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This article is based on a study of the experiences of women chief executives in British local government. Our emphasis will be on our experiences of carrying out the study, and, in particular, on encountering and working with the political aspects of our research. Following a brief outline of our main findings, we review some of the dangers of “doing research” on women. We continue by describing our first encounters with the politics of gender research – the voices of discouragement that questioned the need for the research. We then outline our attempts to understand more about how our relations with each other as a pair of researchers enabled us to surface the political properties of our research. The article discusses the role of reflexivity in maintaining awareness of researcher bias, and how this might affect our analysis of the experiences of women in the system being studied. Next, we discuss how action researchers inevitably become part of a political system that is characterised by different actors holding different aspirations for research outcomes, and argue that collaborative forms of research are necessary if one is to listen to the range of voices that stakeholders represent. We tackle the question about how researchers may “let go” of research of this kind given their political attachments to the topic. Finally, we conclude that spelling out the dilemmas inherent in research of this kind is more likely to achieve results that are well grounded in the political and organisational realities of participants’ experiences.

Can the worst time for an organisation provide the best circumstances for management learning? One UK local authority began a management development programme 18 months before a wholescale reorganisation. This was not regarded as a rational thing to do. Explores the messiness and the politics that had to be worked with by those believing that a programme was necessary. However, training anxious and cynical managers about rational strategic models of change would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, the programme addressed the often hidden struggles, messiness, anxiety, incertainty and politics which influence management learning in a complex and turbulent organisation. The article outline participants’ feelings about the learning processes, and explains how connections were made between personal learning and organisational change. Finally it assesses the programme’s outcomes, concluding that this “bad time” for the organisation resulted in the development of managers’ ability to handle a terrifying amount of change.

The purpose of the paper is to report on the results of an inquiry into the possible reasons why many public service managers and leaders across six European countries report a loss of personal agency and suggests a possible pedagogic response to this.

The nature of agency is explored with reference to theory, and the methodology for the study – heuristic action inquiry – is outlined. The paper argues that spaces within postgraduate education are needed to facilitate managers' critical reflection and working with anxiety, and the article goes on to outline how public services leadership programmes can seek to achieve this.

The paper suggests that programmes need to work both with the cognitive and affective domains, and to find ways of exploring within the curriculum how managers may begin more to see their roles as potentially key actors in the policy‐making process rather than as passive recipients of policy imperatives received from above. The loss of agency experienced by public servants in several European countries suggests that MPA programmes and the like need to work with students' anxieties in a contained way.

Some trends within contemporary public services that lie behind anxiety and loss of agency are identified, including high emphasis on performance targets, centrally driven change, financial stringency, loss of professional and organisation identities, a perpetuation of a “private is best” governmental ideology, and contradictory accountability structures.

Describes a four‐year study to identify the emotional state of National Health Service and local government senior and middle managers. This was accomplished via managers’ drawings to express their feelings about change. Describes various drawings and discusses their implications.

Research was commissioned to identify the competences that are required by local authority chief executives in the UK. It emerged that the “competence approach” was inappropriate for their needs. Instead, “capacity” – a concept originating in psychoanalytic theory – was adopted as one which reflected better the reality of the chief executive’s role. Through a qualitative research approach with a sample of chief executives, five capacities were identified. These were seen as central to the effective performance of the chief executive’s role. The research suggests that policies concerned with the development of chief executives should not be based on an orthodox competence approach. It recommends the use of “capacity” as a better way of conveying chief executives’ capabilities to “hold” many interconnected, dynamic and paradoxical dimensions in their work.

Reflects on the impact of politics on facilitation. The aim of facilitation is to establish and maintain an environment in which learning is created. Central to this aim is the need to work with power relations between organisations, groups and facilitators. Facilitation may be thought of as a part of the political dynamics at play in systems. Discusses three propositions: that organisations are political, facilitation is political and facilitators are political. Proposes a framework showing four positions of awareness about the politics of facilitation. Offers the framework to those who wish to learn more about being a facilitator, and to those who wish to teach others about facilitation. Aims to add to understanding about how facilitators may act more confidently, authoritatively and ethically in the complex, dynamic and unpredictable role of facilitator.

The purpose of this paper is to give concrete ideas to the development of MPA programmes in the light of the changing public sector. Following the introduction of ideas and practices from New Public Management, public managers face new requirements. The paper aims to deal with some of them and argues that in order to be a competent manager in the public sector today, one needs to be able to self‐develop four types of competence‐in‐practice: methodological competencies; theoretical competencies; meta‐theoretical competencies; and contextual competencies.

The approach in the paper is explorative and normative. The paper explores the changes and challenges in the public sector based on the aforementioned four types of competence‐in‐practice. Following that the paper presents a normative model for curriculum design and exemplify the development and possible processes of learning‐centered MPA programmes.

The paper finds that learning‐centred MPA programmes are fruitful for the development of said the types of competence‐in‐practice.

With its particular focus on public sector management education this article may be relevant to curriculum developers, academics and practitioners interested in education and employability of public managers.

The paper shows that building on theories about learning, competencies, and curriculum development suggests a processual model for curriculum development that can inspire faculty members to develop learning‐centred MPA programmes where focus is learning and competence development.

Equality and diversity are generally positioned as special interests, marginal to the mainstream of social policy teaching and learning. The purpose of this paper is to make the case for shifting equality and diversity out of the margins and into the centre of education for mid career public managers, and offers practical methods for doing so.

The current EU policy framework requires public services to go beyond eliminating discrimination, and to promote equality. The paper suggests that while this offers great opportunities for advancing the cause of social justice, the cultures that predominate in public policy may lead to loss and failure. Academic research and experience demonstrate that these changes are highly complex, touching on issues that are integral to our sense of who we are, and how we relate to each other as educators and students, and as enforcers, beneficiaries and implementers of these policies. The paper touches on deeply held emotions, showing that more exploration of appropriate pedagogical methods is needed.

The paper finds that only by raising issues of equality and diversity to mainstream social policy teaching and learning is there likely to be a shift in thinking and commitment that will encourage integration of equality measures within management and leadership of public.

The paper offers three dimensions of pedagogy for enabling public service managers to engage with diversity and the equality agenda within educational contexts, and offers three illustrations of pedagogic processes that support this learning.

Purpose – Reform, transformation and restructuring have become endemic in public services. This paper aims to examine the central “modernisation” and improvement themes of public service reform in Denmark and the UK. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on the authors' reflections on experience and analysis, drawing on the UK and Denmark as sites where there have been substantial efforts to undertake public services reform. It argues that there has been a weakening of the hierarchically organised state in favour of more differentiated governance regimes that cut across the public, private and voluntary sectors. However, the new dynamic image of public leadership and the apparently enlarged opportunities for managerial discretion seem to be counter‐balanced by a strengthening of central interventions and controls. Findings – The paper identifies that managing the tensions and paradoxes of governance regimes has become a key element of the work of public service managers, and that this means that three sets of dynamics need to be worked with. First, the dynamics of self‐creation means that authority is not solely formal but that self‐constitution is necessary. Second, the dynamics of strategising means that managers cannot rely on a fixed legal or professional set of values but must be able to decode, challenge and develop varied sets of values and goals, working with varied rationales for action. Third, the dynamics of networking and negotiation mean that management and leadership positions are partly created through negotiated relations in a network‐like governance structure. Practical implications – These dynamics mean that teaching and learning have to address new challenges if programmes for public service leaders and managers are to be enabling. Originality/value – The paper highlights the challenges facing public sector leaders and managers.