having the interests of particular constituencies or communities or principals represented in the organizational form. Thus, being accountable is not a simple matter of being 'answerable' for some duty or other. It is a matter of promises: it
16 acknowledges the legitimacy of some principal in its standpoint, recognizes the mechanisms of enforcement that have been brought to bear, and inculcates mentalities that support and sustain those standpoints against alternatives.11 As such, accountability is not a mere technological device. It is the lived experience of the never-ending struggle to define, control and then maintain organizational ends. It articulates expectations about how work ought to be carried out, towards what ends and in what contexts. And as such, it seeks to act upon how individuals think about their jobs. It does so by defining ends and by aligning those ends with processes of commendation and condemnation, of promotions and interventions. Accountability, in other words, maps out a zone of behavior and in doing so is the engine that drives the institution's positioning of individual and teamwork on the thick-thin axis. Given this, if we think of accountability in the context of the kinds of 'zone of indifference' described by Barnard (1938; see also Stewart 1989; Dubnick & Justice forthcoming [or 2011]) we ought not to think of a kind of moral neutrality. Rather, such spaces are intensely moral, circumscribed and defined as they are by ideas of the good. And while normative ideals may be defined and brought to bear through discipline (at least in the first instance), rather than emerging directly from individual 'moral intelligence,' they nonetheless lend institutional ends with a legitimating force that they could otherwise not have. This, in short, is the business of accountability. The thick or thin character of institutional norms is the everyday practice of accountability. Accountability, then, provides the interface between institutional ends, role moralities and the metrics and mechanisms through which institutions articulate their moral presence. The thick-thin nexus is a key part of this interface. It underpins, first, how the licenses and constraints of institutional work are conceived and it justifies, second, the structures of 'power politics'
17 through which regulators or teams will seek to define and stabilize some particular institutional form. The struggle over the institution's normative architecture is perhaps the key tension in the practice and government of public administration. The study of administrative ethics is less a matter of studying norms than it is a matter of studying the power to administer administration. That is, we should recognize 'ethical organizations' as conforming to particular (often contested) definitions of how the organization ought to conduct itself. We should recognize individual administrative ethics, by these lights, as being a matter of compliance (in the ordinary sense) with expectations arising from those definitions. As such, accountability both maps out and administers the territory of good conduct and is infused with implicit and explicit threats directed at those whose conduct is not in keeping with the organization's defined aims. Two Cases. In this section we focus on two brief case studies to demonstrate the manner in which the tensions between thick and thin described above - in other words, the tensions produced by the struggle to define and control an administrative ethics - have played out in the drive for administrative reform. Our discussion of the 'high-stakes' No Child Left Behind reforms in the United States focuses on a number of factors that lie behind the invocation of thin standards, achievable through metrics, primarily the interaction of teachers with the process and their developing sense of alienation from it as tension between thick and thin norms became apparent. In the case of the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) reforms, we examine how local, thick, group expertise is being invoked in pursuit of market-oriented reforms. The NHS case reveals a seeming shift beyond ethics as administrative groups are reconfigured as
18 consumers, their priorities shaped by markets. We argue, however, that the NHS reforms reflect if anything an intensified thin administrative ethical standpoint, where though they may be delegated to organizational groups, imagined market priorities that tend to be at the heart of accountability discourses - efficiency, performance, etc. - are given center stage. Case 1: No Child Left Behind: Education in Targetworld. From the outset, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) represented a significant change in American education policy in two regards. First, its passage reflected a major expansion of the federal government's role in education.12 But of equal, if not greater, significance has been the NCLB's reliance on high-stakes performance metrics as the preferred means for delivering this reform program. The use of metrics in American education has its roots in first decades of the twentieth century, but the passage of NCLB in 2002 represented a major shift. Not only did it involve a "scaling up" to the national level policy initiatives found in some states and localities, but it also put into effect an unproven "default" theory of education that assumed the key factor for the "success" of schooling resided in teachers (see Gunzenhauser 2003). There were two policy-related paths that ultimately lead to NCLB, one following the development and application of metrics-based research to matters of education and intellectual performance (Robarts 1968; Lagemann 2000), and the other winding its way through the political maze of education reform proposals (Ravitch and Vinovskis 1995). The two paths ran in parallel for many decades, until they intersect with the emergence of test-based, high stakes accountability systems that become the state-level education policy standard in the 1980s. Metrics previously used as indices and assessment tools were linked to decisions related to the funding or accreditation of schools, the placement or promotion of students, and the certification and compensation of teachers.13 With NCLB, that approach became nationalized, with all due
