thank you everyone for for joining us today um welcome to Marcus stev's professorial inaugural lecture I'm okay it's going to be like that apparently um um I'm Ben Lauderdale professor and head of Department of political science um So Pro professorial inaugural lectures are a a formal opportunity to celebrate the research and careers of colleagues um who have been newly promoted or hired as a UCL Professor So today we're here to recognize and learn more about the work of Professor Marcus deev wh
o was promoted to Professor of public Management in 2021 you might notice that was two years ago um Mark has had his inaugural lecture scheduled at least twice in the previous two years um we had a debate earlier about exactly how many times we've rescheduled this lecture um it was canceled at least once because of covid and at least once because of industrial action and we've lost count of exactly how many times of each um so Mark has had a long time to prepare for today and I trust it'll be a
good show um Mark um has been at UCL for a decade uh joining us as a lecturer in 2013 getting promotion to associate professor in 2016 and to Professor in 2021 this Swift sequence of promotions reflects his outstanding work in all aspects of his job in research and teaching and contributing to the running of the department and University and in his engagement with the broader world so I'm going to tell you a little bit about each of these in turn before I hand over to to Mark so Mark's research
has contributed to our understanding of how organizational forms matter in public sector service provision and to our understanding of how to motivate government employees he has published extensively in the top journals in public management as well as in two Cambridge University press books um he has served as an editor for the Journal local local government studies as well as on the editorial board WS of at least five other journals um his research is methodologically diverse he's used evidenc
e from original surveys survey experiments lab experiments field experiments with civil servants Elite interviews with high level policy makers and various uh analyses of secondary data Mark is an excellent classroom teacher and he has ably taught our students um on the public policy and public administration programs over the last decade um back before we abolished comparable module level teaching surveys Mark students reliably rated his teaching extremely highly I presume he's continued to del
iver that quality education um past the end of the data set um he's been particularly involved in supporting students um who develop ambitious projects to engage critically with the work of organizations like the oecd defra UNICEF and the World Bank um Mark has been involved specifically with our Department's Masters in public administration since its creation serving multiple periods as program director um he's worked to secure and maintain scholarships for students on that program and to recru
it diverse students with a range of work and public Management experien in between his terms as program director he has contributed to to the Department's engagement with student concerns more generally this has included work with staff and students to support remote teaching during covid and also engaging with students over several years to find ways to improve their experience in the department I suspect that Mark will say more about his motivations for his work but it should come as no surpri
se that someone whose research is on public management is deeply committed to working with Public public sector ENT entities to improve how they Implement policy and manage public sector staff um Mark has had a large number of advisory roles particularly in partnership with various parts of the Catalan government including the Catalan health agency the Catalan tax agency and supporting a major reform of the prison system that necessitated the largest movement of public servants in recent Catalan
history his work as a visiting professor at Assad in Barcelona has provided academic connections for our department and a platform for his external work in Catalonia before I hand off to Mark let me quickly explain the order of operations for this evening Mark will give his inaugural lecture after that Christian Schuster who is a professor of public Management in our department and a frequent collaborator with Mark will give an appreciation of Mark's work after the appreciation we will adjourn
and you're invited to join us at a drinks reception in in Bentham house um there'll be a group of people sort of moving over there after after the the lecture concludes um the con convention is that there are no questions from the audience at an inaugural lecture um it's meant to be a celebration of the work of the professor and a brief respit from the incisive questioning that they've received up to this point in their career um that said you can always try to track down Mark later at the recep
tion or by email and give him a piece of of your mind then um so please join me in welcoming uh Professor marus to deliver his Anon wow I'm I'm nervous I haven't been nervous in a long time thank you very much ben uh it's a great pleasure to be here it was hard for me to believe because we had to postpone it a number of times and until I have finished probably I would not really believe that I have uh really done this um I think this is an opport for me to explain all of you a little bit about m
y motivations to do the type of work that I do and also to show you a piece of the work that I do but I think Ben mentioned that we are here to celebrate and to learn I'm going to try to focus more on the first and on the second okay just for you to to set your expectations um really all of my work has to do somehow is related with how to enhance the quality of our public services and my personal story story is a bit of a you know it's sorry it's the first time that I'm presenting it's a little
bit of a strange trip and actually if you for some reason read my CB you will notice that particularly the first years of my academic life were a little bit well difficult to understand probably from the outside so let me give you some reason behind I when I was young I used to play chess and that was my thing I was a chess player I thought I was way better than what I really was probably but I used to train every afternoon so that's the sort of thing that I would do after school I would go to a
chess Center and I will train if you've ever train uh on chess it's extremely boring extremely boring you know like you don't really go there and play but you play certain moves with certain you know I mean it the whole thing is a little bit boring so after some time my family realized that I was getting as they put it I was getting a bit weird socially and they thought you know we need to get him out of you know like he's not good enough to really make a career and this obviously making him a
