 Kontekst v public management, the missing link, and there is also a question mark in brackets. So, there is both how contextual, understanding better contextual influences may help bettering, may help the progress and improvement of our knowledge in public management and public policy, and they will argue also more broadly for the social sciences, but also can knowledge about context and contextual influences help this progress, so we need to question why we are bringing context into the picture, and then we need to learn how understanding context better may help us bettering our understanding of public policy, public management, public administration, public governance, hugely important and significant topics. Let me start with an example. Very simply, managing a school in England is not the same as managing a school in Italy. Let's pick but one aspect of this. In England, the recruitment of teachers in the school is managed by the head teacher, head master, with, of course, the regulatory frame. In Italy, it works very differently. Recruitment of teachers occurs via national public competitions, head once every, well, a number of years, whose outcome is a national ranking in titling teachers, not the head teachers, to choose what school to work for. So, the head teacher in Italy can only say, welcome to the teachers who have chosen to go to that school, and there is no possibility of managing personnel in this way. This is but one example. Let me immediately state there is no ranking implicit here. Both school systems function well, or some may see some flows and say acceptably well, but both are very good or good or acceptably good school systems. But they work in very, but they perform very differently in very different respects. The point is that the two school systems operate in a totally different context. The solutions that work well in one country may not work at all in the other one, and vice versa. Context matters. It is for the purpose of advancing research in this area that a major endeavor was made to gather over 30 scholars to debate this quite unusual topic, context in public management and public policy, and to better our understanding of it. This seminar was organized at the Public Governors Institute in Leuven, Belgium, and was led by Professor Gert Buchert, dear colleague, and on occasion of the retirement of Professor Christopher Pollitt. The outcome, well, actually also the process was very interesting, a very nice two-day gathering with very good colleagues, very good friends, accompanied by some abandoned French wine. But also the outcome is important, especially for the purposes of today's lecture, and this has been a book on an unusual yet, as I tried to explain, or at least to make the argument for, crucial topic. Context in public policy and management, understanding this vision link. I will now provide actually some interpretations of mine and present, of some of the findings that came out of this joint research work, and then later on I will try to show some ways in which I tried to make my contribution to what I consider to be a crucial issue, topic and theme in our field, and beyond, and beyond. First, some defining points. The root word for context is the Latin word contextere, to weave together. This means that context denotes at the same time two things, the context and the object that is put in context. If I may say like that, the contexting and the contexted, although we have to be careful, these two words actually don't exist in the English dictionary, but I think they play well to give the sense. We have this dynamic. We want to understand the context, and we want to better understand that the object that we are studying, the public policy, the public management practice, the public service that is not performing adequately well, and we want to know why. So context evokes a teacher. It entails that any institution, public institution or public policy or public management practice that is the object put in context are institutions that form a seamless teacher. But if context concerns weaving together, then a first question arises. Can we transfer between contexts? That is, can institutions, policies, practices be transferred elsewhere or are they unique to the context into which they generated and into which they are currently woven? This argument has recently been made in a very original piece by professor Fabio Ruggi, who is currently serving as director or vice chancellor of the University of Pavia in Italy, in eighth century old university, who happens also to be a historian of public administration. Actually, that is his main role. We put him on loan for six years to serve as vice chancellor. In one of the last pieces actually he could work at before taking office. He actually made this argument and not that he believes this, but that there is a way of conceiving of context as a barrier. This is called the intransigent context. The idea that context, that each political system may be so unique made of cohesive, consistent, homogeneous elements within it as not to allow for any exogenous pattern or institution modeled in a foreign context is that our institutions are the only ones in the world. Which in a sense, of course, is true. But the question is, can we learn from institutions in another context and transfer it to improve? If so, we need to adapt them, of course. And the question then becomes how to adapt them? Actually, the question, of course, at the root of all is that if we don't challenge the uniqueness argument definitely we say, well, we cannot learn anything from institutions in other contexts. Our argument here is that, yes, we can. The question is, what theories enable us to understand contextual influences so that we may transfer from one context to another one. So we need to theorize context. And there are many attempts to do that along different lines. For example, our colleague from University of Oxford, Professor Christopher Hood has worked on cultural theory to try to understand