Suchergebnisse

As citizens, why do we care about the everyday life of ministers and civil servants? We care because the decisions of the great and the good affect all our lives, for good or ill. For all their personal, political, and policy failings and foibles, they make a difference. So, we want to know what ministers and bureaucrats do, why, and how. We are interested in their beliefs and practices. In his fascinating, new piece of political anthropology, Rod Rhodes uncovers exactly how the British political elite thinks and acts. Drawing on unprecedented access to ministers and senior civil servants in t

The British tradition of political life history has six conventions: 'tombstone' biography, separation of public and private lives, life without theory, objective evidence and facts, character and storytelling. I describe each in turn and review the main debates in the tradition before turning to the swingeing critique by 'the interpretive turn'. Postmodernism deconstructed grand narratives by pronouncing the death of the subject and the death of the author. I outline an interpretive approach that reclaims life history by focusing on the idea of 'situated agency': that is, on the webs of significance that people spin for themselves against the backcloth of their inherited beliefs and practices. I explore, with examples, the implications of this approach for writing life history, stressing the different uses for biography open to political scientists. I end with some brief thoughts on why the British tradition of political life history has proved resistant to change. Adapted from the source document.

What intellectual influence, if any, have British public administration scholars had on their American counterparts since World War II? In this article, the author briefly reviews the major areas of theory and research in the British study of publication administration, further identifying important contributions by British scholars in the areas of modernist‐empiricism, the new public management, regulation, policy networks and governance, and interpretive theory. Although there is a discernible American influence on British public administration, there is little British impact on U.S. public administration; nowadays it is a one‐way street. Increasingly, British scholars are involved in a growing community of European public administration scholars with whom they share active, two‐way connections. Recent European developments suggest that American and European public administration academics are growing further apart. Due to the immense strength of modernist‐empiricism throughout American universities, plus the interpretive turn to a European epistemology of "blurred genres," these twin, traditionally self‐referential, communities seem to be parting company with an attendant danger that future intellectual engagement may be a dead end.

This article provides a brief intellectual history of my journey from traditional public administration through modernist‐empiricism to an interpretive approach and its associated research themes; a story of how I got to where I am. I do so to provide the context for a statement of where I stand now and key themes in my research; a story of where I go from here. I have a vaulting ambition: to establish an interpretive approach and narrative explanations in political science, so redefining public policy analysis.