Stephen Bach and Ian Kessler,The Modernisation of the Public Services and Employee Relations

Stephen Bach and Ian Kessler, The Modernisation of the Public Services and Employee Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 224 pp., £29.99 (pbk).

While much scholarly attention has been directed to mapping shifts in public sector management strategy since the 1970s, less has been given to the effects of these changes on public employment relationships. This book provides both a timely and richly detailed analysis to help fill this gap. The authors, Stephen Bach and Ian Kessler, present a wealth of research on how public policy developments in the United Kingdom under New Labour affected the management of public services and the downstream consequences for employee relations. The book provides an insightful review of the public sector ‘modernization’ project during the Labour government’s three terms between 1997 and 2010.

The book’s starting point is the election of the Labour Party following a long period of Conservative Party rule marked by an attempt to embed new public management (NPM) reforms. Determined to arrest what it saw as profound problems in public service delivery resulting from the previous government’s neo-liberal approach, New Labour committed to implementing a different approach. Following release of its 1999 Modernising Government White Paper, this approach was framed in terms of public service modernization. For the Labour government, effective modernization of public service delivery would depend on the reshaping of employee relations as much as management reform. Bach and Kessler argue that, in practice, Labour’s strategy did not depart fully from NPM, but rather formed a hybrid set of policies that retained key features of the previous neo-liberal model. These features included market-driven contractualism, target-driven performance management and a commitment to consumer choice, voice and control. The programme was reformist, however, in its emphasis on networks and partnerships, a broader range of providers, wider stakeholder involvement in service delivery and a purportedly more modern employee relations strategy.

The stated aim for the book was to explore the extent, nature and handling of change in employee relations driven by Labour’s public sector reform agenda and its consequences for actors with a stake in the employment relationship during the government’s 13 years in office. To identify how modernization unfolded across the public sector, the authors determined to look not only at the broad picture, but also at the experiences of three key sub-sectors: local government, the National Health Service (NHS) and the civil service.

The analytical framework draws on both public management and employee relations literatures. From public management perspectives, Bach and Kessler draw on competing models of public service delivery based on hierarchy, markets and networks. Their employee relations analysis is based heavily on Gospel’s (1992) typology of three overlapping but analytically distinct domains: industrial relations, work relations and employment relations. The authors consider changes in each domain in terms of critical ‘themes’ of public sector employment relations, including the model employer narrative, the quality of working life and the regulation of employment relationships. Bach and Kessler’s study of Labour’s modernization programme is organized into five chapters. In Chapter 2, they examine the strategy’s main features. The four chapters that follow discuss changes in employee relations, focusing on: performance management and pay determination (Chapter 3); workforce flexibility and equality (Chapter 4); work relations and the day-to-day realities of work (Chapter 5); and industrial relations, focusing on trends in employee involvement, partnerships and trade union strategies (Chapter 6). The final chapter not only presents conclusions about the content, process and outcomes of the modernization programme, but also provides a somewhat preliminary analysis of the post-2010 Coalition government’s approach to public management. Through its interdisciplinary approach, theoretical analysis and extensive mining of secondary literature and public policy documents, this book provides a valuable contribution to the fields of public management and employee relations. It also demonstrates the crucial importance of these two fields engaging in cross-disciplinary research and analysis rather than working, as typically they have, in isolation.

However, there were aspects of the book that I found dissatisfying. First, the study contains little primary research. While the authors refer to government policy, research and discussion papers, the analysis is based principally on a thorough mining of secondary sources, which detracts somewhat from its uniqueness and distinctiveness. Second, while the authors argue the need to appreciate differences between sub-sectors of the public service, the early attention they give to analysing developments in the three key sub-sectors separately wanes as the book proceeds. Thus, whereas Chapters 3 and 4 contain distinct sections on specific experiences in the civil service, NHS and local government respectively, this separate treatment is scaled down in Chapter 5 and lacking altogether in Chapter 6. Although the authors nonetheless draw comparative conclusions about experiences in these sub-sectors, this makes it difficult for readers to locate the evidence.

In my view also, the book’s usefulness for readers outside the UK will be limited by its entirely domestic focus. Although they provide a rich and enormously useful analysis of a specific period in British public sector management, the authors missed the opportunity to speculate on the implications of the UK experience for our understanding of changes in other countries that pursued similar change agendas. From a comparative perspective also, the significance of the association between political party and change programme is unclear. If we compare the British experience with that of Australia’s federal public sector, for instance, whereas NPM was implemented by the Conservative government in the UK, in Australia it first emerged under the Hawke Labour Government. Similarly, many of the features of New Labour’s modernization programme were introduced in Australia by the Howard Coalition government.

These reservations aside, Bach and Kessler have provided not only a valuable study of the UK Labour Party’s public sector management programme, but also an engaging contribution to our understanding of the relationship between public service management reform and employee relations. The book has much to recommend it to scholars, professionals and practitioners in both employment relations and public sector management.