and make sense of context. Other colleagues, like Professors Bevere and Rose, have worked on context as history. They use actually a philosophy, a story system applied to the social sciences and in particular to public institutions to make sense of context through a radical historicist perspective. Still other scholars think of context as a set of interconnected institutions and work with new institutional theory for making sense and understanding contextual influences, like Professor Guy Peters from University of Pittsburgh. These are important theories and yet live in a sense unresolved some key underlying issues or questions. We need to question context. And the first question we put is what does context do? Actually different perspectives, but at least we can identify two perspectives for making sense of context. One is the metaphor of the backdrop. So we see social agents, that is individuals, that is persons like, as acting in different contexts and we see this context as a little bit the backdrop in using the theater metaphor. Obviously the same action takes a completely different meaning if it is set against the backdrop of a 17th century royal court or contemporary London. So the idea is that we are like social actors playing doing our social activities against a certain backdrop. And yet there is another way of conceiving of context as animating. Actually we cannot make socially meaningful decisions in a setting which is a-contextualized in which there is no context. So context is enabling decisions that we do that we make are always to use that word which doesn't exist in English, contexted put in context, context as animating. And it's very nice for me to point out that this is a contribution that stems in Emeritus Open University professor Professor John Clark from Social Sciences. Another key question, what or who makes the context. Here again we can see two contending perspectives. One can say context is a given is the product of history it simply happens to be there or can take a more dynamic vision of context as constituted and reconstituted as that another colleague here at the Open University professor Janet Yeumen Emeritus or Emerita I should say in Latin Open University professor. Also this is possibly a little bit more immediate and intuitive to grasp but it's very important context may also depend on scale. If you are the health minister for health or as we say here in the UK the secretary for health in essence the health policy is not part of context it's what you do but if you are a manager in a hospital the health policy is part of your context. So it also depends if you like on the standpoint or viewpoint and in a sense it depends also may vary does vary actually with scale. This for delving into the nature of context trying to make sense of it and questioning what we are talking about. We can also say and so how can we analyze contextual inferences. Ok, that's the nature, that's challenging to try to understand in depth what we are talking about but how do we study contextual inferences. I will first take the difficult road and then I will shift to a much easier road. So don't get challenge or a little bit scared by the next slide but I think we need to mention a couple of theoretical questions to then try to find more solutions and not only questions in search of an answer but first some crucial questions first in the social sciences in general like in the natural sciences like in the humanities we are all searching for the causes of things what is the cause of a certain effect. More often we tend to use or to search for one individual cause which may be necessary or sufficient maybe and this is deterministic causation or perhaps we look for kind of probability of something to happen when something else happens this is probabilistic causation this is really the terminology we use in the social sciences to try to make sense of an effect but if we bring a context into the analysis we cannot content ourselves with just one cause or two or three very limited we need to resort to a configuration or constellation of causes that together determine that certain outcome because they operate under a certain context and there is a strand in the social sciences studying configuration of causes called with this little bit of a challenging term multiple conjunctual causation probably this is the kind or the type of analytical apparatus we need to employ to better understand causation what is the cause of a certain effect when we are taking the broader context into the picture Other approaches try to go the other way around they even start from saying if we look at context we have an infinite number of explanations that's too much, that's too many and so we need to narrow down to simplify the problem so working the other way around how to disentangle the most proximate influencing factors from the broader configuration of factors which still are important, they enable or inhibit certain causes of set of causes of action it's a research stream which colleagues like Tom Christensen, Per Legreid or you and myself are trying to pursue others in certain works some are employing resorting to theories we are a little bit lesser accustomed to in the social sciences like complexity theory and see how this may help us navigate the understanding of the causes of things when we are taking context into account like colleague professor Tony Bovell from the University of Birmingham so these are the kind of big challenges and yet if we just delve into these big challenges we will never come out with kind of more applicable solutions to really making sense of context for solving, for addressing extant problems that we have in public policy and public management as Christopher Pollett argues these are fantastic ingredients but we are still left without the final recipe to prepare the marvelous dish that we associate our hunger for understanding how contextual influences operate Yes, I am aware that we are mentioning hunger just before dinner is very