19 constitutional deference to the niceties and peculiarities of an American federalism that formally locates authority over education to the states. Put in the context of contemporary education reform in the US, NCLB was (and remains) an open-ended composite of state-based efforts to complete a "second wave" of reforms that began in the 1980s as critics attacked previous attempts at reform (Chubb 1988). The first wave was characterized by programmatic initiatives developed and implemented within the existing education establishment.14 Focusing on funding and the adoption of basic curriculum standards, these reforms altered K-12 schooling in the US, but did little to enhance overall performance as indicated by the various metrics of the day. There were, however, examples of local initiatives that seemed to succeed; yet efforts to reproduce such successes in other districts or to "scale up" those reforms were blocked by structures, procedures and "interests" inherent to the education establishment.15 As a result, the second wave of reforms aimed at breaking through the institutional and political barriers to innovation and change. The adoption of high-stakes accountability systems was a major tool in carrying out that strategy. Given the stress on improving the performance of students, the explicit rationale and logic of high-stakes accountability was initially embraced by many teachers. Playing to the core values of teachers, the rhetoric of these reforms stressed empowering classroom instructors through fostering innovation and professional development. The common enemies of both reformers and teachers were the bureaucratized administrative infrastructure of centralized school districts and the constraints they imposed on instructors, a line that, as we also see in the NHS case study, is common with metric-oriented reform. Turning the focus to results and outcomes was more attractive than obsessive concentration on procedure and constant monitoring, and teachers were willing to adjust and adapt to new realities well before NCLB was signed into law in January
20 2002. Although more than half the states had adopted some forms of high-stakes accountability system prior to 2002, special attention was paid to the high-stakes approaches used in Texas since the mid-1980s.16 Regarded as the exemplary model for reform, at the outset it included a "no pass, no play" rule for student athletes (a powerful incentive in the sports-obsessed state), a strengthening of state wide basic skills testing for students, and test-based recertification for teachers. By the 1995 the testing system had moved from assessing the minimum proficiency of students to rating the performance of schools based on the passing rates for students both in the aggregate and in disaggregated student populations reflecting specified racial and economic groups. Both cash rewards and heavy sanctions (including school closures) were tied to those ratings. The results of this effort were touted in the national media and a proposal based on the model became a centerpiece in the presidential campaign of then Texas Governor George W. Bush in 2000 (see Rudalevige 2003). The "testing" of teachers in Texas began in 1986, when a basic literacy exam was given to more than 210,000 of the state's teachers. A formal survey conducted two years prior by a powerful blue-ribbon committee (chaired by future presidential contender Ross Perot) found that Texas teachers believed at least ten per cent of their colleagues were incompetent. The commission also heard complaints from school administrators about the difficulties of firing or disciplining incompetent teachers, and the media was filled with stories and narratives to support calls for action. As a result, the Texas legislature's omnibus education reform law of 1985 required teachers to take two exams, one focused on basic literacy and the other on proficiency in their subject area. Organizations representing teachers supported the new requirements, in part because it was accompanied by a substantial increase in state funding for teacher salaries, and in
