2010 AOM Panel Proposal

8/2/2019 2010 AOM Panel Proposal

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SYMPOSIUM SUBMISSION NUMBER: 13456

SYMPOSIUM TITLE: The future of development management

CO-CHAIRS:

NILIMA GULRAJANI ([email protected])

WILLY McCOURT ([email protected])

OTHER PARTICIPANTS:

MATTHEW ANDREWS ([email protected])

BILL COOKE ([email protected])

CHRIS MOWLES ([email protected])

JONATHAN MURPHY ([email protected])

MARK TURNER ([email protected])

DIVISIONS TO WHICH PROPOSAL IS SUBMITTED:

PNP: Public & Nonprofit

CMS: Critical Management Studies

SIM: Social Issues in Management

ABSTRACT

The application of management expertise in international development is an expression of

the passion and compassion which are the theme of this years AOM conference. Our

panel will act as a forum to take stock of development managements achievements, and to

assess ways forward.

In the early post-independence period in Africa and Asia, management expertise was widely

deployed in large-scale planning and capacity building initiatives, and in development project

management. Even after the development paradigm shift in the late 1970s, state downsizing

and NPM reforms kept management in the forefront of development practice. But

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mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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managements ubiquity provoked a fundamental critique from critical development

management scholars, and mainstream specialists failed to respond with a new agenda.

Renewed interest has been stimulated by recent special issues ofPublic Administration

Review andPublic Administration and Development, in which a tentative new agenda can

be identified, with items which include: the new governance model and the new

institutionalism in developing country public management; a renewed interest in the

politics of reform; the increased prominence of civil society actors, including faith-based

organizations, and the private sector; new development policy initiatives, notably the

Millennium Development Goals; and the international financial crisis of late 2008 onwards.

Symposium participants will be encouraged to prepare fully thought-through responses to

the critical challenge and the new policy agenda, and in the symposium will debate ways

forward in the light of changed circumstances. An edited collection with a reputable

publisher is a possible output of the symposium.

KEYWORDS

PNP: 1 International/Comparative Issues

2 Social & Ethical Dimensions of Public and Nonprofit Activities

3 Public Policy

CMS: 1 Fourth World

2 Post-Development

3 Public Sector

SIM: 1 International NGOs

2 Corporate Social Responsibility3 Social Repair, Poverty

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SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW

Development management as compassion in action

One of the ways in which management scholars and practitioners can express the passion

and compassion which are the theme of this years AOM conference is by deploying their

expertise to assist the development of the poor countries of the South. The panel we

propose on this topic will take stock of what development management has achieved, and

act as a forum for leading scholars from different parts of the world working on

development management to discuss ways forward. Having the panel at AOM will allow

for mutual exchange between the worlds of development studies and management studies

The need for a new development management agenda

In the 50 years since the independence of many former European colonies in Africa and Asia,

management expertise made a central contribution to development, through the large-scale

planning and capacity building initiatives. At the same time, expertise built up in the

management of donor-funded development projects, the pre-eminent mode of international

development assistance. Even after the collapse of confidence in public sector-led

development that ensued from the oil-price rises of the 1970s and the election of right-wing

governments in key industrialized countries like the US and the UK, the downsizing of the

state, the implementation of NPM reforms and the ubiquity of performance and other

management techniques among development agencies kept management in the forefront of

development debates. But that very ubiquity has provoked a fundamental critique from new

development management scholars, and there appears to have been no practical response to

the critique, or indeed to the new development agenda that has emerged following the slow

demise of the so-called Washington consensus.

