HALDANE ESSAY COMPETITION 1985
| Author | Richard A. Chapman,John Boynton |
| Published date | 01 June 1986 |
| Date | 01 June 1986 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1986.tb00618.x |
COMMUNICATIONS
HALDANE
ESSAY COMPETITION
1985
All public services at the present time are experiencing pressures for change and
the impact of new developments. In part these are the consequences of a radical
govement but in part they are
also
the consequences of new techniques and new
management processes. Together they provide many challenges for the practice
of public administration and for the participants in the Haldane Essay Competition.
The evidence for
this
is to be found in the unprecedentedly large number of entries
this year
-
thirty
-
as well as in the wide range of topics covered.
From the content and other evidence it appeared likely that one candidate,
confusing quantity with quality, had submitted
six
entries. One essay concluded:
Those
of us who are neither consulted nor made part of the decision-making process
are naturally reduced to airing our views by writing essays’. This seems as poor
a justification for an essay as the desire
to
rail against the abolition of the
GLC,
evidenced in one
essay;
or to argue in another essay, well below the required length,
that civil servants get moved too frequently from one job to another.
There were several well researched essays of a historical character this year. We
read with interest the story
of
the governance of Royston over past centuries; the
problems of mining subsidence stemming from the unreliability or inaccessibility
of
records; and the role of the district auditor. Only one essay in this group was
in our view worthy of special commendation and this was on the development
and role
of
the Chief Financial Officer in local authorities, by George Swainson.
Had the author spent more time on the relationship
of
the present with the past
it might have been
an
award winner.
Inevitably a considerable number
of
essays concentrated on aspects
of
adminis-
tration
of
the civil service.
Of
these we single out for mention
MinisteriaZ
Accountability in the
Civil
Service
by Martin Edwards
-
a persuasive and well-
written justification for the status quo. Several essays were on subjects too esoteric
to be
of
general interest, but readable and useful to a smaller audience; for example,
Sinn Fein and Local Government,
by Alice Carroll, and
The Management of Change
in a Whitehall Library
by
D.
Ricardo and
A.
Pannizzi.
Planning and the Use of
Information and Computer Systems in the Work
of
an Organization
by
A.
Bundy
had much practical wisdom and commonsense to its credit and was not plagued
by the jargon which often accompanies papers on computer subjects.
Retribution,
by M.
J.
D.,
broke the rules by being handwritten and too short. But the author
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