21 part due to its compatibility with the desire of many teachers to weed out the incompetents among them. The first two administrations of the Texas Examination of Current Administrators and Teachers (TECAT) resulted in a 99% passage rate, but observers found the process had a demoralizing effect on teachers who had expected a less time consuming and less onerous test. In addition, the ongoing media coverage highlighting stories of incompetent teaching and unqualified teachers was perceived as demeaning by many teachers who saw their sense of teaching as reliant on professionalism and public standing diminished by a reform effort they initially supported. Post-test surveys and interviews noted that only 5% felt the process made them better teachers, and more than half stressed it negative impact on them both personally and professionally. At the same time, the survey uncovered a basic agreement that the reforms -including those focused on teacher competency -- were necessary and even desirable.17 The Texas experience with high-stakes accountability is well studied and frequently debated, but its status as a model for other states both pre- and post-NCLB offers insights into the impact of such reform efforts on the ethical landscape under which public sector professionals work. Teachers initially embraced the notion of reform-through greater accountability, not merely because of the pecuniary rewards it would bring to them individually and collectively, but also because the reform agenda was highly compatible with what it meant to be a professional educator. However, being subjected to the accountability demands of the reform -- in this instance, being subjected to what was generally perceived as a demeaning and at times publicly humiliating testing process -- proved to be a challenge (on a very personal level) to their sense of identity as members of a professional community. To comprehend the impact of such high-stakes accountability reforms, we can consider the
22 options facing teachers as a classic example of facing the choices of exit, voice or loyalty (Hirschman 1970, 1980). For teachers, exiting by choice effectively meant surrendering one's thick ties with the professional community. Those who remained under conditions of loyalty were essentially choosing to adapt to the ethically thin demands of the reformist agenda. To remain as a vocal sceptic of accountability-based reforms required the ethical stamina to live a life between the conflicting demands of thick and thin relationships. Fast forward 25 years from the initial Texas experience, and issues related to accountability-based reforms remain unresolved at the policy and implementation levels. NCLB, up for renewal in 2012, went into its tenth year with even its supporters calling for changes (see Chubb 2009;Schneider 2011). Its critics, including some prominent former advocates of major K-12 reforms (see Ravitch 2010), have mounted a significant challenge to the policy regime based on the negative impacts of high stakes accountability.18 In light of a potential political stalemate over renewal, the US Department of Education has used a variety of executive power mechanisms to reshape NCLB through grants and waivers from strict implementation guidelines to states that can demonstrate an effective effort to achieve the student proficiency objectives of NCLB by the legislated target date of 2014. At the state and local level, major efforts at school reform move ahead relying increasingly on high stakes methods that increasingly place the burden for "success" on schools and their teachers. What is most important for us, however, is the way this extended process of reform has indelibly altered the ethics regime surrounding teaching and teachers. The classroom and the school are venues where one expects thick relationships to be nurtured and thrive. For teachers, such relationships have hitherto been assumed central to their professional endeavors, and it is those relationships -- with students, with colleagues, with administrators, with parents and the
23 community-at-large -- that, they believe, ought to determine performance and success. Reformers, however, perceive many of those thick relationships as obstacles to achieving the objective of student performance and proficiency. Thinning those relationships by reducing entry into the field, eliminating tenure or modifying (if not eliminating) collective bargaining rights are perceived as corrective actions, and if the result is the undermining of the teaching profession's norms and practices, so be it. For the reformers it is a matter of altering those norms and practices in order to achieve the higher goal of schooling, which is to enhance student performance and proficiency in areas deemed essential for their success and society's wellbeing.19 Well funded by major foundations and supported by politicians from both sides of the partisan divide as well as a sympathetic media, the American education reform movement has a momentum on the policy stage that seems to have already succeeded. And yet reformers such as Michelle Rhee and the leaders of Students First! realize that the ability to bring about real change through alterations of curriculum, governance and sanctions will be insufficient until it undermines and/or replaces the ethical infrastructure of the teaching profession. The struggle is not for teachers to adhere to an 'ethics.' It is to define what those 'ethics' are taken to be. After a quarter century of high-stakes accountability reforms, the reformers are having considerable success but are running into resistance. Their persistence in the use of agendasetting and policymaking powers has made exit and adaptive loyalty more inviting to many teachers, but it has also energized what reformers regard as a reactionary countermovement that is attempting to mobilize opposition to any further changes. But even if that anti-high stakes movement succeeds, it is unlikely that it would call for a return to pre-reform conditions in K-12 education. The ethics of teaching have been forever altered by the power of reform.
