EBOOK
About
The 'Little Heresies' seminars provide an important public platform to debate the future of public services. This is the second published collection of talks given at those seminars. Both books takes their title from the first seminar, Kittens are Evil: it is still widely believed that private sector management methods and policies work well in the public sector. To suggest that they create perverse incentives and lasting damage to the social fabric is still a heresy. In this second volume (a companion to Kittens Are Evil), nine heretics, all leading thinkers and practitioners in their professional fields, explain the disastrous effects of wrong thinking and ineffective practice in areas like: standardisation, professionalisation in public services, measurement in public services, so-called evidence-based policy-making, money creation, philanthropy, and the third/charitable sector. Each heretic offers an alternative way of thinking about and developing policies. Government would do well to listen to these experts in designing practices for the future.
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Reviews
"The authors each challenge a current orthodoxy pervading our public services, including local government. And collectively, they challenge the concept that the only way to secure better public services - whatever 'better' may be - is by the adoption of New Public Management (NPM) and acceptance of a neo-liberal ideology...The authors challenge a range of specific policies and programmes with supportive evidence and helpfully also propose some reasonable alternatives. Critically, and in my view, quite rightly, there is a powerful thread throughout the book that public services cannot simply be modelled on the business sector...Local government could learn and re-think a great deal by reading what are less than one hundred pages, packed with provocation and evidence. Here lies the foundation for a new popular and people centric approach."
John Tizard in The Municipal Journal (themj.co.uk)