 Rwy'n ddod am gwell o dweud y ddwadau. Rwy'n ddod fel y sig yn dysgu ddweud. Rwy'n gyfantio gweithio oedd yn ei bod, yn cyfosibl rhywunol am hynny. Rhaid i'r unrhyw fawr oed yn fwy teimlo o phoedd y gallwch chi'n iawn o ran worshiwn i mi, ac mae'r llwer oedd ychydig o bwysig ychydig arall ac oed yn gallu gweithiau eich gweithio i ni am fedd persoedd yr hyn. Roedd yddech chi yw'r cyff Stockw Osliech. Rwy'n gweithio i ni llweddog trwy gweithio, enwedig y dwylau y bach, y cwm y ffrind ac y ddech. Fy yma ydych yn y ddweud, yn y ddweud y ddweud? Dyma y dyfodol hwn yn ystafell, yn fwy. Yn y ddweud, mae'n ddweud. Yn y ddweud, mae'n ddweud. Yn y ddweud, Hadeb. Roedd yn cyhoedd yn y ddweud, gyda hynny, mae'n gwneud hynny mewn. Yn y ddweud, mae'n gweithio ar ddweud. Yn y ddweud, mae'n gwneud ar y ddweud, o'r bwysig y ddysgu o'r ddysgu o'r gwahysgol. Mae'n rhai Albert Hertzsmen o'r ddechrau ac yn y cyfrifio economiaid, a'r adrwm yn y dyfodol yma'n ddechrau'r llifau, mae'n dod o'r rhan o'r cyfrifio transdisciplinellach, ac mae'n defnyddio i ddweud ifynyddiadau ar y cyfrifio cyfrifio ymlaen i amlwg ymgyrch, ac mae'r adrwm yn ystod yn ddefnyddio ar gyfer. we know that innovation happens at the boundaries, so give us nudge at the end. The question is how do you empirically operationalise this when we, let's say we want to do research in that area in other social sciences or humanities, taking the analytical apparatus that you proposed here about understanding impact of context on practice? we will have this challenge of ontological compatibility or incompatibility of assumptions that we make in social science and humanities and that is one question how do we operationalise such a transsubject or discipline. The second question is, you looked at it from the western philosophy perspective. I'm struggling to understand your argument earlier about China, for example, you talked about civilizational differences. Do you think there also, it is not just about the culture and the civilizational thing but there might be even philosophical reasons behind those differences? That you talk about in the public administration in countries in Asia or in other parts of the world. Thank you. Thank you very much for these two great questions. The first one is how we move on with our empirical work and they will say, well, at a more abstract level, we needed to use systematic comparative method that is comparing across contexts. And in terms of more practically, I think more and more this kind of research is enabled by networks of teams of researchers, so strong teams within one institution, as we're trying to create in so many fields here at the OU, in wide networks whereby we get the same level of in depth access empirically as well as theoretically to organizations or institutions or policies or practices or whatever into another context and working together over a long time frame. I think this is really a crucial way of organizing research in the 21st century, if I may dare to make it. Strong teams, very strongly networked. The second question is absolutely fascinating. Actually, what we are trying to do with colleagues in other regions and civilizations of the world is really to first of all get on the same page in terms of the least some key research agenda issues. What is it that we aim to explain and how can we or different ways, but at least how can we harmonize our the ways in which we conceive of context? Once we've done that, more and more it is about doing research in depth across really regions of the world and civilizations, which is why we're trying to develop some partnerships with universities in China, South, Singapore, Southeast Asia, and of course, hopefully India and other parts because that is really gives the edge to research and then we can revisit our research questions and develop our research projects in lightened by this broad traversing across contexts even at the level of civilizations, which of course do exist and a very important. OK, with a question, I'll take your question first and then one from Jean, and then I want just to hear from, don't worry, we've got enough time to have all your questions, you first. Again, if you could just say your name when you're where from. Yes, hello, my name is Ahmed Mohamed. I'm a resident of Malta Cines and I'm informed in the local community project. Thank you, Professor, your presentation. My question is a regarding for the strategic management earlier you mentioned in contextual influence and shape in strategic management in a public service organisation. I just wondering how it will influence. Can you give us another example please to understand more? Thank you. OK, good question. Can we, while you're thinking, do you want to take that now? Can we hear from Jean Hartley there as well? Hi, I'm Jean Hartley, colleague of Eduardo's in the business school and thank you very much for a really thought provoking inaugural lecture, really enjoyed it. I wanted to ask you a bit about dynamism in context because what you've talked about so far is if you like mainly about enlightening us about different ways of categorising context. But there's a really interesting agenda perhaps around when context changes either slowly or suddenly. You might think about the day after the Brexit referendum, suddenly the UK is in a very different context than it was previously. And that changing context may happen at organisational level or sector level, country level or actually global level. So I wondered if you had any comments on changing context and what insights you might draw