BOOK REVIEW

Accounting for Public Policy. Power, Professionals and Politics in Local Government, by David Rosenberg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). ISBN 0 7190 2565 6.

David Rosenberg was a very important person to some of the researchers in public sector management, the present reviewer included. He was a caring colleague who took it upon himself to worry about the intellectual challenges that others were grappling with. This sometimes took strange forms, like David buying books on behalf of fellow researchers - books that he thought they should read. David was also a man of principles who apparently preferred to remain an outside critic rather than compromise and gain recognition from some academic position. No one was allowed to ignore issues if David could help it.

A sociologist by training he spent his last years as research fellow in the Department of Accounting and Finance studying how budget officers in local government cope with austerity. Thatcherism was exerting great pressure on British local government and David, as a socialist, was no unbiased observer of the process. He tried to show how Thatcherism, which in this book he calls a form of “anti-corporatist symbolic politics”, has not been able to achieve any significant shift in the balance of corporatist power inside the state. Managerial practices in the state are reproduced by way of continuous negotiations and struggle. The signals of discontinuity that are present in external discourse, and in the legitimizing profiles that state officers display, do not pierce through to the basic structures and practices which are kept intact by professional agents such as budget officers. David died before he could complete his study of the politics of accounting professionals in local government under severe financial stress. His friends Allan Cochrane, Andrew Coulson, Mike Cowen and Diana Rosenberg, have edited the notes and reports that David had written to produce a book well worth reading.

Mike Cowen gives a multi-faceted picture of David’s “oeuvre” (Foucault, 1972) in an introductory essay, which prepares the reader for the challenge to come. There is also an appreciative foreword by Aaron Wildavsky, David’s friend since that memorable occasion at the conference on municipal budgeting in Sweden when David unleashed one of the most aggressive verbal attacks this reviewer has ever heard, in the middle of Aaron’s plenary speech on roles in the budgetary process. And Aaron and everybody else will remember how he slammed that door when he left the room.

In the first chapter Rosenberg argues for a focus on officers and their own perceptions of the politics of role playing in the budgetary process. and the consequent use of unstructured interviews for data collection. In the next chapter - Budgets and Human Agency - he includes a review of possible approaches to research on the rituals of budgeting. Goffman is a central figure. The third chapter reviews the common-sense literature of central-local government relations, using Foucault’s notion of discourse. Professionalism, bureaucratic control and the role of an “urban manager elite” in the resource-allocation process all receive special attention.

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Rosenberg devotes a later chapter to developing his view of the semi-autonomy of local government and the management of contingencies, all against a background of retrenchment. The inclusion of his own empirical observations, ahich increase pro- gressively throughout the book, allows Rosenberg to generate notions that seem help- ful when describing the role of professional administrators in austerity. One chapter provides a portrait of British municipal treasurers under the heading of “Languages of role”. How to protect professional authority without trespassing into councillor territory is a continual problem.

A subsequent chapter illustrates the “assumptive roles” of managers in the social services, whose role definition - it should be noted - stresses a responsibility to plead for more resources to provide better services to the victims of the success of others. Here I find David Rosenberg at his best, developing a concept - the assumptive world - that seems helpful in relating the role of the individual manager in a specific context to the different practices of professions and institutional collectivities. The application of political skills to challenge and try to impose, on a policy from Whitehall that is considered irrational, a counter-rationality, based upon negotiated professionalism, may be successful in gaining legitimacy with an elite audience. This in turn may influence resource allocations. The interplay of “assumptive worlds” is part of the articulation of professionalism, praxis and departmental strategies.

Trust is the subject of Rosenberg’s final chapter, “a shorthand for competency, straight dealing and the ability to play by the existing rules of the game” . . . ‘-hlodifica- tions to the existing rules can be made and are made, inside the existing rules of the game oiled by ‘trust’.” David agrees with Wildavsky in the importance they both attach to relations of trust as integrating and transcending structures. He points out the limitations of studies that view political power as located entirely in the formal organs and parties. Trust is not a simple relationship. It allows and expresses the co-existence of conflicts and alliances. It allows professionals to demonstrate competency as craftsmen and, as politicians, to redraw existing boundaries between parts of the organization.

Perhaps David Rosenberg was an outsider - as he claims to be in a biographical note at the end of the book - because he was not quick to draw conclusions and because he used unstructured interviews and wanted to allow the views articulated in the interviews to colour his analysis. He mixed references to literature with quotations from his interview notes in a masterly way, letting the one support and illuminate the other.

His final project was interrupted before completion, but it is easy to see great things emerging from this book because David was so careful to integrate his unstructured observations with a sound theoretical basis. He is noticeably proud when he announces in the final biographical note that he was allowed access to confidential meetings of the top strata of corporate managers in local government. And he seems to have been striving for close interaction between research and practice, to the mutual benefit and respect of them both. In this sense his work can be seen as a contribution to the Chicago School.

Sten Jiinsson Gothenburg School of Economics

and Commercial Law

REFERENCE

Foucault, M., The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).