Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on Public Policy 3 - Publish or Perish Case Study

Note to readers: This is one of a series of posts discussing changes in public administration and their impact on public policy. Each post has a full list of posts at the end. You may care to start at the introductory post and then follow through.

In my last post in this series I spoke of the rise of measurement as an all pervasive mechanism affecting all aspects of life including public administration and public policy.

In this context, one of the things that I was musing about was the changing position of academia, an area that I have known very well over a long period starting as a child in an academic household. This is an area where measurement has become pervasive and indeed arguably even perverse.

To try to provide a measure of this (I, too, like measurement!), one of the first things that I thought of were citation indexes.

In the words of the University of Southern Queensland Library:

Citation Indexes are compilations of all the cited references from particular groups of journal articles published during a particular year or group of years. In a citation index, you look up a reference to a work that you know to find journal articles that have cited it, although you can also search by concepts and authors. Cited reference searching is a fast and efficient way of finding journal articles that relate to your research.

Citation indexes can be useful. Again to quote the USQ Library:

While most users think of indexes as merely a means of recovering information, index compilers have long been aware that indexes--especially those for scientific literature--serve a vastly more important and often unstated purpose. That is, they reveal connections between ideas or concepts that were not considered before.

That is true, but as anybody in management knows, what you measure is what you get. So treating citations as a performance measure means that those being measured have an incentive to maximise citation performance. Here I was interested in the history of citation indexes as a way of assessing impact. To quote Thompson Scientific:

While the first proposal for the SCI (Science Citation Index) was made in 1955, it was in the 1960s that ISI (Institute For Scientific Information) applied for and received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a Genetics Citation Index. As a result of this multidisciplinary project, we published the first SCI (covering the 1961 literature) in 1963. We then went on to launch a quarterly service that eventually proved successful. Since then we have indexed the literature back to 1945 and now the CD-ROM version of SCI is updated monthly and the online and magnetic tape versions are updated weekly.

In 1973, we made SSCI available. It now covers the social sciences literature back to 1956. The index deals with topics such as anthropology, economics, sociology, educational research, and information sciences among other fields. A&HCI was introduced in 1978. A&HCI provides access to disciplines as varied as archaeology, linguistics, philosophy, musicology, literature, and others in the arts and humanities.

Advances in modes of access have also been made over the years. In 1974, the SCI became one of the first large-scale databases available online via DIALOG. Other ISI databases followed. In 1988, SCI (and later SSCI and A&HCI) became available on CD-ROM. This new technology and increased data storage capabilities enabled us to implement a variety of access and browse features unique to our citation-based searching. Enhancing the power of citation searching through bibliographic coupling, you can navigate the literature by exploring papers that share one or more references.

If we look at this history, we can see that the rise of the citation index paralleled the rise of interest in measurement, going on-line in the seventies as the new computing and communications technologies became available.

By the time I became CEO of the Royal Australian (now Australian and New Zealand) College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO) at the end of 1997 the citation system was very well entrenched. At the time we were worried that the College's scientific journal, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Ophthalmology, was dropping down the citation list. The journal really needed to be in the top ten globally to attract the required level of scientific and clinical articles, so under the leadership of the editorial team the journal was renamed Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology and effectively relaunched to achieve the required citation level.

This material does provide a guide as to the history of citation indexes and some indication asto their impact, but more is required. So I decided to look at the term publish or perish, now a very common term in academia.

While I found many references, it proved very hard to trace the origin of the term. The only on-line dictionary reference I could find (Source) suggested a mid nineties date. I knew that this could not be right because I was using the term in the eighties, so I continued searching. Finally I found an article by Eugene Garfield, What Is The Primordial Reference For The Phrase 'Publish Or Perish'? (The Scientist, Vol:10, #12, p.11 , June 10, 1996.)

Eugene's work traced the term to at least a 1942 book by Logan Wilson with the same connotations as today. So the term has been around for a while at least in the US. But we can also be reasonably sure of is that the term was not common in the sixties since I did not hear reference to it, but was being referred to in the eighties. So like citation indexes, its rise does parallel the rise of the measurement movement.

Copyright and Citation Details

The material is this series is copyright Jim Belshaw. However, it may be copied or quoted with due acknowledgment.

The following should be used for citation purposes if referring to the overall series: Jim Belshaw, Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy, Ndarala Group, 2007 with a link to the introductory post.