challenging but it is really where we are good all these analytical practices but we want also to kind of tackle this problem and bring solutions to that so one way forward which I suggest in this lecture is to kind of consider the analysis, the understanding of context as made up of multiple levels of course systematically interacting with each other but also to some extent analytically distinguishable like levels of context and we can of course distinguish between the macro level context as for example culture or even civilization so we have the context of the confusion public administration in the China and the number of other countries which is different from the context of western public administration that's a really macro level so we have a meso perhaps more accessible level of context as a political administrative system of a country or a cluster of countries the specific culture of governance the policy styles, the professional epistemic cultures a kind of a meso level of analysis or we can focus more the micro level, the context of the specific policy sector or indeed even the individual organization actually what I tried to do over my professional life at the beginning more intuitively in the hindsight thanks also to the opportunity of this lecture to reflect upon my own intellectual trajectory in a little bit of a more self-conscious and systematic way is to tackle the issue of context at different levels one at a time now we'll follow for kind of autobiographical reasons all in all this is a inaugural lecture more the chronological order of these publications rather than the order from macro to micro vice versa and actually I started at the meso level and I tried to complement the research work made by colleagues like Christopher Pollitt and Gert Buchard to understand how the political administrative system of a country may affect the reform of public management of public administration in that country where heavily studied like the United Kingdom for example but others less so so I tried to tackle and try to understand the public management reforms in those contexts at the meso level later on I turned to the micro level contextual influences in the forming of the strategy of organizations for public services and more recently the more you get a little bit older the more you try to be ambitious so I tried to address the macro level of the European public administration as the conceptual and factual context of public administration in Europe or even more ambitiously of the West but let's start from the meso level so trying to understand context as the political administrative system which of course has an influence on the dynamics of the reform of the public sector in a certain country for example and in this book and many other related works I tried to do this for countries in the so called Napoleonic or French model of public sector French model of the state actually this book is about an important yet relatively understudied part of Europe not so much of course France the French public sector has very often been included in comparative studies but less so the public sector Italy and especially Greece, Portugal and Spain there are very practical reasons why this occurred one is that as we know there were dictatorships in Greece and Portugal and Spain till the mid of the 1970s and as we know dictatorships and any coercive regime is not a good friend to free independent research and study and so there are relatively late comers to our field and we need of course a vibrant and thriving community of scholars in all those countries to be fully involved in international circuits of research and study so together with a number of colleagues we worked at this in different attempts and in this book I tried to make an argument about why contextual influences made the trajectories of the public sector in these countries both different differentiated among themselves of course as well as distinctive from the trajectories in other countries for example how did it happen that the public sector in the United Kingdom is so managerialized and this did not penetrate or not to the same level definitely not the same level in those other countries it's not that they weren't exposed to international pressures to managerialize it is that the context there was less friendly or more inimical if you like to a managerialist approach and so the way in which reforms played out in those countries were different why? because the model of administration is different because of the dynamics of the political party system there because of the presence of special core that is the way in which the civil service is organized in those countries because of the role of the unions in those countries and so on and so forth so a range of factors contribute to making to an explanation of the dynamics of the reform of public management in those countries context matters this was a kind of meso level so looking at the country level or a cluster of countries in a more recent work together with colleague professor you are fairly from King's College London we tried to think about context seriously at the more micro level which is typical in business schools so our object of analysis very often is one organization how it behaves and what we make in this book is the argument that context matters this is a bit unusual in strategic management texts for the public sector what we argue is that contextual influences shape the strategic management of a public organization by shaping the kind of autonomy and the kind of accountability that public organizations enjoy let's go back to our head teacher of the school the condition of autonomy to manage strategically are very different from one context to the other we have seen that the ways in which stuff is recorded for example is very different the decisions that are within the of the public strategist may be very different but also what is expected of a public manager may be profoundly different so what is expected of the head teacher of