Search results

For many, the claim that a new approach to bureaucracy—new political governance (NPG)—is underway reads as if it was written by Stephen King: Frightening fiction. While the thought of promiscuously partisan senior public servants publicly defending and promoting the government’s reputation to the demise of impartiality is disturbing, the evidentiary record has led most to dismiss the idea as empirically false. This article questions, and empirically investigates, whether dismissing the idea of promiscuous partisanship has been premature.

A case study of the loyalty displayed by Canada’s most senior public servant during a highly publicized parliamentary committee is analysed with a novel theoretical and empirical approach in three steps. First, the Clerk of the Privy Council (Clerk)’s committee testimony is analysed against analytical constructs of impartial and promiscuous partisan loyalty that focuses on the testimony’s direction and substance. Second, the objectivity and truthfulness of the testimony is analysed by comparing what was publicly claimed to have occurred against evidence submitted to the committee that provids an independent record of events. Third, the perception the Clerk’s testimony had on some committee members, political journalists and members of the public is analysed through print media and committee Hansard.

While the Clerk’s testimony displays an awareness of upholding impartiality, it also comprises promiscuous partisanship. Throughout his testimony, the Clerk redirects from the line of questioning to defend and promote the sitting government’s reputation. Moreover, to defend and promote the government’s reputation the Clerk’s testimony moved away from objectivity and engaged in truth-obfuscating tactics. Finally, the nature of the Clerk’s testimony was perceived by some committee members and the public—including former senior public servants—as having abandoned impartiality to have become a public “cheerleader” of the government.

Employing an in-depth case study limits the extent to which the findings concerning the presence of promiscuously partisan loyalty can be generalized beyond the present case to the larger cadre of senior public servants.

Empirically, while most research has dismissed claims of promiscuous partisanship as empirically unfounded, this article provides what is possibly the strongest empirical case to date of a public incident of promiscuous partisanship at the apex of the bureaucracy. As such, scholars can no longer dismiss NPG as an interesting idea without much empirical leverage. Theoretically, this article adds further caution to Aucoin’s original narrative of NPG by suggesting that promiscuous partisanship might not only involve senior public servants defending and promoting the government, but that doing so may push them to engage in truth-obfuscating tactics, and therein, weaken the public’s confidence in political institutions. The novel theoretical and empirical approach to studying senior public servants’ parliamentary testimony can be used by scholars in other settings to expand the empirical study of bureaucratic loyalty.

This chapter highlights how Malaysia has experienced a successful economy through different stages since independence. The development, administration and institution-building phase was followed by reform initiatives throughout the years. Master Industrial Plans, 5-year development plans and other mid-term plans are used, which include governance and performance management reform. Today, public service reform continues to evolve with emphasis on better services, e-government and one-stop clearance centres. Under the Government Transformation Programme launched in 2010, seven National Key Results Areas have been identified, e.g., reducing crime, fighting corruption, improving education, and raising living standards of low-income households. Within this, political transformation programme, digital transformation programme, community transformation programme and social transformation programme have been created that advance public sector reforms. This chapter shows that while states and leaders remain powerful actors, leaders recognise a need to reform and overcome unethical and inefficient bureaucratic dysfunctions, or keep them at a minimum. Leaders manage such problems by using transparency to address problems of vested interests, stringent audits and punishing civil servants for criminal breaches of trust, removal of ministerial control over government-linked companies and removing resisting actors. Yet, more reforms in shepherding public service renewal are needed in sustaining reforms and reputations of public institutions. The author calls for increased values-based leadership that is inclusive at the highest levels.

In his incisive analysis of academic tribalism, Stephen Balch (2004) argues that schools of thought can be catalysts or barriers to disciplinary inquiry, depending on the institutional setting. He cites physics, chemistry, and mathematics as fields in which competing schools of thought generally enhance the marketplace of ideas by increasing the scope and value of intellectual exchange (ibid., p. 2). Balch deems these disciplines “collegial” because, though “rivalries exist among hypotheses and investigators, there is general agreement on the means of resolving them and a strong sense of shared intellectual mission” which enable “internalized checks” to “keep things on the straight and narrow” (ibid., p. 4). By contrast, Balch describes the social sciences and humanities as “adversarial disciplines” in which paradigmatic rivalries “shade into enmities, bear heavily on methods of verification as well as the substance of disputes, involve judgments of value as well as of fact, often reveal an absence of shared mission, and produce results whose employment outside academe is very frequently polemical” (ibid., p. 4). In these contexts, schools become impediments to “serious academic discourse about the human condition” (ibid., p. 2) as the collegial ideal of a “free and open marketplace of ideas” (ibid., p. 1) gives way to balkanized disciplines “divided into enduring factions whose partisans frequently treat their opponents more as foes than colleagues” (ibid., p. 4).

This inquiry aims to contribute to the literature on the historical developments that have influenced the origin, uses, and meanings of branding.

In this qualitative work an historical methodology was followed and, according to Howell and Prevenier's guidelines, a wide variety of sources were selected of the data presented. Moreover, this study draws on three important perspectives – that of the practitioner, the scholar, and the consumer – in order to offer a thorough view of the relevant issues concerning the evolution of branding.

The investigation suggests that various forces (e.g., the media, economic developments during the Second World War, marketing research and theorizing) have enacted a comprehensive transformation in the concept of branding. First, the paper offers evidence of the link between fire/burning and the origin of branding. Second, it shows that, in its early days, branding was characterized as a phenomenon with limited applicability. Third, the paper demonstrates how that phenomenon was transformed into a multidimensional, multifunctional, and malleable entity. Last, it presents recent evidence from both business and academia that shows the current, complex status of the concept of branding.

The paper is novel in its large perspective and integrative narrative, and the unusual exposure of its various conceptual issues and links. It should be of interest to marketing historians, brand managers, and scholars of branding.

Labour came to power in 1997 and immediately transferred many features of its party political news management style into government, overseeing the departure of most of the civil service communications leadership within two years, and developing the media management role of politically appointed special advisers. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the changes in custom and practice that operated behind the scenes in government communications between 1997 and 2015, asking to what extent such changes challenge public trust in government in a liberal democracy.

This study takes a longitudinal, qualitative approach through in-depth interviews with former civil servants, journalists and special advisers, together with documentary and archival evidence. The data were analysed thematically through the text-processing software, NVivo.

The paper finds that although the controversy over the 2002 dossier on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was an extraordinary episode, the creative approach to news management that characterised this case still operates within UK Government communications: the bypassing of civil servants, a partial approach to the facts, selective briefing of favoured journalists, a lack of due process in the management of information and a disregard for the letter and spirit of propriety codes. This has implications for public trust and confidence in the workings of liberal democracy.

The study adopts a mediatisation approach to the study of public relations, using the concept of the “cross field” to demonstrate how PR professionals share media management responsibilities with a number of different promotional actors. PR professionals in government must therefore navigate between the hidden, competitive and demanding worlds of politics, the media and bureaucracy, working with journalists, politicians and political operatives to craft the narratives that seek to drive public opinion.