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Interview with Greg McElligott
The Prospects for Democratic Administration
IPAC published Greg McElligott’s Beyond Service: State Workers, Public Policy, and the Prospects for Democratic Administration in 2002 as part of its “Series in Public Management and Governance” with University of Toronto Press. Patrice Dutil, IPAC’s Director of Research, discussed the book with Prof. McElligott, who teaches in the Labour Studies department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Patrice Dutil: What do you mean by "democratic administration"?
Greg McElligott:Our society has come to accept a very small and constrained notion of what democracy is all about. Government mandates are based on tenuous promises, limited choice, and a distorted electoral system that consistently excludes the voice of the majority. Between elections, opportunities for effective participation are distributed largely on the basis of wealth. The public sphere that is subject to any sort of democratic accountability is steadily shrinking, as privatization transforms citizens into consumers, and automates their interactions with service providers.
Democratic administration runs counter to all these trends, and draws on a longstanding critique of state and corporate bureaucracies. It argues that government accountability is best delivered through an informed and active citizenry, not through auditors trying to impose a conservative corporate vision. This implies reallocating social resources to support an unprecedented degree of participation, and removing obstacles that tend to filter out input from those who most need access to the state’s resources. Two of the most important obstacles are hierarchy, and the influence of business throughout the state. Democratic administration seeks to build new models of service provision that can do without both. In this sense it is a direct answer to the claim that "there is no alternative" to bureaucratic hierarchy except the hierarchy of markets and corporate power.
My particular interest has been with the contradictions present in public service work. Those who now work on the state’s front lines are told they are part of a democratic process when they obey orders from above without question. In principle, this is a strange juxtaposition - one not present in private sector workplaces, where no pretense of democracy is made. And the experience of frontline work is hardly democratic – even by the low standards now prevailing. Freedom of expression is curtailed, state workers do not elect their own leaders (deputy ministers), and basic components of free association (the rights to unionize, bargain and strike) are restricted and often banned outright. In my view it is a fundamental failure of imagination to believe that we can build a democracy (much less a deeper, broader democracy) when hundreds of thousands of people are accorded second-rate citizenship rights. That is why my book outlines a scheme to reconcile democracy outside the state with democracy inside it.
Patrice Dutil: Your focus in the book is the federal government's Employment and Immigration department from 1976 to 1991. Why did you pick this department? Are the lesson learned in this case applicable elsewhere?
Greg McElligott: EIC was attractive because it had more frontline exposure than most other federal departments, and I was trying to conduct a study from the perspective of those on the front line. Until very recently this viewpoint has been ignored in public administration research. The dominant approach has been to construct reality around the opinions of senior personnel.
Everyone who works on the front line (as I did briefly at EIC) knows that there is often a huge discrepancy between what happens there, and what management thinks is happening there. So while policy debates swirl around matters that concern those in the upper echelons, clients and frontline workers live in a very different world. I wanted to bring this world to light, and to get a better sense of the power dynamics at play there.
EIC also had a reputation as an innovator with respect to its internal structures and employment practices – a reputation one would hope for in a department responsible for national labour market policy. Yet I had heard that workers in one of its branches had gone to the trouble of organizing a vote of non-confidence in their senior manager. There were hints, then, that frontline workers in a politically sensitive department were capable of exercising powers that few other researchers had considered or explained.
The timing is significant here because the period under consideration marked the ascent of neo-conservatism under Liberal and Conservative governments in Ottawa. The state was being restructured to make it more business-friendly, and much of the resistance on the front line came from those trained in very different notions of public service. This provoked identity crises in many agencies, and loyalty dilemmas in many public servants.
An active and innovative union at EIC (the Canada Employment and Immigration Union, or CEIU) took this opportunity to reconsider its strategies, and forge new links with client communities. It created and attempted to implement "counter policies" more consistent with its members' notion of service than the diluted and degraded service models imported from the private sector.
These sorts of struggles continue in many public workplaces today, although the most intense battles seem to have moved to levels beyond the federal government. So with some modification the dynamics of frontline politics at EIC are likely to repeat themselves elsewhere, and there are several lessons to be learned.