on there. Very good. So you'd like to take those two questions? Yes, very happy. I will just go in reverse over there so we can kind of see less continuation of our talk. Yes, that is actually crucial. The temporal, I didn't mention it, but I'm very pleased with now, the temporal dimension of context is crucial. Actually, when we talked about historicism as an approach to framing context, it is really about to bring time and the temporal dimension as a crucial dimension of context. So the same place is not the same context as, to put it in a very plain way, the OU is here and has been here over 50 years. But of course, it's not the same in the same context now as it used to be when it's been established. So the temporal dimension is absolutely crucial. The only practical implication is that it entails an even more well-worked out, well-wrote out analytical framework to interpret it. And then thank you for the question on context in strategic management, which is actually a core area of research for me. Yes, we try to conceptualize context as along two dimensions, contextual inferences along two dimensions, the kind of autonomy that enables those making strategy in the public organizations to make their choices and the kind of accountability, what you are held accountable for. So that's the kind. And I think another example, which is also in a very active area of research here at the Open University, is actually the security and across Europe is actually the security and police and policing sector. Because there you can really see how embedded into the culture of governance, the policy styles and so on and so forth. Of that country is a police system. Here in the UK we are accustomed to having a number of police services, but of course in other countries we just have one. And so actually it's a discovery just crossing the channel or travelling from one European country to another one. I think when you consider the role of police and security when we transit from liberal democracies to other political regimes, and we cannot do research pretending that these differences do not exist. They are crucial. Okay, there are quite a few questions. I will take more from here, the theatre, but maybe from Elaine, questions that you've received. It's from Facebook Live. It's from Johanna Ramos-Becara. It seems to me that especially in Spain one of the problems with public administration is a level of corruption there is in both the public sector and a political level. It seems that although a democratic country, now the dictatorship is very much still ingrained in practices. Is this because of the corruption? I think this is actually a very crucial question. Corruption both in the formal sense when you have bribery, but also when you have exchange of favours which go beyond the impartiality that public administration and the public service should guarantee is a key issue. And we know that this differs across countries, across policies, across jurisdictions, and we wouldn't really understand how public services are managed if we don't take these two into the picture. So this is a very important suggestion and very important line of analysis for all those who are doing contextual analysis. Are there more questions? Yes, Paula. Can we get the mic to Paula again from social media? Yes. This is one from Twitter. This is from Alessandro. Is there a recipe for overcoming the intransigent feature of context or context are really intransigent because they are built according to a mix of unique structures, historic complex and social relations? Thanks. Thank you. Thank you Alessandro for this very challenging and very important question. That's another temporal dimension to context. It very much depends or to some extent it also depends on how context is interpreted. And of course in identity politics as we are living in this time in so many countries, in a sense it is those political dynamics that make context more intransigent. We are unique and so we pretend that our institutions are unique and we make both the work of scholars studying and comparing institutions across contexts and the work of practitioners that want to learn from the experience of other countries and other policies, we make that work more difficult. So it's really, there is also a kind of temporal dimension also to the extent to which a context may be conceived of and actually be intransigent or not. All right. Any more from here? I have got another one. It's really long. This is from John on Facebook Live and by the way there's loads and loads of hello messages and lots and lots of support coming in from our online guests this evening. So this one is, can public policy and the principle of public policy management and decision making be applied to organisations that transcend both public and private sectors? Public transport systems in the UK are in the main operated by private companies but are influenced in some way by public policy. Could we in the transport sector use the methods presented for effective decision making and public policy influencing while remaining sensitive to economic business and cultural needs? Thank you John for this question. Well it's of course a very, very important topic on which to elaborate but it's also a challenge to our colleagues across the business school here at the OU and of course across Europe and the world. How much is context taken into account also in business studies? From my viewpoint I can say that the grey area or the area in between the purely public and purely private sector is larger and larger