24 Case 2: Cultivating Consumers in Britain's National Health Service. The United Kingdom's National Health Service was established as part of the post-war welfare state and continues to provide most healthcare services 'free at the point of use' for all UK residents. The NHS employs 1.7 million people, making it by some measures the world's fifth-largest employer (Daily Telegraph 2012). Its budget for 2011/12 was £106bn (approximately US$166 billion) and it is governed broadly in line with the UK's devolved federalism.20 The NHS in England, by far the largest component in the regionalized organization, treats 3 million people every week (NHS Choices 2011). Our discussion here focuses on the reforms implemented in England and Wales through the Health and Social Care Act 2012.21 Before going into some of the Act's details, it is helpful to situate it in the NHS's twenty-year 'permanent revolution' (Hunter 2005, p.209; see also Pollitt 2007) through which successive reform projects have sought to 'modernise' the service, largely aimed, in classic New Public Management style (Hood 1991; Osborne & Gaebler 1992), at alleviating perceived deficiencies in performance produced through perceived shortcomings in accountability (see Dubnick 2005). That is, the reform attacked clinical teams as interest groups resisting efficiency and patient care. NHS reform has always been Janus-faced, on the one side looking towards marketization in order to produce ostensible efficiencies, and on the other side looking towards centralized bureaucratic coercion as a presumed means of delivering results. Reformers have sought to introduce elements of competition into the Service without the (politically unviable) option of allowing competition on price. Margaret Thatcher's government, finding that they could not privatize the service, introduced an 'internal market' reform featuring some intra-NHS competition. This proved ineffective in terms of outcomes, not helped by the Service's struggles
25 in the face of depleting budgets. At the same time, reforms have placed a major emphasis on delivery targets, especially on hospital waiting times, and have witnessed a rise in metrics and monitoring governed by a cadre of what Christopher Hood calls 'econocrats' and 'accountocrats' (Hood 1995, p.94).22 All this has been matched by a broader rise in managerial 'leaderism,' through which managerial 'reform' imperatives are driven through narratives of 'leadership,' and provision is oriented away from ideas of citizenship and towards ideas of the citizen as a consumer of services.23 The NHS, as such, has been torn between budgetary pressures and central policy requirements for two decades. The reform cycle under Tony Blair's premiership set the scene for the current Cameron government reform efforts, hitting the English NHS on four fronts simultaneously. First, capital funding was diverted through the 'Private Finance Initiative,' whereby private providers built and maintained NHS estates that were then rented by the service. Second, organizational reform saw the introduction of new levels of governance through a maze of healthcare trusts, foundation trusts, all overseen by a number of regulators. Third, a series of uniform targets were introduced from the center (see Smith & Busse 2010), for instance producing a 'three star' rating for each regional Health Trust (Bevan 2006)24 to which chief executives could be 'held to account'. Finally, there was a major drive for the introduction of 'patient choice,' through which it was hoped efficiencies would emerge. Choice was predicated, as one ex-policy advisor to Tony Blair put it, on the grounds that "the absence of choice also meant an absence of incentives for providers to improve" and that, without competition "providers who offered a poor or a tardy service could continue do so with impunity; for those badly treated had nowhere else to go"(Le Grand 2006).25 The division of the NHS into regional organizations allowed resources to be
26 delegated down and patients, in collaboration with their General Practitioners (GPs),26 were encouraged to 'shop around' between NHS hospitals for elective procedures. The hope, as expressed, was that patient choice would render hospitals and trusts 'accountable,' would root out failures and would encourage efficiency, innovation and quality improvements. The Cameron reform builds on Blair's work, in particular by combining further organizational change with a shift in the 'market' focus of the NHS. The Cameron government's innovation lies in the sense that healthcare 'choice' may work better in a 'wholesale,' rather than 'retail' environment. That is, if 'patient choice' is replaced by 'GP choice.' Patients proved to be relatively passive consumers. It is hoped that, disciplined by market forces, GPs will do a better job. Organizationally, regional trusts have been