What can students of public administration be seen to be doing on a regular week day? They travel down to Leuven, Belgium to see emminent scholars of public governance.
On Wednesday our research master group of the Utrecht School of Governance made the trip down to meet professor Christopher Pollitt and hear him speak about the virtues and problems inherent in comparative research. As part of our course, we read Public Management Reform, a public adminstration classic which he wrote together with Geert Bouckaert.
This oft-cited book considers the wind of change that has swept past many governments over the past, say, twenty years, (known as New Public Management, NPM) and tries to compare and differentiate different paths of reform within each country.
After a short lunch in a cafeteria at the Grote Markt, a beautiful renaissance square reminding us of the Brussels Grote Markt, we were received at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Pollitt there entertained us with an engaging lecture about the "can of worms" that is comparative research. His talk didn't bore us for even a moment. He picked out and dissected, with various telling and sometimes critical examples each of these "worms". Did you know, for example, that the World Bank rates over 200 countries' corruption level on the basis of a body of data none of which they collected themselves, often purchased from market data companies, and including such surveys as "corruption levels as perceived by local business men" (imagine the possible trappings and biases there!). Pollitt then concluded by stating that when we compare countries with such different traditions, attitudes, and contexts, we must accept that data will never be entirely comparable: "if you cut a worm in half, you'll be left with two worms".
The second talk, by Wouter Vandenabeele who actually just moved his affiliation to Utrecht (but we just preferred to travel for 2,5 hours to meet him here), was quite different. Vandenabeele talked about his work with the American organisational scientist James Perry around the idea of "public service motivation" (PSM). The idea with PSM is that workers may have a certain rate of it that relates to their levels of public engagement and civil-mindedness. In Europe, however, the elements that make up PSM are different from those in the United States, due to a variety of factors, among them the political system. In a story encompassing the whole process of his PhD, he stood still at various points where important research design decisions had to be made, and made us think along about the ways we would have gone about it. That was in fact quite stimulating, and it was pleasant to find out that the solutions we as master students chose, were actually often the once he used in reality.
But the most stimulating part of the programme came in the evening. Our professors had already announced us way back how dinner in a pizzeria around the corner of the faculty was a traditional part of the programme, "to enhance group dynamics". We had a nice pizza over there, got to talk to the professors, and were then left behind as they made their way home. We had decided to stay in a youth hostel and go discover the city. Another important objective was to sus out our group dynamics further, in the relaxed setting of some Leuven bars. First stop was at the youth hostel bar, after which we ventured out into the tiny but cosy centre. Bar Caravan, after which we stumbled into the Bierkelder (beer cellar), where party happened that did not tolerate day light! Needless to say, it became late, and needless to say, we didn't get up to much more sightseeing the next morning. But we had an excellent trip nonetheless that we all hope will be repeated at some not-too-far-off point in the future.
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