and so more and more we need to bring our framework for analysing contextual influences into that grey bordling so important area which involves both public and private delivery of the services and so definitely this is an area for more and more research and enquiry. Some really great contributions there from social media. Let's take some contributions here, one from here and one over there. Emma Bell from the business school. Thank you, Eduardo. I enjoyed that talk. I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about methods. I didn't get a sense from your talk what you felt the appropriate or necessary methods were for looking at context. I did notice the slide where you talked about causality which I would see as associated with a particular kind of epistemology and I wondered what you would say to say qualitative researchers who might say that context has to be studied in depth. Thank you Emma, thank you very much. First of all from your question we know in what wonderful hands our PhD students are because Professor Emma Bell is responsible for PhD students across the faculty. Actually your question is crucial. The good thing here is that you have also provided at least half if not more of the answer so we'll build on that as well. You're right, it's about qualitative methods as well, it's about reflecting on epistemology, it's about the kind of causality that we employ which is often linked also to qualitative research methods whereby the configuration of causes or multiple conjunctural causation basically what we have is that to try to explain complicated outcomes what we need to look at is that configuration of causes and different configurations actually may produce the same outcome or vice versa so what we need is to be more flexible methodologically epistemologically and working with this more sophisticated or equally sophisticated but less employed notions of causality than are most often found in everyday research work and we need to do it comparatively and to do that we need both sophistication and quality methods as well as good teams of researchers, and we need to work more and more across Europe and across the world. So that's another challenge and we need to work and invest also in personal relations actually to set up a stronger scholarly community in our fields of inquiry. Is that cut it with you? Yes, a big nod there by everyone. Yes, some more questions. Gentleman, yes, and then one in the front and one behind. Yes, we need to get to you. I'm Steve from DMU in Leicester. I did one for university and I'm going to ask you a question a student asked me yesterday. They said to me, what's the difference between strategy and environment? And I said, you tell me, but could you comment, people talk about strategic environment, could you, are the difference between strategic context and strategic environment? And secondly, you might think that sort of context is perhaps there's one context. I don't know, we're talking about context, but this can there be a hierarchy of context. So I can give you an example. So for example in Haringey, you know, with baby pee, obviously that caused a crisis within that organisation and that context became the dominant one and probably in some way sort of undermined other context but also in creating things like emotion and loss and fear, which I've not heard you talk about some of those emotional issues that one might attribute to context. So it'd be useful to hear your comments on that. Okay, a lot to hear then. Can we just take two more questions and you can take all three, Eduardo at the back there and then from the front. Oh, hi Eduardo. This is Peter Bloom. I'm at the Business School as well. I just had a question and I know you touched on it in your most recent book, but not so much about the context of public administration, but the ways in which public administration itself shapes context. And what I mean by that is that administration itself is a particular discourse that helps to shape the questions that are asked. If, for instance, you're in a country like the United States, which doesn't have as strong as administrative discourse, and even though it's a liberal democracy has a very strong policing discourse, the kinds of questions that that context is going to raise is very different. So I wanted to know in many ways in what ways is administration itself something that shapes context. And then I guess secondly, how is context itself a discourse? I think you have seen previous attempts to talk about context from kind of French anthropology in the 1950s, the British sociology in the 1970s leads in different ways to forms of essentialism. In what ways are we avoiding that now? I think one of the key ways we talk about context now is things like the economic context. It's a hyper competitive economic context, which has an essentialist ring to it as if we can't avoid this kind of capitalist, you know, competitive context. So I guess in that sense, in what ways can we make sure that context as a discourse isn't used for essentialized purposes? There are some powerful questions there, and perhaps we just take you in the front, yes. If you can bring the mic over, please. Thank you, Keith. And then you can come back to all three. My name is Joe Jordan. I'm thinking about the three levels you used. I would normally think of levels macro, meso, micro, in ways in which we also define the relationships between those levels. So I didn't hear you mention how we would define those relationships. And of course in the context of public management or administration, those what we think about those relationships at a societal level is embedded in the law and therefore becomes a public statement of opinion as well. So that's my question there is really about the relationships. OK, a really good set of questions. