Everyday Life in British Government

As citizens, why do we care about the everyday life of ministers and civil servants? We care because the decisions of the great and the good affect all our lives, for good or ill. For all their personal, political, and policy failings and foibles, they make a difference. So, we want to know what ministers and bureaucrats do, why, and how. We are interested in their beliefs and practices.

In Everyday Life in British Government, a fascinating, new piece of political anthropology, R.A.W. Rhodes uncovers exactly how the British political elite thinks and acts. Drawing on unprecedented access to ministers and senior civil servants in three government departments, he answers a simple question: ’what do they do?’ On the basis of extensive fieldwork, supplemented by revealing interviews, Rhodes tries to capture the essence of their everyday life, describes the ministers’ and permanent secretaries’ world through their own eyes, and explores how their beliefs and practices serve to create meaning in politics, policy making, and public-service delivery. Everyday Life in British Government goes on to analyze how such beliefs and practices are embedded in traditions; in webs of protocols, rituals, and languages.

The story Rhodes has to tell is dramatized through in-depth accounts of specific events to show ministers and civil servants ’in action’. He challenges the conventional constitutional, institutional, and managerial views of British governance. Instead, he describes a storytelling political-administrative elite, with beliefs and practices rooted in the Westminster model, which uses protocols and rituals to domesticate rude surprises and cope with recurrent dilemmas.

R.A.W. Rhodes is is Professor of Government in the School of Government at the University of Tasmania and Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Newcastle. In addition, he is treasurer of the Australasian Political Studies Association, life Vice-President of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in both Australia and Britain, and editor of Public Administration, 1986-2011. He was the Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s ’Whitehall Programme’ (1994-1999); and of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (2007-8). He is the author or editor of some 30 books including: The State as Cultural Practice (joint author, OUP 2010); Comparing Westminster (joint author, OUP 2009); Observing Government Elites (joint editor); The Oxford Handbook of PoliticalInstitutions (joint editor, OUP 2006), and Governance Stories (joint author).