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Editorial

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 December 1989
Published date01 December 1989
DOI10.1177/095207678900400301
Subject MatterArticles
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EDITORIAL
A welcome innovation in this issue is summary of a CSC/PAC seminar on
’Making Things Happen in Government’. These joint activities are valuable and
publication helps spread the information and makes sense in terms of the effort
that is put into preparing material. But the comment that is recorded of a
comparison of the Ibbs Report with that of Northcote-Trevelyan seems somewhat
overstated..
In Policy Sciences in 1973 Aaron Wildavsky argued that, &dquo;Attempts&dquo; to plan
are no more planning than the desire to be called wise may be called wisdom or
the wish to be rich entitles a man to be called wealthy..&dquo; There is a difference
between attempts at managerial change and changing management....
There is a strange gap in academic and practitioner views of what is
happening. The ’ivory tower academic’ is saying that things are really much
more complicated than is being allowed and, in any case, isn’t it another canter
round the Fulton course? The academics seem to have become the sources of the
folk wisdom about the impracticability of much change in the real world that civil
servants used to chorus.
One thing that the new style has not cured - perhaps the reverse - in Whitehall
is the traditional disease of acronymphomania. Of course organisations have
always - subconsciously if not deliberately - used specialist terminology to
separate the insider from the intruder. The current explosion is about another
organisational inevitability; attempts at coordination has created a fragmentation
of systems as departments attempt to fight off uniformity that threatened their
turf. In a world of VFM, MINIS, MAXI, and MAISY the introduction of a
phantom system called something like MESSY would be difficult to spot. Who
knows what some backwater is using?
The labels are on the whole a tribute to civil service ingenuity. If we go back
to PESC and the ’forward look’ we have a label that suggests the nuisance value
to Spending Departments (cf pesky) that was at the...

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