If citing this post, Jim Belshaw, "Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 3 - Public or Perish Case Study", in Jim Belshaw, Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy, Ndarala Group, 2007 with a link to this post.

Series Posts

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 1 - Introduction, 20 March 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 2 - Notes on Major Trends, 26 March 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 3 - Publish or Perish Case Study, 6 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 4 - the New Zealand Model, 9 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 5 - Application and Spread of the New Zealand Model, 10 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 2 - Notes on Major Trends

Note to readers: This is one of a series of posts discussing changes in public administration and their impact on public policy. Each post has a full list of posts at the end. You may care to start at the introductory post and then follow through.

This post records in note form some of the major trends affecting public administration since 1945 for later reference.

The Welfare State

The term "welfare state" came into popular use in British Commonwealth countries at the end of the second world war. The social hardship of great depression created a desire in Governments for action to protect citizens. This was aided by the work of John Maynard Keynes in discrediting elements of the previously dominant economic thought by showing, among other things, that economic downturns need not be self correcting, that Government policy actions based on the assumptions of classical economics.

Neoclassical economics remained dominant at micro level (value and distribution) with Keynesian economics dominant when it came to explaining fluctuations in activity at macro or economy level.

The 1942 UK Beveridge Report is often referred to as a key report in defining the scope of the welfare state. It was certainly influential. However, in Australia and New Zealand elements of the welfare state had been evolving since European settlement and in the Australian context were encapsulated what has been described as the Deakinite social contract.

Central to this was the idea that workers were entitled to a guaranteed wage that would allow them to cloth, feed and educate their families. In return, industry received protection via tariffs to ensure that this could be paid. Government acted as umpire and protector.

The end of the war saw a dramatic expansion in Government involvement in the economy in Europe and the Commonwealth countries including a significant expansion in Government benefits. State ownership, long a key belief especially of the various labour parties, saw expansion of Government owned activities together with nationalisation or attempted nationalisation of specific key industries especially in the immediate post war period. By the 1970s, Sweden, the Swedish model, was often held up as a welfare model as was Germany.

During the 1960s the welfare state was still the dominant model, as was the neoclassical micro/Keynesian macro split. However, by then elements of previous Australian thinking such as support for tariff protection were already in decline.

End of the Welfare State

The 1973 oil shock marks a critical date in the decline of the global concept of the welfare state.

The fifties and sixties had been decades of continuous economic expansion dependent in part on cheap oil. International trade grew in importance both in absolute terms and relative to the size of domestic economies. There was rapid expansion in international investment, especially by US companies. This was not always welcome, leading to the publication in 1968 of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreibers' book The American Challenge, a book that in some ways encapsulated the European response to US dominance.

By the end of the sixties the US economy was in a degree of difficulty with slowing economic growth and rising inflation. In 1971 Richard Nixon ended the convertibility between gold and the US dollar, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system that had underpinned global trade and currency arrangements since the end of the Second World war. The U.S. dollar was devalued by 8 per cent in relation to gold in December 1971 and devalued again in 1973.

Because the US currency was the main global currency and store of value, the decline in the value of the US dollar created tensions, especially among resource exporting countries. There had already been discussions among OPEC members and especially its Arab members on the need for higher oil prices. The Yom Kippur War (October 1973) triggered a combination of embargoes and orchestrated price increases led by Arab countries, leading to a three fold increase in the price of oil by early 1974.

The effects of the oil shock were quite profound. Oil importing countries faced the combination of inflation and recession, with downturns feeding between countries, leading to stagflation that in many countries effectively lasted the rest of the decade. The traditional economic remedies including lowering interest rates were ineffective. Structural unemployment emerged especially among the young, leading to the effective abandonment of traditional full employment policies. Tightened Government revenues led to cut back in services. Economic competition among nations intensified.

The net effect was to lay a base for radical changes in public policy and administration, changes that fed between countries. These changes drew from a variety of sources and affected every aspect of life.

Standards, the Quality Movement and the Importance of Measurement

On the surface, the evolving role of standards, quality and measurement are one of the most important but least understood elements in global change in public administration.

Program budgeting together with related concepts such as zero based budgeting emerged in the United States during the sixties.

Traditional approaches to public sector budgeting can best be described as incremental. You have existing activities, you estimate the expected costs of those activities, estimate what revenue you will have, decide what new things you want to do, want you are going to have to cut out to do it. So you start from what you do/have and then modify at the margin.