abolished, and are to be replaced by 'GP consortia' that will buy services from healthcare providers (both public and private) on behalf of their patient populations. All this is predicated on conventional 'There is No Alternative' narratives, positing rising costs of care and poor outcomes27 as the problem and competition as the solution (Department of Health 2012a). At the same time, the Cameron reform's special innovation, through the Health and Social Care Act, is that it sees itself as putting clinicians in charge of shaping services, enabling NHS funding to be spent more effectively. Previously clinicians in many areas were frustrated by negotiating with primary care trusts to get the right services for their patients. Supported by the NHS Commissioning Board, new clinical commissioning groups will now directly commission services for their populations (Department of Health 2012b, para.6). Doctors and nurses are to be emancipated from central control, with the reform (as Health Minister Andrew Lansley puts it) "giving them overall responsibility in each local area for the NHS budget." And for NHS organizations, the reform "means giving them operational
27 independence from ministers in Whitehall - allowing them to focus on the results they are delivering, rather than the latest central missive from government" (Lansley 2012, p.789). For Lansley, indeed, the key problem the reform is trying to solve is that frontline staff do not have the freedom to deliver care in the way they see best. Perfectly sound clinical decisions taken by doctors and nurses are routinely frustrated by a system that is not clinically led and where trust and power are not placed in the hands of those who treat patients every day (Lansley 2012, p.789). So, the reform is articulated as bringing trust and control back to 'local' levels, and to the groups that, at the NPM-driven beginning of the reform era, were themselves regarded as a significant part of the NHS's problem. As we saw in the case of No Child Left Behind, much of the interaction we are interested in involves the imposition of metrics legitimated on 'thin' ethical frameworks. Testing was predicated on a mistrust of the 'thick' ethical frameworks through which bureaucratic groups were sustained. These teams were presumed to stand in the way of modernizing forces, or were simply deemed to be hostile to accountability and reform where greater accountability (not, say budgetary pressure) was the solution to problems of performance. Team appeals to their obscure and arcane local forms of expertise were dismissed in favor of centralized standards and organizations were reformed towards accounting and managerial imperatives privileging legibility and ultimately towards metrics imposed from outside. In the case of the most recent NHS reform, on the other hand, there is a major emphasis on the local and on group expertise being used on patients' behalf. Are we witnessing a major shift away from previous NPM reform cycles in British healthcare? We think not. The Cameron reform has been met with deep skepticism, not least from within the medical profession, largely on the grounds that the marketization components in the reform will 'put
28
The Power of Administrative Ethics
profit before patients' (Spence 2012), will lead to patients 'being excluded from health services' (Pollock, Price, et al. 2012), and ultimately will 'wreck' the NHS (Bailey 2012; see also Hunter & Williams 2012; Ham 2012). We see the reform less as a radical move but as situated fundamentally within the logic of NPM era reform as we have set it out above. The emphasis on power being transferred to 'doctors and nurses on the ground' relies on the idea that doctors and nurses - the 'thick' groups that administer public services through their expertise - have been tamed by the 20 year reform process and, as subjects of reform, will continue be disciplined through their new independence. Their independence, in other words, is itself a regime. They are to be 'governed through freedom,' in a sense, in that they would "enact the responsibilities that composed their liberties," having been "equipped with a moral agency that would shape their conduct within a space of action that was necessarily indeterminate" (Rose 1999, p.72). The market imperative in the reform is intended, in other words, to replace government and to dissipate the need for the administration of administration - in the 'delivery' of healthcare to patient populations. Rather than taking the kinds of centralized approach favored in No Child Left Behind or in the targets imperatives of the Blair Reforms, this new iteration posits healthcare workers as existing in localized consumer-producer relationships with each other. By remaking healthcare markets on local grounds, characterized by competition over quality, by GPs acting in an 'agency' relationship, consuming healthcare on their patients' behalf, and by NHS hospitals competing with private providers, the system is imagined as self-regulating. This exercise in 'cultivating consumers' is also imagined, as envisaged by the economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek, as being beyond administrative ethics. That is, markets, as institutions that best "encourage the discovery and communication of decentralized practical