At a practical level, development-related programs and activities under the rubrics of

capacity development, institution building and public management reform remain

significant. A recent special issue ofPublic Administration Review called for greater study

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of development managements potential contribution to global problems like poverty and

terrorism. Contributors to a forthcoming special issue of Public Administration and

Development adopted a more critical perspective on the practice of management in

development organizations. From those enquiries and from elsewhere, an agenda for

development management can tentatively be identified. Its items include:

the rise of the governance model in public management and the new

institutionalism, which has shifted attention 'upstream' from development

management to institutional frameworks for theory and practice

a new interest in politics, reflected in donor initiatives such as the World Banks

Institutional and Governance Reviews and the UK Department for International

Developments Drivers of Change studies

the increased prominence of civil society actors such as faith-based organizations

and the private sector, including in the provision of public services

major development policy statements, notably the Millennium Development Goals

and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, whose implications for

development management have not been fully explored

the critical view of development management as anti-political and hostile to

emancipatory and indigenous forms of development

the international financial crisis of late 2008

In the light of that agenda, symposium participants will be invited to outline their view of the

current state of management in development, and to contribute to a debate on new approaches

that will be appropriate to the development challenges of the 21st century. What adjustments

do existing approaches need to respond to challenges such as those above, and to bring

them in line with new conditions, the new development agenda and underlying political

and institutional frameworks? Has the time come to discard exhausted approaches that

stand in the way of progress? The roster of contributors, adopting a variety of theoretical

orientations, will offer both theoretical views and empirical data.

Possible symposium output

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Contributors will be encouraged to prepare fully thought-through positions on the debate.

Palgrave Macmillan, which has published monographs and edited collections by two of the

contributors, including Willy McCourt as co-Chair, have indicated that they will welcome a

proposal for an edited collection based on the AOM symposium.

RELEVANCE OF THE SYMPOSIUM TO SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS

Public and Nonprofit

Development management as a sub-field has a special interest in the public and nonprofit

sectors. All of the contributors have done work in those sectors. The reform of public

agencies in developing countries is one of development managements central concerns,

and will be the focus of TURNERs contribution. Both COOKE and MURPHY will focus

on international development agencies, especially the World Bank. MOWLES

contribution will focus on the arguably uncritical adoption of mainstream management

methods by development NGOs.

Critical Management Studies

What has been called the new development management by COOKE and critical

development management by GULRAJANI (2009, 2010) and McCOURT and

GULRAJANI (2010) can be regarded as the application of CMS principles to international

development, and has been recognized as such by Hugh Willmott in his foreword to Dar

and COOKEs 2008 edited collection. COOKE is one of the panel participants. MURPHY

has also published on the central CMS themes of oppression and managerialism. Both

focus on aspects of the social injustice of the broader social and economic systems that

(development) managers and organizations serve and reproduce which is highlighted in

the CMS area of the AOM website. GULRAJANI and McCOURT will extend the

critiques of critical development management in Gulrajani (2010)), and McCourt will

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extend the critical account of the history of management in development in McCourt and

Gulrajani (2010).

Social Issues in Management

The contribution of management and organizations to the development of the poor

countries of the South is arguably one of the greatest challenges to management theory and

practice in the 21st Century. The Millennium Development Goals embody the ethical

concern of rich country citizens with global poverty, and international NGOs and official

development agencies are the institutional expression of that social concern. Development

management also takes an interest, in the form of corporate social responsibility, in the way

in which transnational companies operate in developing countries.

Development management is also a meeting ground for scholars with an interest in social

issues on one hand and on the other hand, scholars who have a critical orientation or have

an interest mainly in the public and non-profit sectors.

PANELLISTS DISCUSSION THEMES in order of presentation (see symposium

format below)

The following scholars have agreed to participate in the panel, and have provided the text

shown under each of their names to give an indication of the contribution that they are

likely to make. Since the participants may not be known by colleagues assessing our

proposal, we have listed one leading publication by each participant.

1. WILLY McCOURT (Reader in Development Policy and Management, University

of Manchester)

A half-century of development management: What has (not) been achieved?