To meet defence needs in the US in the early sixties, Robert McNamara popularised the concept of program budgeting. Under this approach you grouped activities by programs, defined the outputs (results) you wanted to achieve from those programs, defined the inputs you needed to achieve those outputs. In theory, this approach made it much easier to analyse activities and set objectives and priorities.

A key problem lay in the specification of outputs in such a way that they could be measured. In some cases this was fairly easy, so many tanks for example, but in other cases this was far more difficult to measure.

A real problem here lay in the difference between outputs (the activity measurement) and outcomes (the impact of the outputs).

Take economic advice as an example. How do you measure the outputs? So many minutes to the minister? So many cabinet submissions? Then how do you measure the effect of that advice? In economic performance? But then how do you take into account the fact that the advice is only one small input into a total outcome?

Program budgeting reached Australia fairly early at university level, being part of the post graduate public finance course, for example, at the Australian National University as early as 1970. However, it was not adopted at the level of the national government until 1983. In time, program budgeting would combine with other approaches drawn in part from the business world, in part from changes in public administration and especially the New Zealand model (discussed in a later post), to create the now dominant public administration paradigm.

The concept of a standard, an agreed specification that must be achieved or followed, has a long history. There are two linked concepts here, what is to be achieved and how it is to be measured. So again measurement is central. Standards are normally silent on how the standard is to be achieved. This does not matter so long as standards are met.

The international standards movement began because of the need to ensure compatibility in the technical arena but then extended into the management domain. From there it moved into the public policy arena.

As an example, the competencies movement in education that entered Australia in the 1980s was a direct outcome of the standards movement. But when it did arrive, its application was distorted by the desire of Government and its advisers to control inputs as well as outputs, thus mandating elements of what had to be done, not just what was to be achieved.

The rise of the standards movement was paralleled by and linked to the rise of the international quality movement. Again, measurement was central.

The difficulty in all this emphasis on measurement - and it is all around us today - is that it is very hard to measure some things, especially where outcomes are long term.

Copyright and Citation Details

The material is this series is copyright Jim Belshaw. However, it may be copied or quoted with due acknowledgment.

The following should be used for citation purposes if referring to the overall series: Jim Belshaw, Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy, Ndarala Group, 2007 with a link to the introductory post.

If citing this post, Jim Belshaw, "Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 2 - Notes on Major Trends", in Jim Belshaw, Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy, Ndarala Group, 2007 with a link to this post.

Series Posts

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 1 - Introduction, 20 March 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 2 - Notes on Major Trends, 26 March 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 3 - Publish or Perish Case Study, 6 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 4 - the New Zealand Model, 9 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 5 - Application and Spread of the New Zealand Model, 10 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 1 - Introduction

This series of posts is by way of an experiment in consolidating material within a blog format.

The period since the end of the Second Wold War has seen a series of fundamental global changes to the practice of public administration. Those changes have been affected by and in turn have affected the development and implementation of public policy.

Over the last twelve months I have discussed aspects of these changes in a number of posts on several blogs. Given this, we thought that it might be interesting if I attempted to draw this material together in a more integrated way, thus making it more readily accessible. We will also post the material to the Ndarala Group web site a little later to test the process in another format.

As material is posted, we will add full post details of all posts at the end of each post, along with citation details. This creates a problem in regard to feeds, but we hope that readers will bear with this.

Copyright and Citation Details

The material is this series is copyright Jim Belshaw. However, it may be copied or quoted with due acknowledgment.

The following should be used for citation purposes if referring to the overall series: Jim Belshaw, Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy, Ndarala Group, 2007.

Series Posts

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the development of Public Policy 1 - Introduction, 20 March 2007

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 2 - Notes on Major Trends, 26 March 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 3 - Publish or Perish Case Study, 6 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 4 - the New Zealand Model, 9 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on the Development of Public Policy 5 - Application and Spread of the New Zealand Model, 10 April 2007.

Changes in Public Administration and their Impact on Public Policy 6 - A View from the Past, 1 May 2007

Ndarala Group - changing approaches

One of the difficulties we face as a collective, an extended network of management related independent professional practices and professionals, lies in finding the best way of making our knowledge and work more broadly accessible. The busier we all are, the harder this becomes.

You can see this in our difficulties in maintaining the currency of this blog. The main Group web site also badly needs updating.

We have experimented with various ways of resolving this difficulty, so far with limited success. However, we are now going to trial some new content management approaches, collecting, consolidating and representing material in new forms to make it more accessible.