29 knowledge" (Gray 1998, p.135), can replace questions of social justice on the outside and loyalties, fidelities and principles on the inside (for his critique of social justice, see Hayek 1976). Duties emerging from market forces, within this ideological scheme, will be sufficient to discipline all players. The GPs consortia that do not serve patients well, or that are not sufficiently active as intermediary consumers of healthcare on patients' behalf, will lose patients to their rivals. Hospitals that are inefficient or ineffective will suffer. The reform, as such, does not rely on the tensions between 'thick and thin.' It replaces them - in its own view - with a more efficient social technology. As such, this reform does not involve a rowing back from the previous attack on 'thick' relations and ethics. It simply assumes that they have either disappeared or are irrelevant. The triumph of this iteration of administrative ethics is that it sees itself as presiding over the withering away of ethical concerns in administration at all. There is a misapprehension at the core of this standpoint. While the marketization of healthcare relationships is imagined as allowing a 'zone of accountablity' to emerge, shorn of ethical concerns but constrained by market forces, the organizational experience will likely involve the intensification of an administrative ethics narrative, in a quasi-corporate governance guise, aimed at orienting mentalities towards 'efficiency,' 'growth,' 'accountability to stakeholders' and 'performance,' where specified outputs are construed as products and from there as outcomes (Gregory 1995). The ethical administration of conduct will continue, because people and the purposes to which they are put will still need to be monitored, performed and controlled. It is likely that we have not escaped Hood's 'accountocrats' yet (Hood 1995, p.94). Attempts to detach organizational goals from 'ethical' concerns, rather than simply situating work in a technocratic space, tend to fold back on themselves, with the internal imperatives of organizations simply reinvigorating administrative ethics for the new market dispensation,
30 characterized by cost controls, by forms of corporate responsibility articulated through reputational and other forms of risk management and by innovation and enterprise situated in market terms. The interplay of thick and thin will play out henceforth in the theatre of markets.
Conclusion
As the two cases above have highlighted, while tensions between 'thick' and 'thin' are inescapable, the NPM generation of reform agendas have sought to set thick relationships aside in favor of and through the enforcement of thin metrics. What's more, the invocation of ethics has to be understood not as an appeal to the good, but as a form through which particular power structures can be enforced. Administrative ethics are a form of administration. While the struggle between thick and thin can never be escaped, the paths along which organizations travel are closely determined by what has gone before. The reform agenda has its impact, whether through the metrics focus of NCLB or through the marketization of the NHS that has come through the Cameron Reform. Organizational path dependencies come about not least because organizations attract and recruit workers in line with whatever 'ethics' holds sway at some particular time. Those who are reluctant to comply will either be turned away or will turn themselves away. On this level at least, organizations and their masters choose their virtues. Administrative ethics is not fully described by the moralist's virtues. Nor is it encompassed by the instrumentalist's designs. It is better understood as a form of, a function of, and a facility of politics. Presentations of ethics as standards to aspire to should lead us to ask 'whose standards?' Behind every such appeal is a demand for the maintenance or overthrow of some organizational status quo. A call to regard administrative ethics as a matter of power is not a call to cynicism. It is, rather, an appeal to subject the bases of administrative ethics to critical
31 analysis. Organizational life is a language of power and we must recognise that this power extends to how ideas of the good are brought to bear on and pervade administrative work. Administrative ethics is thus neither pre-existing good nor simple tool. It is the very stuff of organisational politics and power.
