Developing Public Managers for a Changing World: Volume 5

This chapter tells the story of the initiation, development (over two decades) and collective contribution of the Copenhagen Forum since its foundation in 1996. This Forum comprises a grouping of teachers and directors of masters-level public administrative programmes (notably the MPA) from different academic institutions across Northern Europe. Each year a workshop is convened where a series of papers are presented by the participants, and from which this volume, and a number of other related publications, have been derived.

The chapter is essentially factual and descriptive in style; summarising the story of the Copenhagen Forum so far; doing so under the following five headings – ‘overview’, ‘origins’, ‘odyssey’, ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes’.

The chapter is particularly oriented towards teachers of public administration and by focusing on the pedagogical aspects of the public management programmes that they are responsible for delivering, provides insights, guidance and suggestions from experience to help them develop their practice.

The aim is to provide readers with an appreciation of the context from which the inspiration for this volume, and the individual contributions, derive. It is a context that has been all about a shared fascination with, and collective commitment to, the advancement of learning and development among practicing public managers.

Investigating some enriching perspectives on mid-career PSM and UrbEd ‘teaching, researching and innovation’ (Public Sector Management; Urban Education).

Alternative approaches, analyses, designs and methods (1) focused on national and local problems and policies, (2) to be reconstructed, researched, taught and enriched in practice-oriented MEd-courses for mid-careerists and (3) which might strengthen their capacities to shift from reflection in action to reflection on action. Two decades of UrbEd and PSM experiences in Amsterdam and Rotterdam are analysed. New perspectives – Social Quality and Artistic Empowerment initiatives – are assessed. The implications for current and future higher education policies and perspectives are then considered.

Initiatives implemented since the 1980s are bearing fruit. These address urban problems, foster innovation, enhance mid-career education and enable cross-border initiatives such as Social Quality measures. Such measures are well supported at the moment by practice-oriented policies at Applied Science Universities (ASUs).

The chapter’s recommendations might incite lecturers, (mid-career-) professionals of ASUs and local managers and authorities to intensify their cooperation with urban renewal projects and vice versa.

One ambition of most mid-career MPA programmes is to combine the attainment of an academic master degree with a qualitative leap in professional skills and functioning. This ambition requires that academic insights and methods be sensibly linked to real-life professional contexts and challenges. This chapter develops a rationale to enhance conditions and mechanisms that help to produce such linking, based on insights in professional learning.

Two methods used in the mid-career MPA programme at Erasmus University Rotterdam to help students to establish such links will be discussed. The first method involves an evolving personal learning agenda and the second method involves peer-to-peer coaching. Both methods will also be used to evaluate the added value of the programme for the professional functioning of the students.

The MPA programme makes students link theory to their own real-life practice and changes their perspective on analysis and professional intervention. Often, however, these new perspectives are quite general in nature, not taking much account of the specific context. Thorough lecturer feedback and training in peer consultation may help students to become more reflexive and to develop better situation-specific strategies.

The findings point to the need for further development of didactical strategies.

The chapter analyses professional added value of an academic programme.

The chapter questions the low demand for scholarly (scientific research) competence of civil servants through identifying practical and transformative uses of scientific knowledge in professionals’ practice, thus arguing for a particular type of scholarly competence in professional degree programs.

The chapter conceptually develops a theory of practitioners’ knowing in action that reframes use of scientific knowledge as part of practical inquiry.

The chapter formulates the notion of extended ‘scientific temper’ to open up spaces for reflection in the context of everyday professional practice and avoid the pitfalls of technical rationality. It argues for an ontological – as opposed to mere epistemological – dimension of knowing in action. It suggests that changes in practitioners’ stance in line with the extended ‘scientific temper’ enable specific uses of scientific knowledge and help achieve aims of emancipation and transformation.

The chapter sketches a list of scholarly competencies and principles of didactics of training scholarly competence of civil servants in line with the notion of extended ‘scientific temper’ and post-structuralist paradigms in science.

The chapter’s value lies in reconceptualising the use of scientific knowledge in relation to everyday professional practice in public administration.

This chapter argues for the development of a model of tutor/student interaction, applying experiential theory and using a learning community framework to improve the student learning experience and to enhance the quality of course curriculum and content. A further value is the opportunity for students, to ‘find’ potential solutions to workplace problems and, as public sector managers, to challenge and change workplace practices and attitudes.

This chapter explores the practice of using course participants’ own experiences to inform course content and increase the currency and value of teaching and initiates development of what could eventually become a real co-production process.

The chapter applies an experiential approach to education and learning, contending that this could lead to a potential co-production process. It argues that this combined approach is a useful model by which to examine current workplace issues using the professional experiences of course participants.

The chapter advances the argument put forward in ‘Another Look at Research’ (Oldfield, 2016) by placing experiential learning within the context of a co-production approach to the delivery of education and learning and delineating a distinctive pedagogical approach to mid-career education.

This chapter takes its point of departure in the vision of educating public leaders and managers with the ability to create public value in a networked governance structure. The purpose of the chapter is to revise this vision by unpacking the notion of public value in contemporary governance and discuss the implications for public leadership and for public leadership and management programs.