In this context, we have more than a thousand pages of material on our collective blogs alone to draw from.

A New Way of Ranking Universities by Student Experience

A number of Ndarala professionals have been involved with the higher education sector as staff members or advisers, so we spend a fair bit of time talking about higher education issues.

One vexed issue has been the ranking system used to create public pecking lists among universities. Too often these focus on those things perceived by academics to be important in creating prestige such as research dollars or position on citation indices, ignoring perhaps the most important criterion of all, the student experience. This includes the question of value for money.

As a way of testing this, we created on the Regional Living Australia Blog a new ranking system for Australia's universities focused solely on the student experience. The post appears there because it links to one of the arguments on that blog, the value offered to students by Australian universities headquartered in Regional Australia.

This first pass ranking does not pretend to be absolutely rigorous. A lot more work is required to refine and extend the methodology used. However, the results were interesting in that they really did change the pecking order from those presented using conventional methodologies.

Lightbulb glows - the Dilanchian blog

I see that Noric Dilanchian and his team are continuing to update Lightbulb, the Dilanchian blog with a whole raft of new material.

I think that the blog as well as other supporting material on the web site makes the Dilanchian site very valuable indeed for all those interested in intellectual property and commercialisation issues.

The Importance of Demography and Demographic Change - update

Note to readers: this is a stocktake post that is updated from time to time.

Last November we repeated an earlier story I had written on the importance of demographic change to Australia.

Issues associated with demography and demographic change continue as an important topic in Group discussions because of their importance to so many aspects of life and practice. For that reason, this post provides an update on main posts on the topic across several blogs.

The blog demography.matters continues to be a good international entry point to discussions on demographic issues. Like this blog, the demography matters writers have experienced some difficulty recently in keeping the blog up to date, but it remains a valuable resource.

An annotated list of some of the posts I have written on demography and demographic change follows in chronological order.

12 October 12, 2006: Demography, Universities and the Trades in Australia. This and the following post on 30 October 2006, Demography, Universities and the Trades in Australia - a postscript, discuss the impact of demographic change on numbers entering university and the trades and the links to the public policy and skill shortages.

31 October 2006: People Management in Professional Services- the Demographic Time Bomb looks at the impact of demographic change on the professions.

8 November 2006: Impact of Demographic Change in Australia provides an introduction to some of the issues associated with demographic change from an Australian perspective.

On 14 November 2006 I began a series of posts examining the NSW State Government's new ten year plan from a New England perspective. Assumptions about demography are central to the plan.

In NSW Ten Year Plan - New England's Needs I set out my perceptions of the needs the plan might meet. This post includes supporting demographic data. My next post, Does the NSW Ten Year Plan Meet New England's Needs?, looked at the structure and objectives of the plan against the needs as I saw them. My conclusions were not positive. This was followed by a concluding post, NSW Ten Year Plan and New England - Conclusions, drawing the analysis together.

5 December 2006: Demographic Change - a note on Germany looks in a preliminary way at one aspect of the relationship in Germany between demographic and structural change.

7 December 2006: Australia's Population - June 2006 outlines the latest population statistics released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

21 December 2006: Australia's Aborigines - A Note on Demography looks in a preliminary way at the demography of Australia's indigenous peoples.

26 December 2006: Australian Migration Statistics 2005-2006 looks at the latest Australian migration statistics.

2 January 2007: Africa, Demography and Productivity Change - a miscellany looks at African population issues.

3 January 2007: Australian historical population data provides a link to Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates of the Australian population since 1788.

On 18 January 2007 in Sydney Government releases draft Mid-North Coast strategy I reported the release of the the Government's strategy for this area as defined by them. Assumptions about population growth are central to this strategy. I followed this with a post on 23 January, Sydney Government's Coastal Planning Strategies, looking at the coastal strategies as a whole. I was again very critical of the demographic assumptions.

In Personal Reflections 26 January 2007, I mused further on this topic, following this up on 28 January 2007 in Demographic Change in NSW - the future with a further examination of the realism of the assumptions underlying the population projections.

On 7 March 2007 in NSW's Aboriginal Population I provided some data on the regional distribution of Aboriginal people. On 8 March 2007 in Aborigines and the Development of Public Policy - a Methodological Note I looked at data problems. Then on 9 March in Australia's Aborigines - another demographic note I provided some more demographic data on the Aborigines.

