SpAds: political sherpas bridging minister and civil servant

This paper examines how opinion-shaping political and civil service stakeholders view the role and contribution of Special Political Advisers (SpAds) within the Westminster system of government. The literature only recently paid considered attention to this role, partly due to the recent reforms that spawned the emergence of SpAds, but also because political advisers still only represent a small population within the government community. It is acknowledged that each country’s institutional and administrative traditions greatly influence SpAds’ tasks; arrangements with the UK being no exception. Recognising that SpAds take on the role of “temporary civil servants” whose duties vary according to ministerial direction, the study reported in this paper concludes that SpAds can make an invaluable contribution to policy delivery by acting as a bridge between Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary. The capability to bridge the tensions between ministerial urgency to realise policy goals and civil servant realism to accurately assess the “fracture points” to be overcome in the process of policy delivery is reported as particularly valued by the public official. This paper concludes that the SpAd’s relentless pursuit of the Minister’s agenda is distinctly counterproductive for both Minister and civil servant, but adopting the function of bridging across contrasting interests enhances policy delivery effectiveness

Emerging Impacts of Online Over Connectivity

The discourse about the inevitability/ubiquity of information technology (IT) transforming the globalizing workforce is developmentally and managerially one sided. Much of the rhetoric involved infers, on the one hand, libertarian, putatively democratic and innovative communicative capacities. On the other hand, managerial imperatives continue to invoke control and re-engineering impulses that flow from the deliberate (ab)use of IT in effecting least cost strategies. Little is said about what technology can do to one! This paper outlines major work-related challenges that management will be forced to contend with and what the one-sided published literature on the impact of IT on actors in coercive workplaces will have to acknowledge

Invisible IT-Harmes and Emerging Wicked Issues for Public Policy

This paper explores the effects of current IT polices and corporate and government praxis in the arena of technological development and use. It also explores global trends that lead toward futures that a majority of the world population, arguably, would not choose and should actively seek to avoid. It emphasizes growing discrepancies between information rich and information poor, segregated by an invisible technologically-imposed boundary and further controlled by surveillance technology creating newer social cleavages and IT-harems. The paper also explores the future of employment in an information society and concludes with wicked policy issues for urgent consideration