Patrice Dutil: How is "resistance" and "informal policy-making" among frontline state workers manifested?
Greg McElligott: Despite the best efforts of senior management and hordes of consultants there is still space for frontline discretion and human contact in government work. Many frontline jobs cannot yet be automated, and in others (teaching or nursing, for example) client resistance is likely to delay it for some time. This space allows frontline personnel to inject some of their own values into daily workplace decisions. The public has been encouraged to view this practice with suspicion, and look to senior authorities to safeguard their interests from the front line. But in the current context frontline discretion is often less threatening to good service than attempts to control discretion from above.
The resistance discussed in Beyond Service takes many forms, but much of it is based on this inescapable frontline discretion. At an individual level, frontline workers often cope with inadequate resources by giving clients the benefit of the doubt, making investigation and punishment allow priority, and redefining official goals to fit their own agenda. Many of these tactics could potentially be organized at a collective level, and some of them have been.
At EIC, the union organized coalitions of frontline workers and clients to fight service reductions and cutbacks. This was a learning process for both groups, and a more inclusive and genuine consultation process than anything organized by management. The union also organized concrete expressions of solidarity with other workers. It circulated instructions to employment centre personnel so they could avoid referring job seekers to struck employers seeking scabs ("replacement workers"). It handed out leaflets to the unemployed in an effort to undercut the effects of a more restrictive UI regime, and showed UI agents how they could work to the same end. These efforts embody both traditional forms of resistance, and innovations in informal policy-making. I argue that they can point toward more inclusive and democratic forms of accountability and service delivery.
Patrice Dutil: What are the implications of your findings on theories of the state?
Greg McElligott: State theories of both the left and right have generally ignored the independent political agency of frontline workers and their unions. If we recognize active centres of resistance throughout the bureaucracy, then the essential unreality of organization charts and many official goals becomes more readily apparent. Welfare agencies claim to provide service to dispossessed clients. In fact they are structured to deliver a large dose of control with a tinge of service. Yet some frontline personnel may actually try to provide real service. Police departments burnish their crime-fighting image while focusing their officers on paperwork and unrelated duties. Yet some officers and police associations actively push for a tougher enforcement posture.
These dynamics are not captured in generalizations about what the state does. The state is not inherently inefficient or efficient; it is not inherently repressive or benevolent. It is in fact a site of struggle. And from my perspective the crucial insight is that neo-conservatism and market values are not totally dominant there. Resistance is continuing. There is still room to dream of a world beyond degraded public services, passive consumers, and unaccountable managers.
Patrice Dutil: What are the "prospects" of democratic administration as an academic field, and as a concrete reality?
Greg McElligott: It has now been about thirty years since neoconservatives helped provoke a collapse of faith in the competence of the Keynesian welfare state, and claimed that they could do better with free markets and less free workers. Keynesianism as a general policy stance did not last much longer than thirty years itself. So there is nothing inevitable or permanent about our current political arrangements.
But faith in management hierarchies and pseudo-market practices is deeply embedded in those who dominate both. They are not likely to embrace more democratic forms voluntarily. Even if more stock bubbles burst, even if misleading accounting is discovered at the root of more corporate success stories, even if the discredited accounting firms were deeply involved in state restructuring in Canada, faith at the higher levels will be hard to shake.
Experience at EIC and elsewhere suggests that the real impetus for democratization of our state is likely to come from below. But for that to happen, people have to believe that change is possible, and that democracy can work in places it has not been allowed to penetrate. Studies like my own may help to demonstrate that new democratic forms are already evolving, and so provide some concrete evidence on both counts. But much more needs to be done in the way of innovative thinking. Many on the left are hesitant to draw up blueprints in this regard, but if we are to imagine anew future we need something to think about. Considering how many millions of dollars have already been spent on consultants trying to bring market forms to government, it seems reasonable to suggest that a deeper democracy will require some prior investment - of thought, at least.
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