3 April 2007: Australia's Aging Population - Treasurer Costello releases second Intergenerational Report provides links to material on Australia's aging population released by the Federal Government.

28 June 2007: Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia's Aborigines - 3 includes statistical data on both the Aborigines and various national groups within Australia. This post followed and part corrected the data in Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia's Aborigines - 2 (24 June 2007).

6 July 2007: Regional Variation and Australia's Aborigines discusses the distribution of Aboriginal people across NSW as shown by the latest census data.

On 5 August 2007 in Sydney's Sluggish Population Growth, I commented on Sydney's growth compared to the other capital cities, querying again the Sydney Government's planning assumptions.

7 August 2007: Pacific Perspective - Pasifika and New Zealand's Future discusses demographic change in New Zealand.

On 13 August 2007 in US Market for New Law Graduates I discussed, among other things, emigration of younf professionals from Australia.

15 September 2007: Imperial cities, global cities at a time of change looks at the rise of London and the lessons for Australia. Imperial cities, global cities - a postscript (23 September) extends the argument, drawing from comments on the first post.

Australia's Population - March Quarter 2007 Introductory Note (26 September 2007) and Australia's Population - March Quarter 2007 at State Level (28 September 2007) discuss new Australian population data.

28 September 2007: New England Australia Demography - Stocktake of posts as at 28 September 2007 is as the title suggests.

Teasing Neil - but with a serious point (16 October 2007) compares the demography of two very different Australian electorates, Sydney and New England. I followed this on 18 October 2007 with a look at the demography of another electorate - New England's Federal Electorates - Cowper.

20 November 2007: Global Demographic Trends - Introduction began a series on global population trends. This was followed by Global Demographic Trends - A few macro numbers (23 November 2007), Global Demographic Trends - the decline of Europe (26 November), Global Demographic Trends - the rise of Africa (30 November) and then Global Demographic Trends - Asia (8 December 2007).

NSW Demographic Snapshot as at 30 June 2006 - Introduction ( 29 December 2007) outlines the geography of NSW as an entry to a discussion of NSW demography. This was followed on 30 December by NSW Demographic Snapshot as at 30 June 2006 - fastest growing councils 1.

3 February 2008: Report of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, year ended 30 June 1940 includes demographic data on NSW's Aboriginal population in 1940.

20 February 2008: Australian Short Term Visitor Arrivals - January 2008 discusses newly released statistics on the country of origin of Australia's short term visitors.

Denise North appointed to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority Board

Senator Eric Abetz, the Commonwealth Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation, has announced the appointment of Ndarala professional Denise North to the Board of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority.

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) is the statutory authority responsible for the efficient management and sustainable use of Commonwealth fish resources on behalf of the Australian community.

AFMA manages fisheries within the 200 nautical mile Australian Fishing Zone (AFZ), on the high seas, and, in some cases, by agreement with the States to the low water mark.

Ms North has held diverse senior executive roles across a range of sectors, most recently in commercial and strategic roles with SingTel Optus. She has also worked as a management consultant, in the not-for-profit sector and as an industry analyst and policy advisor with the Australian Government.

Ms Northﾠhas a BEc, MBA and GCDC (AICD), and is Chairman of Streetwize Communications Ltd, a not for profit,ﾠand of the Council of International House, University of Sydney. ﾠ

Evidence Based Management

As part of our series on evidence based professional practice on the Managing the Professional Services Firm blog I have just put up an initial post on evidence based management.

As you might expect, this is a topic of considerable interest to Group professionals given our management improvement focus.

The proponents of evidence based management argue that it can prevent managers and management constantly reinventing the wheel. They also argue that it can help counter the fashion waves that constantly plague the management domain.

We agree with both points. However, effective application is far from easy in part because there is as yet no agreement as to what evidence based management really is.

Belshaw joins the Learning Circuits Blog Team

I am pleased to announce that I have accepted Dave Lee's invitation to join the Learning Circuit's blog team with the mission of introducing a more international focus into the LCB discussions.

For those who do not know LCB, the blog is sponsored by the American Society of Training and Development to provide a forum for training discussions especially related to e-learning.

I feel honoured to be asked.

Those who read my personal blog will know that education and training is a key obsession of mine. The same focus comes through on the Group's Managing the Professional Services Firm blog. If we don't educate and train our people properly, how can we achieve firm or national objectives?

Ndarala people do a very wide range of work in the education and training arena. I am presently discussing with my colleagues the best way of bringing this to a wider audience.