a school as a strategist of that school may depend on underlying premises that are shaped by the context in that country to put it very plainly there is a very limited expectation that the head teacher of a school in Italy is held accountable about the performance of students there because basically he or she cannot control much of the levers cannot choose the staff cannot change or only very limited can change in the way in which teaching activity is organized so context may shape the very premises of what managing strategically a public organization for public services may ultimately mean in terms of the autonomy to make strategic decisions and in terms of what is expected of the public strategist and so the kind of accountability in a sense shapes what it means managing strategically a public services organization so again context we argue matters in a very fundamental sense more recently I tried more of a macro approach and of course this is a different kind and altogether different kind of product of course but to my knowledge in our field is the first handbook which is not handbook of public management handbook of public administration in Europe context related actually it is both written by the scholarly community in the field of public management in public administration and takes into account the factual context of how the public sector works in Europe so the idea is to provide an understanding of public administration in account of the factual as well as the conceptual context of knowledge product of the European scholarly community in the field well of course those who very kindly accepted to join this venture and devote their time to contributing one or more chapters to this as well as the context of public administration in Europe because very rarely in our field at least in public administration public management we have universal managers that cover the whole world we must make attempts to gain that kind of knowledge of course but much of our knowledge is contextualized and so the idea is that even a handbook to be perhaps even more useful has to take context into account and so has to be contextualized so it's about public administration public management in Europe and then more recently actually this is kind of joining the two big intellectual passions of my life so the field in which I do research and philosophy this book makes an attempt to somehow reflect on the philosophical foundations of the field of public administration as such but the way in which I wanted to read it on this occasion maybe a little bit of a stretch but is a way again of thinking of the broader and broader and broader so if you like in a sense broadest context that the way in which we think so the philosophical foundations of western and European civilization is in a very deep sense part of the context of knowledge also when applied to a specific field like studying public administration in Europe so studying European PAE so in some sense a way of reading these works and of course of all and foremost the works of all the colleagues who are struggling with the issue of context is to make sense in different ways and possibly at different levels to pitch it at different levels of how context may help and contribute to our understanding of public organizations and the public sector as a whole and the work of public managers in the broadest sense those who care and look after public services. I cannot end this moment of reflection together with you all without mentioning that the more I reflect about this topic and the more of course although in a very limited and a little bit of sparse and occasional way but the more I also make my foray into other social sciences because public administration is about everything you get involved into the different policies across the both gamut the both spectrum of public policies depending on the research project you do or the kind of focus in your empirical investigation that you have and the more I delve into that the more I think that really context may matter more broadly across the social sciences and so bringing contextual analysis into the picture is something which is an effort which may be really worth doing it and reflecting and also trying to bridge across our colleagues in the natural sciences I think that even in the context or I dare to make the argument here that even in the by definition recontextualize natural sciences well is it really so if they are to join the social sciences for a more comprehensive understanding of a certain phenomenon so we know for medicine we can never just look at the therapy and the pathology and the therapy without looking at the person in its entirety the more we do this and the more we need in order to understand the person we need to understand the context each and every person leaves her or his social life so understanding context is a research endeavor which may permeate so many areas and maybe worth expanding across policy fields and indeed I think this sensitivity to understanding context and contextual influences may also be a plus and give really the edge in for effective teaching making learners aware and capable of reading through the various circumstances of their professional life and relating knowledge about the contents to understanding of context is key to professional and if I mean human development more broadly so I think that generating this knowledge is really goes hand in hand with being at the edge of the teaching knowledge about context is key to distinctive and actually cutting edge teaching, offer and enabling a proper learning experience so I would like to emphasize this side too as worthy of pursuing and finally just before I conclude let me read this inaugural lecture to an esteemed colleague and a very good friend professor Christopher Pollitt who has been professor at the open university over a long time and has so usually contributed to our understanding of context and contextual influences in public policy and public management thank you very much