Notes 1. Such thinking has been key for MacIntyre throughout his career (see especially his thoughts on effectiveness in MacIntyre 1985, p.73ff; see also MacIntyre 1999). We do note that the conclusions we draw from MacIntyre's diagnosis are different to those drawn by MacIntyre himself. He is concerned with the erosion of the virtues in the face of modernity. We are concerned solely with production of administration and administrative selves through the production of administrative ethics. 2. We do not claim that the self outside organizational life is any less a presentation (on which see Goffman 1969). 3. On professional organizations, see Bucher and Stelling 1969; also Satow 1975. 4. As we discuss below, the United Kingdom's National Health Service works on broadly federal lines. The latest reform is, at least initially, targeted at England. 5. We are following Michel Foucault's work on power/knowledge and on 'governmentality' here (See for instance Foucault 1994a; Foucault 2008; Rose 1992; Rose et al. 2006; Miller & O'Leary 1987; Miller & O'Leary 1994; Dean 2010). 6. On virtues as skills, see Annas 2011. 7. See Suchman & Edelman 1996; see Edelman & Suchman 1997). 8. See Dubnick & Romzek 1993; Dubnick 2005; 2006. 9. Much has been written on this, not least in the fields of virtue ethics and of political philosophy (See for instance Williams 1985 from a virtue ethics standpoint; see Walzer 1994 for an argument on "thick and thin" from a political philosophy perspective.) 10. See Dubnick & O'Kelly 2005 and 2006. 11. Mark Bovens (2010, p.962) has posited that there are 'two concepts of accountability,' one promoted as a virtue and the other offering it as a mechanism to generate compliance. These two views of accountability bear more than a 'family resemblance'. Virtue and mechanism are, in the institutional context, effectively the same thing in that the mechanism is held to measure a series of products (metrics) that are held in turn to reflect the desired virtues (see Gregory 1995). 12. Historians trace national education policies back to the pre-Constitution Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which required that territorial governments set aside land in each town for public schools if they wished to be considered for statehood. And while the Constitution itself makes no explicit allocation of national authority in the area of education, over the past two hundred twenty years there has been increasing federal involvement in matters of expanding access to education, providing funding and related support, and promoting curriculum content standards. With NCLB, however, the federal
32 government extended it reach by focusing on educational quality and specifically the improvement of teaching. 13. On various "high stakes" mechanisms, see Wohlstetter 1991. 14. The "waves" perspective has taken several forms. Also see Linn 2000. 15. For an analysis of the obstacles to "scaling up," See Bruns, Filmer and Petrinos 2011. 16. The analysis that follows draws on Shepard and Keitzer 1987 and Haney 2000. Also see Helig and Darling-Hammond 2008 and Palmer and Rangel 2011. 17. Specifics on this study, including excerpts from interviews, are found in Shepard and Kreitzer 1987. 18. For an exchange between Chubb and Ravitch, see Ravitch and Chubb 2009. 19. As an example, one of the most active and vocal advocacy groups for extending accountability-based reforms puts what they perceive to be the primary purpose of teaching right in their name: "Students First!" Their explicit mission objectives are stated simply as "elevating teachers, empowering parents, and spending wisely," Their policy objectives are rhetorically elevated as well: "Ending seniority based layoffs is a matter of social justice" proclaims their web site (seehttp://www.studentsfirst.org/, accessed 7-9-2012) 20. The United Kingdom has three 'devolved' regions, each with varying levels of autonomy: Wales, with very limited powers, Northern Ireland with unique powers rooted in its 'peace process' and Scotland, with more substantial powers. Strangely to American eyes perhaps, England, the largest of the UK's nations by a large margin, does not have any self-governing institutions. The NHS has separate governance structures for each region. The UK also has three separate legal systems: England and Wales's legal system is based on common law, as is that of Northern Ireland. Scotland's legal system is based in Roman Law. Public Sector reform, following these complex institutional structures, is often targeted on England and Wales, with devolved institutions in Scotland and in Northern Ireland implementing reforms quasi-autonomously. 21. We call it 'the Cameron reform,' in order to distinguish it from the previous, related cycle of reform instituted under Tony Blair's government ('the Blair reform') from 2002. 22. See also for instance (Hood 1991; Hood 1995; Bevan & Hood 2006; for an account of targets in European healthcare as a whole, with a special emphasis on the UK, see Smith & Busse 2010). 23. On leaderism see O'Reilly & Reed 2010; on citizen-consumers, see Clarke et al. 2007; on choice in the NHS see Greener 2003. 24. On targets, see also (Cutler & Waine 2000; Smith 2002; Bevan & Hood 2006; Hood 2006; McMurray 2007). 25. Julian Le Grand has been active in defending this aspect of Blair's legacy, both on efficiency grounds and on social justice grounds (see Le Grand 2007; Le Grand 2009a; David J. Hunter 2009; Dixon 2009; Le Grand 2009b). It is unclear how his claim that social exclusion in state services can be resolved by competition between state services is to be understood. On choice in general see the work of Ian Greener (2003; 2009) and see also (Clarke 2005; Newman & Kuhlmann 2007; Clarke et al. 2008; Needham 2008; D.