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you very much. If you allow me, I will start from this last one and then we'll try to follow the order because the question of relationships between levels is crucial. And I think this, of course, to an important extent in the eyes of the beholder. So it's the scholar, it is up to the scholar, I mean, to frame in such a way that the levels of context may make sense as a function of explaining better public management, the working of public, the workings of public organizations or a public policy. So to some extent, the analytical interrelationships depend on the way in which the scholar is framing theoretically this issue to better our understanding of the given public management problem, which in a sense is also one of the two questions of Steve about the levels of context. The other one is equally challenging. It is about distinguishing in strategic management in particular and in business studies more generally between context and environment, which actually formed possibly the main hurdle to getting our book published because we are so much unsure about how to frame this, especially at the beginning, that we're saying we cannot publish it till we have solved this, which is why it took some years. No, it's only for that, but that was surely one key cause. What also colleagues in the Christopher Pollack's book on context tried to do is to think of the environment as the most immediate explanations. And yes, those causes are somehow triggered, enabled or inhibited, it depends, a combination of these, by the broader context. So seeing the broader context as an enabler or an inhibitor, and then the most immediate as the kind of environmental influences on the organisation that we're studying in our piece of research, in our research work. And then there was of course the question, actually the questions by Peter. Thank you very much for putting these two questions. To what extent our object of investigation, the context to use that terminology, is a shaper of context? So going beyond the linear one-way model directional interpretation of causality, this is absolutely crucial. The direct answer is yes, of course, the public administration and the public sector is, to some extent, the shaper of its own context. But the second part is of the answer, or one possible second part of the answer, is that conceptions of public governance may matter a lot, which links, if I understood correctly, your second and equally powerful question to the issue of how do we treat this course and this courses and competing this courses, you also mentioned of course a new liberalism and capitalism and capitalist discourses and so on and so forth. I think of course this is a huge question, this is a huge question with huge ramifications. And yet I would say that here again a theory like discursive institutionalism may help us to see how this courses becomes institutions is themselves. And in this way part of the context, but also perhaps especially in certain junctures, the most malleable part of the context, because of course all in all this claim is of course maybe untested, but all in all it may be relatively easier to reshape a discourse than actually tearing apart, breaking down and re-establishing Capitol Hill to continue on the US. Because of course the constitutions luckily so tend to have a stronger stability than discourses to some extent at least. This is a crucial part of the explanation, thank you. Okay, and there was one more question wasn't there? Yes? Okay, just time for one more question. Okay, this is from Facebook Live as well from Rolf Alter. Rolf, there are no regulations at Warder-On-Gorau, but what about converging context such as loss of trust in public administrations? Trust, trust. Thank you, Rolf. This is a very important question. Actually there is a stream of research in public management about trust. How trust is built, how trust is developed and also how very suddenly trust can be a kind of better. Wiped off, and so this is correct. Trust can become at some point part of the context and there are actually scholars who are trying to measure the level of trust in public services, but also the extent to which public servants trust the people, the citizens they have to serve, and also the level of trust between and amongst public organisations. So trust within the public sector and so you're right trust is a crucial variable and to some extent the stock of trust which is there and which may also be depleted is a crucial or another crucial component of context. So that is another very good part of the picture and the very complex picture we're trying to analyse tonight. It's been a great lecture, clearly many questions we could carry on. Couldn't make lots of nods there, I think, from a member of your family and from Sieve herself. But we need to draw things to a conclusion here. Obviously you clearly enjoyed it. If there are more questions I'm sure you could write in. Can we just give a big round of applause to Eduardo for the next lecture? See that lasted. That's a real acclaim. There are opportunities here at the Open University to study the curriculum related to Eduardo's topic tonight. Some relevant courses I hope are listed on the slide displaying now. Thank you very much.