The chapter explores the notion of public value as a conceptual framework for emergent forms of networked governance. Drawing on insights from sociology of law and governmentality studies, a set of key tensions inherent in the public value discourse are identified as the diagnostic impetus to consider the somewhat excessive leadership figure put forward in the literature. The chapter shows that the discourse of networked governance and public value thinking is rather contested and imply a certain kind of hybridisation of public administration and public purpose into opposite identity spheres. Instead of forming a ‘whole system’ as suggested in the literature, the hybridisation implicates an ongoing suspension that allows the governance structure to become tense and unresolved. The hybridisation forms new dilemmatic spaces in contemporary governance, it is argued.

The author suggests that public leadership should be considered as hybrid practices, formed around an ongoing search of ‘publics’ and images of ‘wholeness’ by way of oscillating between varying values and identities. This form of hybrid leadership calls for new explorative learning formats in public leadership programs, it is argued.

The chapter undertakes a careful critical reading and conceptual examination of the current paradigm of public value management. By drawing on sociology of law and Foucault’s genealogy of rationalities of government the examination brings new insight into the doubled identities and dilemmatic spaces of contemporary governance and elaborates the concept of public leadership theorized as distributed and hybrid practices.

The purpose of this chapter is to consider a public value(s) approach as a response to the challenges besetting public management and to investigate the implications of such an approach for management education.

The chapter investigates the concepts of public value and public values and their influence on the norms and practices of public management. It then focuses on the way in which management education has responded to a changing context resulting in innovation and realignment in order to enable public managers to espouse public values and achieve public value. The chapter concludes by exploring the philosophical and practical impact of a public value(s) approach in mid-career public management education.

A public value(s) approach provides not only a relevant discursive framework for public managers but also an appropriate mode of management for the changeable context in which they work. This changes their expectations of mid-career education and influences programme content and pedagogy, enabling innovation and experimentation.

The chapter identifies and analyses the benefits, outcomes and challenges of the public values(s) approach in the mid-career classroom.

This chapter reflects on a recent initiative as authors and tutors for the first module of a new online Masters in Public Administration (MPA) programme now offered by the University of Birmingham for public sector professionals around the world.

Our focus is particularly on the key lessons with regard to using the ‘online’ mode for ‘experiential learning’ – that is, facilitating our mid-career practitioner students in the acquisition of added management learning through critical analysis of, and structured reflection on, their work-based experience.

Three particular challenges for online programme designers are identified as follows: the challenge of achieving a ‘learner-centric’ online design (rather than a teacher-centric one); the challenge of facilitating effective communication (within the student group as much as between students and teachers); and the challenge of building an effective online learning community.

The chapter concludes by proposing strategies for approaching and mediating these three challenges in turn. With regard to ‘learner-centricity’ we advocate an approach that promotes in the students a spirit of inquiry and which encourages conceptualisation on the basis of their existing knowledge and experience, rather than following a traditional ‘teacher-centred’ and lecture-dominated pedagogy. In relation to communication, particularly critical is the choice of a high quality course management system (CMS) and exploitation to the full of the system’s capabilities in relation to computer-mediated communication (CMC), both within the student community and through ‘synchronous interaction’, between students and staff. Finally, on the building of a ‘learning community’ of students, we emphasise the importance of facilitating students’ cognitive and social presence throughout the modules and programme through the promotion of active engagement and critical reflection on the key issues in the curriculum.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop the idea of Innovative Laboratories as a learning format which can be used to create public value in a Danish context by specifically coping with strategic challenges which takes the form of paradoxes.

The learning format is theoretically informed by Niklas Luhmann’s functional approach as well as based on concrete teaching experiences within the course on strategy which is an integral part of the Master of Public Administration, CBS.

The structure and processes of Innovative Laboratories incorporate the idea of theoretical perspectives as contingent ways of observing and apply this idea to the way strategic problems are reformulated by the participants and thus to how new strategic solutions become viable.

As such, the laboratories represent a way of innovation, as the most valuable part of the process is not to find a solution but to create a new problem by reformulation. This innovation process is captured by the metaphor of ‘managination’.

Teaching executive courses always raises the challenge of how to deal with the tension between theory and practice. The present chapter analyses the use of experiments in practice as a pedagogical approach to deal with this tension in Master’s programmes.

The empirical data comprise eight qualitative interviews with former students, exam papers and participant observations during the course ‘Experimental Management Practice’ over a period of five years.

The course requires the participants to experiment with their (managerial) practice and make these experiments the learning material and stepping stone for formulating problems in new ways. We argue that it is fruitful to make a distinction between practical problems and knowledge problems, and that playful shifts back and forth between the two forms of problems can provide learning. We also argue that it is important to observe the distinction between the role of the manager and the role of the student in order to meet ethical challenges, inevitably raised by experimenting with practice. Finally we argue that the experimental teaching practice can be conceptualised as a monstrous pedagogy, as the pedagogy creates a liminal zone with hybrid characteristics.

The chapter provides new conceptualizations of the tensions between theory and practice based on our experiences from one degree programme. It would have been interesting to study other executive programmes and which pedagogy they use fort dealing with this tension.