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This contribution will review the contribution which management expertise has made to

development theory and practice in the roughly 50 years since the independence of many

former European colonies in Africa and Asia. In the decades following independence, the key

management tasks were large-scale planning of economic development and public service

delivery, with indigenization and capacity building for the developing country nationals now

responsible for those tasks. Following the economic shocks of the 1970s, the emphasis moved

to the downsizing of the state and, following the direction of reforms in industrialized

countries, the implementation of NPM reforms such as the creation of arms-length semi-

autonomous agencies and contracting out of public services. Most recently, management

techniques have moved on to the global stage with the Millennium Development Goals as the

extreme example of the management principles applied to managing the world. This

contribution will reach an open conclusion, suggesting that the capacity-building, downsizing

and NPM models have run their course, and inviting symposium participants to propose new

approaches that will be appropriate to the development challenges of the 21 st century.

Publication: Bebbington, A. and W. McCourt (eds) (2007) Development success:

Statecraft in the South, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

2. NILIMA GULRAJANI (Lecturer in Public Administration and Development,

London School of Economics)

To criticize the critics: Beyond the new development management

This contribution will provide an overview of the landscape of contemporary studies in

development management scholarship, suggesting that a longstanding division between

radical and reformist development management research continues to exist. It will define

and offer a closer examination of critical development management (CDM), the most

recent example of radical development management thought that is connecting scholars in

critical management studies to those identifying with post-development theory. It will

challenge CDMs suggestion that all development management is perniciously managerial

on both theoretical and normative grounds. Overall, the argument will support a future for

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development management that is neither defined nor destined for failure. The future of

development management scholarship can and should concern itself with a non-managerial

development practice that bridges the divide between radical and reforms.

Gulrajani, N. (2010) 'New vistas for development management: Examining radical-

reformist possibilities and potential', Public Administration and Development, 30, 2

(forthcoming).

3. BILL COOKE (Professor of Management and Society, University of Lancaster,

UK)

Imaginaries of international development management

Responding to GULRAJANIs challenge, this contribution will use the conception of

imaginaries developed by Walter Mignolo to present an analysis of the World Banks

representation of its work in Brazil and Columbia as an example of how a critical

perspective undermines technocratic assumptions about the benign contribution of

management to development. In particular, it will explore how the World Banks use of

managerialist discourses and/or imaginaries, under the guise of technocratic neutrality,

present challenges to democracy, homogenize cultural and institutional difference, and

frame actors in these countries on unequal terms. Important too in the notion of imaginary

is what is excluded; and here concerns are raised about the failure to acknowledge the

substantial set of management knowledge institutions and organizational and management

scholarship in Brazil in particular.

However, the analysis will also suggest that critics have been too quick to equate

development management with a neo-liberal economic agenda. Reservations about

managerialism notwithstanding, it is perhaps better that management specialists rather than

economists should take the lead in developing country management programmes.

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Dar, S. and B. Cooke (eds). 2008. The New Development Management: Critiquing the

Dual Modernization. Zed: London.

4. JONATHAN MURPHY (Lecturer in International Management, Cardiff Business

School, Cardiff University, UK)

This contribution will add to the critical view of development management advanced by

COOKE, examining how power imbalances are reproduced even where the explicit

objective of the development exercise is to empower the poor. It will build on the authors

paper in the forthcoming special issue ofPublic Administration and Development, using

new interview material. Its ultimate objective of is to argue that the developing country

poor, mostly appearing as the object of development management activities, should

become instead their subject.

The contribution will explore why development programmes can end up hurting the

disadvantaged people they set out to help. Through a case study of urban sanitation

workers in India, I examine the way in which disproportionate attention is given to

implementing externally-driven agendas, in this case, the belief that public services should

be delivered by private companies, rather than focusing on the need to improve poor

peoples in terms of how they see their needs. Privatization of urban sanitation services has

worsened the circumstances of sanitation workers.

While critical development management (CDM) has legitimately been criticized for

insufficient engagement with practical development issues, this paper shows how it can be

used both to point out the negative impacts of ideological presuppositions embedded in

mainstream development management andto propose viable alternatives.

Murphy, J. (2008) The World Bank and global managerialism. London: Routledge.

