Abstract
This book represents an attempt to use biographical research to explore the history and the contemporary practice of public administration in British central government. The argument is advanced that biographical case studies — looking at the careers, personal qualities and achievements of a number of top civil servants — can illuminate the exercise of leadership in Whitehall and the changing role and culture of the civil service. Biography, and particularly comparative biography, is unduly neglected as a political science methodology, despite what Rod Rhodes has rightly called its ‘enormous potential for the study of administrative and political leadership in British government’.1
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Notes
R.A.W. Rhodes, ‘From Prime Ministerial Power to Core Executive’, in R.A.W. Rhodes and R Dunleavy (eds), Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 36.
Ben Pimlott, ‘The Future of Political Biography’, Political Quarterly, vol. 61 (1990), p. 224.
Louis M. Smith, ‘Biographical Method’, in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research (London: Sage, 1994), p. 296; Origo quoted in: Jameson W. Doig and Erwin C. Hargrove (eds), Leadership and Innovation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 18.
Alexander L. George, ‘Case Studies and Theory Development: the Method of Structured, Focused Comparison’, in Paul Gordon Lauren (ed.), Diplomacy (New York: Free Press, 1979).
Larry D. Terry, Leadership of Public Bureaucracies (London: Sage, 1995), p. 61; Brian Leavy and David Wilson, Strategy and Leadership (London: Routledge, 1994).
Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) [first published 1957].
Alan Beattie, ‘Biographies of 1992 and the Limits of Biography’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 46 (1993), pp. 430–4; John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993), p. 228; Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, p. 80.
Patrick O’Brien, ‘Is Political Biography a Good Thing?’, Contemporary British History, vol. 10 (1996), pp. 64–5; Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 269; Fred I. Greenstein, Personality and Politics (Chicago: Markham, 1970), pp. 41–7, 68.
D.C. Watt quoted in O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service, p. 258; G.C. Peden, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and British Rearmament against Germany’, English Historical Review, vol. 94 (1979), p. 46.
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© 1999 Kevin Theakston
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Theakston, K. (1999). Introduction. In: Leadership in Whitehall. Transforming Government. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27226-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27226-6_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-27228-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27226-6
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