[...]... that ‘this management of the future has to go hand in hand with the responsibility for the present he must be interested in today as well as tomorrow It is not easy to live in two or more time dimensions at once’ (p 367) Note here the complete absence of the past no mention at all of learning from the past, building on the past, honouring the past 9 Time, Policy, Management The past is left... identify some of the 4 The end of time? practical difficulties that arise when all eyes are turned to the present and the future, and what happened in the past is ignored or forgotten 1.2 The Plan of the Book This first chapter simply gets some big ideas out on the table Thereafter the scheme of the book involves two parts The first is an alternation between empirical material and theory Thus, the next chapter,... in Time The most important of these has probably been the influence of generic management theories, purveyed by the business schools, management consultancies and management gurus When Kotter writes about change management or Senge promulgates his ideas about the learning organization’ and the ‘fifth discipline’, or Kaplan and Norton promote the balanced scorecard, they are not primarily concerned with. .. missing the point As for the differences between public policy and public management, that is another frontier that has been manufactured mainly for the convenience of academic factions The two subfields are heavily overlapping and strongly mutually influential the study of most public management 5 Time, Policy, Management definitely involves an appreciation of policymaking Equally, woe betide the policymaker... working on this issue for two decades or more The verdict of Sabatier, a leading public policy theorist over the past quarter century, is that the policy process 17 Time, Policy, Management usually involves time spans of a decade or more, as that is the minimum duration of most policy cycles, from the emergence of a problem through sufficient experience with implementation to render a reasonably fair... book Turning to the recent literature on the ‘transformation’ of government we find an American academic quoting with evident approval Mr David M Walker, the Comptroller of the US General Accounting Office: ‘Transformation is about creating the future rather than perfecting the past (Breul 2006: 7) Some generic management gurus go even further, and explicitly outlaw the study of the past: ‘Re-engineering... 11 Time, Policy, Management practitioner literature we find the Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency from 1997 to 2004 remarking that in his many dealings with Congress: ‘ occasionally I found myself wishing committees had focused more of their time on the long term needs of the U.S intelligence rather than responding to the news off the day’ (Tenet 2007: 35) Other works on public policy. .. a first step in the restoration of the past and of the nature of temporal processes as essential components in the study of public policy and management Putting these materials together has convinced me that there is something major here to be unearthed and debated My own continuing research will pursue it, and my prime ambition for the book is that it might enthuse others to join in the hunt CJP Jarventaka... contemporary policy discourse often implies that the past is either irrelevant or only a negative, restraining influence Either way, the past should play little part in progressive policymaking, which should be focused on the latest bright new dawn Alongside this downgrading of the past sits an impatience for the future The argument that we will have to wait a long time for things to change, or for new solutions... contents are summarized in Table 1.1 Table 1.1 The Sequence of the Book: A Summary Chapter Contents 1 The end of time? A brief introduction to why the past has become neglected in public management and administration, and why we should pay it more attention 2 Timeships Introducing a range of theories and perspectives which deal explicitly with the past and the temporal dimension As a broad overview, this . and public policy literature time in general, and the influences of the past in particular, are not at all to the fore.) Therefore, since I have come to the conclusion that time and the past are.