5. MARK TURNER (Professor of Development Policy and Management, University

of Canberra, Australia)

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Shooting in the dark: Reforming public organizations in developing countries

Since the 1960s considerable effort and resources have been invested in reforming public

sector organizations in developing countries in order to improve their performance.

Donors have played a key role in this process. While there have been some successes,

there have been many disappointments and some failures. The anticipated performance

improvement has simply not occurred in many instances. The contention of this paper is

that these reforms are often undertaken with little knowledge of the organizations that are

to be changed. How the organizations actually work, the contexts in which they operate

and the impediments to reform are either ignored or overlooked. There is in fact an

unacknowledged gap in our understanding of public sector organizations in developing

countries. There are few detailed academic studies of these organizations, a situation

which means that many reform initiatives shooting in the dark sometimes you are lucky,

but mostly you are not. Furthermore, there has been inadequate attention to detailed

studies of successful organizations which might provide insights into what works and what

does not. This paper calls for more attention and resources to be devoted to the in-depth

study of public sector organizations in developing countries drawing on the tools developed

for this purpose in organization theory and analysis.

Greig, Alastair, David Hulme and Mark Turner (2007) Challenging global inequality:

Development theory and practice in the 21st century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

6. MATTHEW ANDREWS (Assistant Professor, Kennedy School of Government,

Harvard University)

Developing management: From the inside out or the outside in?

Development is about change. Thinking about the future of development management thus

requires thinking about how management approaches, structures and institutions change.

An important dimension of this line of thought centers on how change occurs when it

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emerges internally rather than being imposed from outside. The article adopts a dialectical

approach to the inside-out and outside-in approaches to change in developing country

public sector management, exploring the pros and cons of both.

Andrews, M. (2010) Good government means different things in different countries,

Governance, 23: 7-35.

7. CHRIS MOWLES (Red Kite Partners and University of Hertfordshire, UK)

The poet William Blake said that He who would do good to another must do it in Minute

Particulars. What does it mean for organizations with a mission to do good to others on a

large scale, whether they be beneficiaries in developing countries, as in the case of

international development organizations, or private sector organizations wanting to care for

their staff? How would one respond to the invitation of the conference to dare to care?

Using the international development sector as an example, this contribution will argue that

the way international NGOs have taken up management methods uncritically from the

private sector has attenuated their moral mission. This arises as a result of the mismatch of

specific and contextual needs on the one hand, and the abstract, generalized and quasi-

scientific theoretical underpinnings of the dominant discourse on management on the other.

When the caring industry is informed by management methods which are based on

assumptions of predictability and control, caring can become so instrumentalized that the

objects of its compassionate intentions may no longer recognize themselves in the

relationship of care. This paper argues that insights from the complexity sciences and

theories of emergence are a much more helpful guide for thinking about the

professionalization of caring than the more orthodox linear if-then causality that underpins

much management theory. It argues that such insights will direct managers attention to

local interaction, power and relationships of mutual recognition rather than the more

abstract accounts of large-scale philanthropy where people and their activities are occluded.

This has significant implications for private as well as public and non-profit sector

managers wishing to care systematically for their employees.

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Mowles, C. (2007) Promises of transformation: Just how different are international

development NGOs? Journal of International Development, 19: 401 11.)

SYMPOSIUM FORMAT

The symposium will extend over two sessions. It will begin with a joint presentation by

GULRAJANI and McCOURT which will suggest possible terms for the debate. The

remainder of the first session will be devoted to the critique of existing development

management practice, with COOKE and MURPHY taking the lead. The second session

will be devoted to exploring practical ways forward and new issues for research in the light

of the critique. TURNER, ANDREWS and MOWLES will lead discussion in this session,

with TURNER beginning discussion with general issues in public sector reform and

ANDREWS focusing on issues of public finance management. MOWLES will lead

discussion on how issues raised by previous participants apply to the non-profit sector.

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2010 AOM Panel Proposal