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With effect from 1 March 2012,  I am Professor of Government (Research) at the University of Southampton, England,  and from 1 July 2012, I became Professor of Government at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

From April to June, I was ensconced as a Visiting Professor in the USG. It is the number one school of public administration in the Netherlands. The rankings are published by Elsevier (9 October 2010: 86), the Dutch equivalent of the Times Higher Education survey. They are the result of a national survey of academic peers and USG has been top in teaching for the past ten years and in research for the past five years, ever since the research rankings began.

FROM LOCAL GOVERNMENT TO NARRATIVES:  ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF R. A. W. RHODES, Editor, Public Administration, 1986 to 2010. Guest Editor: Patrick Weller

Contents 

1. The Irrepressible Rod Rhodes: Contesting Traditions, Blurring Genres

  John Wanna, Australian National University and Griffith University and Patrick Weller, Griffith University

 2. Was local governance such a good idea? A global comparative perspective

Gerry Stoker

Southampton University

3 The New Orthodoxy: The Differentiated Polity Model

David Marsh

Australian National University

4.  Networks: Reified Metaphor or Governance Panacea?

Tanya Börzel

Freie Universität Berlin

5.  Core Executive Studies Two Decades On

Robert Elgie

Dublin City University

6.  The Whitehall Programme and after: researching government in time of governance.

Christine Bellamy

Nottingham Trent University

7.Whitehall: A Practitioner’s View

Lord Wilson of Didcot

Emmanuel College, Cambridge

 8. From Government to Governance to Governing elites:Rhodes’ contribution to governance theory

Anne Mette Kjær

University of Aarhus

9.  Not odious but onerous? Comparative public administration

Christopher Pollitt

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

10.  It’s Pubic Administration, Rod, but Maybe Not as We know it: British Public Administration in the 2000s.

Christopher Hood

Al lSoulsCollege,Oxford

11 The Study of Public Administration in the United States

Jos Raadschelders

University o fOklahoma

12. Governance Ethnographies: possibilities, pitfalls and purpose

Francesca Gains

University of  Manchester

13.  Interpreting Interpretivism Interpreting Interpretations: The New Hermeneutics of Public Administration.

Colin Hay

University of  Sheffield

14.  Public Administration as storytelling

Mark Bevir

University of California

 15. Thinking on: a career in public administration

R. A. W. Rhodes

University of Tasmania and Australian National University

Public Administration was first published in 1923. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in its field. This collection provides:
• a history of the journal;
• a portrait of its work; and
• a source book of key articles in the field for undergraduates and postgraduates.
Over the past twenty-five years Public Administration has pioneered new approaches and published many leading articles in the field. A mere 12 articles cannot ‘represent’ the scope and coverage of the journal and, inevitably, the editor makes a personal selection. However, these articles are also the most cited articles since 1986 and include prize winners of the best article of the year. They also reflect the changing subject matter of the journal and its shift from a practitioner to an international academic readership. So, Part 1 comprises theoretical articles, Part 2 contains comparative material, and Part 3 focuses on public management.

The articles

1. Baron Wilson of Dinton, ‘Portrait of a profession revisited’, Public Administration, 81 (2) 2003: 365-78.
2. Hay, Colin. ‘Theory, Stylised Heuristic or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration’, Public Administration, 82(1), 2004, pp. 39-62.
3. Hood, C., ‘A public management for all seasons’, Public Administration 69 (1) 1991: 3-19.
4. Klijn, Erik-Hans, Koppenjan, J. and Termeer, K. ‘Managing networks in the public sector: a theoretical study of management strategies in policy networks’, Public Administration 73 (3) 1995: 437-454 1995.
5. Lowndes, V. and Skelcher, C. ‘The dynamics of multi-organizational partnerships: an analysis of changing modes of governance’, Public Administration 76 (3) 1998: 313-33.
6. Mulgan, R. ‘Accountability’: An ever-expanding concept?’ Public Administration 78 (3) 2000: 555-573.
7. Rhodes, R. A. W. ‘The governance narrative’, Public Administration 78 (2) 2000: 345-363 2000.
8. Scharpf, F. W. ‘The joint-decision trap – lessons from German federalism and European integration’, Public Administration 66 (3) 1988: 239-278.
9. Stewart, J. and Clarke, M. The public-service orientation – issues and dilemmas. Public Administration 65 (2) 1987: 161-77.
10. Thoenig, Jean-Claude, ‘Territorial administration and political control: decentralisation in France’, Public Administration 83 (3) 2005: 685-708
11. Weller, P. ‘Cabinet Government: an elusive ideal?’ Public Administration, 81 (4) 2003: 701-22
12. Williams, P., ‘The competent boundary spanner’, Public Administration80 (1) 2002: 103-124.

It took far longer than I intended but, at last, it is out.

My article entitled ‘The New Governance: governing without Government’ Political Studies (44) 1996: 652-67 was included in this virtual issue of Political Studies. My article was one of the two top voted articles for the 1990s.  The editors’ write that this virtual issue was compiled to honour the 60th Anniversary of the Political Studies Association of the UK . It showcases some of the ‘best’ articles published since the launch ofPolitical Studies in 1953. The process for compiling this issue has covered many stages, beginning when the Editorial Board asked as many (former) Chairs of the PSA as possible to select the articles that they personally considered to be the most significant from the Political Studies archive. The list was then sorted by decade and an e-mail survey was conducted with all current PSA members, asking them to vote for the best articles in each decade. The results showed that in each of the six decades there were two articles that clearly ranked above the others. The Editorial Board therefore took the decision to make the issue a compendium of the twelve ‘Top Voted’ articles between 1953 and 2010, and these are the articles which are on-line on the PSA web site @: http://www.psa.ac.uk/

My third book with Mark Bevir was published by Oxford University Press in March. We foreswore trees for the cover. Instead, we have  used Gustave Doré ‘s ‘The destruction of Leviathan’.

I was invited to Taipei for five days to deliver three lectures and take part in a roundtable. I was sponsored  by the Research and Development Commission, Taiwan Governance Research Centre, Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University, and the Program of Human Resources Development on Public Sector and Civil Society, National Taipei University. My hosts were charming and made sure there was some time for sightseeing. They provided a guide, no doubt to ensure their ‘investment’ did not get lost. Here I am pictured outside the National Palace Museum.

On the second day, I had two guides – Jose and Yuli. I do not know what I did to prompt such anxiety.

We visited the Beitou Museum and its associated hot springs. With their flowing sulphurous mists, they are a feature of the area – there are some thirty all told.

Bradford College, or as I knew it, the Tech, has been providing education and training in the city since 1832. In 2008-9, it celebrated a 175 years of providing education and training in Bradford and as part of its celebrations it has web site with 175 of its alumni and, of course, a birthday cake.

I am one of the so-called ‘heroes, see:  http://www.175heroes.org.uk/rod_rhodes.html. As I attended for three hours a night after a day’s work for three nights a week, I prefer the description ‘survivor’!

The public announcement may be a year late but the Institute of Public Administration Australia has awarded John Wanna and me the Sam Richardson Award for the most influential article published in 2007. See:

‘The Limits to Public Value, or Rescuing Responsible Government from the Platonic Guardians’,Australian Journal of Public Administration 66 (4) 2007: 406-421.

For information on the prize go to: http://www.ipaa.org.au/01_cms/details.asp?ID=222