33 Hughes & Griffiths 2008; D. Hughes et al. 2009; Tritter 2011; Simmons 2011; Simmons et al. 2012). As the most recent cycle of reform was progressing through Parliament, controversy emerged on blogs, through newspapers and in journal publications between health economists over the evidence base for the choice agenda. See (Cooper et al. 2010; Cooper 2010; Beckford 2011; Ramesh 2011; Cooper et al. 2011; Bloom, Propper, et al. 2011; Pollock, Macfarlane, et al. 2011; Bloom, Cooper, et al. 2011; Pollock, Majeed, et al. 2011; Gibbons 2012; Pollock, Macfarlane, et al. 2012; Cooper et al. 2012). Methodological debates aside, it should be noted that the evidence produced by Cooper et al was focused on the Blair reform, rather than on the 2011-12 proposals, so provides lessons about competition between state hospitals under a regime supposedly driven by 'retail' consumption, whereas the Cameron reform introduces both private providers and a more 'wholesale' mode of consumption by GPs' Consortiums. 26. The GP is the primary interface between individuals and the NHS. 27. Although, on many measures, the NHS fares as well as European comparators, on less money. References Annas, Julia. 2011. Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bailey, Peter. 2012. "Primary care duped: the government's bill will wreck the NHS." British Medical Journal 344. February 14: e998-e998. Barnard, Chester. 1938. The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Beckford, Martin. 2011. "300 Heart Attack Patients Saved a Year Under Competitive NHS." Daily Telegraph. 28 July. Available at:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h...ients-saved-a-year-under-competitive-NHS.html [Accessed July 10 2012]. Bevan, Gwyn. 2006. "Setting Targets for Health Care Performance Lessons from a Case Study of the English NHS." National Institute Economic Review 197, no. 1: 67-79. Bevan, Gwyn and Christohper Hood. 2006. "What's Measured is What Matters: Targets and Gaming in the English Public Health Care System." Public Administration 84, no. 3: 517-538. Black, Julia. 2002. "Regulatory Conversations." Journal of Law and Society 29, no. 1: 163-196. Bloom, Nicholas, Zach Cooper, Martin Gaynor, Stephen Gibbons, Simon Jones, Alistair McGuire, Rotrigo Monero-Serra, Carol Propper, John Van Reenen, and Stephan Seiler. 2011. "In defence of our research on competition in England's National Health Service." The Lancet 378, no. 9809: 2064-2065. Bloom, Nicholas; Carol Propper, Stephan Seiler and John Van Reenen. 2011. The Impact of Competition on Management Quality: Evidence from Public Hospitals, London: London School of Economics. Working paper. Available at:http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0983.pdf [Accessed July 10, 2012]. Bovens, Mark. 2010. "Two Concepts of Accountability: Accountability as a Virtue and as a Mechanism." West European Politics 33, no. 5: 946-967. Bruns, Barbara, Deon Filmer, and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds. 2011. Making Schools Work: New Evidence on Accountability Reforms (Human Development Perspectives). Washington DC:
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