Dancing To Whose Tune? Change And Investigations In Hm Customs And Excise
| Author | Alan Doig,Mike Graham |
| Date | 01 September 1998 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9299.00113 |
| Published date | 01 September 1998 |
DANCING TO WHOSE TUNE? CHANGE AND
INVESTIGATIONS IN HM CUSTOMS AND
EXCISE
ALAN DOIG AND MIKE GRAHAM
The public sector has been subject to significant organizational and cultural change
in the past two decades. The purpose of change has been the cost-efficient and cost-
effective delivery of public services and functions. The process of change has been
concerned with the best means to do this, whether in structural, cultural and pro-
cedural terms. Without careful determination of the services and functions from the
onset, the process, however, can become an end in itself, reflecting the comments
of the Head of the Civil Service when he said that he did not know the final shape
of the civil service on the grounds that ‘it is not unusual . . . for an organisation in
the process of evolution not to know what its final state will be’ (Dynes and Walker
1995, p. 99).
Where an organization has assumed its core functions are clearly defined and
understood but where they are not explicitly used to provide the purpose to shape
and direct the process of change, that process may be influenced more by generic
external imperatives on structural, cultural and managerial reform that developed
from the 1988 Next Steps report than by the organization’s core functions. The arti-
cle questions assumptions that, by itself, an emphasis on the former will facilitate
the performance of the latter. It suggests that the process of challenging culture
and structure may have adverse consequences until the purpose of change and the
functions of the organization are used to shape and inform the process. It looks at
the impact of the process of change on a core organizational function in one large
government department that has undergone significant change – major investi-
gations within HM Customs and Excise
1
. It considers that change may be, to use
the idiom of earlier research into change and the department, partly about teaching
organizations to dance the Next Steps, and partly about ensuring that they keep
dancing, but it is also about teaching departments that dancing is best done to tunes
that inform the steps.
INTRODUCTION: THE 1980s INVESTIGATION STRUCTURE
WITHIN HM CUSTOMS AND EXCISE
At the end of the 1980s HM Customs and Excise was a large department
with 27,000 staff whose work functionally involved two broad areas – the
control of imports and exports, and the administration and collection of
Alan Doig is a Professor of Public Services Management, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John
Moores University and Mike Graham is Senior Investigation Officer, National Investigation Service,
HM Customs and Excise. Mike Graham writes in a personal capacity.
Public Administration Vol. 76 Autumn 1998 (489–498)
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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