Many Master’s programmes draw empirical data from the students’ own practice into the teaching. We argue that using experiments is highly useful to identify some of the general challenges inherent in analyses of one’s own practice. It does not solve the tension between theory and practice but creates new challenges, potentialities, dilemmas and insights.

We suggest using ‘monstrosity’ as an umbrella term for ‘hybrid’ and ‘liminality’ of the complex relations that are at play in further education of practitioners. We compare the idea of the monstrous to the notion of educating ‘reflected practitioners’, and we argue that in a situation where the public manager is expected to define his/her own role, we might be better off educating a ‘monstrous practitioner’ instead of a ‘reflecting’ one.

The ability to act in a purposeful and effective way amid institutional tensions and paradoxes is, right now, a highly prized quality in public leadership. The purpose of this chapter is to qualify moderately brave acts as a learning format that combines the analytical and performative skills implied in this kind of agency.

The chapter explores the engagement with paradoxes as a narrative praxis. From existing literature, it sums up an understanding of agency as a social process of mediating paradoxes in order to make action possible. Drawing on Northrop Frye’s theory of modes, the chapter explains this praxis as a narrative endeavour balancing the dynamics of tragedy (disintegration) and comedy (integration). Moderately brave acts are formed as a kind of low-mimetic synthesis – very much akin to comedy and realistic fiction. The narrative dynamics of low-mimetic synthesis are pursued in the case story of Christian, a Master of Public Administration (MPA) student from Copenhagen.

Moderately brave acts appear as a learning format that can inspire a less idealised, but not entirely ironic approach to the paradoxes of management. In this way, they can foster a nuanced and pragmatic agency that combines analytical reflexivity with the ability to take practical action in problematic situations.

The chapter may inspire teachers to use narrative techniques to allow students to deal with real problems of daily praxis in a way that embraces the tension between idealisation and deconstructive irony.

This chapter explores how experimental learning and transfer of learning can be designed in professional Master of Public Administration (MPA) programmes when external conditions constrain the application of learning formats that require the personal contact of students and/or the cooperation of the student’s employer.

The authors conduct a single case study of the professional MPA programme at the University of Kassel in Germany. The programme is based on the principles of blended learning with a high share of online teaching. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with students, document analysis and practical experience by one of the authors.

The study shows that attempts of bridging theory and practice have proved challenging in the past, which has, for instance, resulted in changes of course modules aiming directly at linking both domains. The findings are presented and discussed in the light of three different perspectives: (1) learning outcomes of professional MPAs and the theory-practice-nexus in a systems theory perspective; (2) the impacts of administrative culture; and (3) didactical/micro-level perspective. Furthermore, recommendations for practical purposes are derived.

The exploratory study does not provide strong generalisable results but aims at enriching the academic discussion as well as points to solutions for the practice.

Beyond useful insights on how (elements of) experimental learning are or might be implemented in the PA masters’ programme under study, the chapter offers a more generalised discussion of the challenges contextual factors might pose to the implementation of experimental learning formats and discusses possible solutions to overcome such challenges.

The purpose of this chapter is to document how a new learning technic may create transformative learning in leadership in an organisational practice.

The learning methods developed in the learning in practice (LIP) project include aesthetic performances combined with reflections. The intention has been to explore how leadership may be transformed, when leaders work as a collective of leaders. The learning methods developed and tested in the LIP project are art-informed learning methods, concepts of liminality and reflection processes carried out in the leaders’ organisational practice.

One of the most important findings in the LIP project in relation to transformative learning is a new learning technique based on guided processes rooted in aesthetic performance combined with reflections and separation of roles as performer and audience. Reflection processes related to aesthetic performance serve as argument for the impact of ‘the audience wheel’.

Leaders who perform and reflect in a collective of leaders can better deal with complex organisational problems and enhance growing of welfare-in-the-making from an inside and out perspective. Moreover, the separation between classroom teaching and practical intervention will diminish when leaders learn aesthetic performance and reflections as a practical technique.

This chapter suggests that welfare management is becoming a matter of being able to use the open space in between formal roles, silos and organisations to actualise a not yet possible, qualitatively better welfare here and now. The discourse about the open-ended and futuristic space in between is challenging practices of welfare education. A growing field of studies is criticising the centres of education, learning and research for being a McDonald’s culture, with an overly linear approach, unable to connect passion, sensitivity and intuition with knowledge. This chapter goes further than criticising existing practices. Building on notions of affective studies, the aim is to experiment on how to shift the focus from thinking about open spaces to intensifying thinking-spaces, able to generate the processual relations increasing the opportunity for a qualitative better welfare to occur here and now.

The object of the chapter is an experiment entitled The Future Public Leadership Education Now. It is based on non-representational studies and designed to operate on the affective registers.

The chapter offers a theoretical and pragmatic wandering as wondering. It continues and expands the experiment as an ongoing thinking-spaces moving between the known and the unknown. It aims at gently opening the opportunity for a qualitatively better welfare to occur.

Researchers become welfare artists intensifying affective co-motions as ongoing and form-shifting processes.