bit strange so we we need to find we need to find a solution and then uh near my home there was a Rugby field really close to where you used to live uh and they had a brilliant idea that I could play rugby you know from chess to rugby they thought it was a natural movement so there I was uh 15 years old I think I was and I started playing rugby and I loved it right uh I really really like it so much so that I was reasonably good at it not many people play rugby in Catalonia or in Spain so it was
reasonably easy to become you know I become what at the time was called something like a professional athlete even though I had very little of professional and very little of athlete but uh you know I all of a sudden I thought I'm going to be a professional athlete for my whole life right this is going to be my career I'm going to be a rugby player year um and I was supposed to be a medical doctor I had prepared the tests and everything and then when I went up to the Catalan government and I re
gister myself for uh University degrees uh somehow I decided to register for a sport Science so I went back home and I told my family you know I'm going to do Sports Science and they didn't like it very much you know um I had a pretty good grade from high school and my father was telling me like why on Earth would you do Sports me you were supposed to be a medical doctor what's wrong with you my mother was telling him let the kid do what he likes you know in a very kind way so finally they allow
ed me to do Sports Science and uh well things that happened in life I got a really bad injury in the first year so I had to stop playing rugby and I become basically a full-time student and I realized that I didn't quite enjoy that much the sport Science I like practicing sports but not really studying them so I went to my family and say I would like to change and go back to study medicine and my father told me no you're not going to quit anything if you want to study medicine you know do both a
t the same time but you're not quitting probably he was afraid that I would just quit anything he probably was probably right um so I I look at the sced and it was impossible because you know both uh undergraduates had very heavy practices so I had to do something online so I decided to do psychology okay and after that I did a master of science in health health science and after that I realized that I made a I make a statistical mistake in my final dissertation that the committee didn't so and
I was furious with that so I decided that I would take a basically a Masters on statistics thanks God I didn't do it and instead I did another program called a master of research in management Sciences because apparently was a new thing in something called a pieces of school which I had no idea what it was uh but it seemed fun so I joined that and then I realized that there is this whole worldall called management within Business Schools which I pretty much like and I realized that all of a sudd
en being good at at my studies was extremely challenging because everyone was super smart so I had to put a lot of effort needless to say this program was in English and I had no clue about you know still have difficulties now day after 10 years at UCL so imagine okay and that led to a PhD in management science and the one thing that I've always that probably connects all of this is that at the end of the day all my dissertations and most of my essays had to do with the public sector probably be
cause my father was a politician my mother was a government employee teacher and all of their families were actually government employees different sorts right so I was basically raised hearing some of the stories that they were telling saying you know we need more resources my father was to used to work in Immigration he was the head of immigration in BARC Ona and he used to complain about how difficult it was because the better he did his job the higher the demand that the city had to you know
uh face this Challenge and they were both very left oriented so at home basically we used to talk about the need of more resources for better public services so that's basically what I've devoted all my life and when I finished my phz uh a friend of mine told me there is this position that UCL you should apply and my answer was I you know it's pointless because I don't know anyone at UCL that's Spanish mentality 15 years ago 13 years ago right if you don't have friends they're not going to hire
you so I apply here um and somehow probably for a mistake of some sort um I got a job offer I still remember when I got the phone call David Hudson used to be the head of the department at the time sorry David Cohen hadson and uh he made me an offer and I didn't even thought that that could be negotiated so I just said yeah great okay uh with that salary now probably I would not have the right to work in the UK apparently with new so you can imagine right now uh this is what brought me to UCL u
m but what has really allow me to do what I've been able to do in the recent years have really been all the organizations that very kindly have support my work uh they're mainly from Catalonia and from Spain there is nothing that catalans like more than to steal money from the Spanish government so I've been very active on that uh I'm pretty successfully have to say but really the thing that has made more of a difference in in my career by far it's not the funding nor the institutions really but
it's all the co-authors that I've been very lucky to work with some of them are here today uh you don't know how difficult it is to convince all of these people to put your name on a paper without doing anything so it's challenging some of them have even repeated that so I I really ow most of what I am today academically to my colleagues and you know besides the papers besides all of this I would recommend to anyone working in Academia at an earlier stage this is really what is going to stay wi
th you the longest okay some of them will become friends some of them will speak after you in your inaugural so it's really that's really what mattered okay now um let me show you uh a taste of my work and I'm here today to focus on public and private sector collaboration okay you know that we are moving uh from this concept of government to something called governance you know that governance has as many definitions as people trying to to explain it right um the way that I understand this is we
are moving from an idea this levia tan by Thomas hops this is my my aim at talking something that resembles to political science okay Thomas hops um but the idea is you know the government is no longer probably seen as something very powerful but instead is something that it's much weaker in a way or much more at least um affect Ed by what citizens and voters really want right and now we have this idea of a government that we ask them to create public value so to do things that really matter we
ask them to do this efficieny with efficiency right value for money Etc and we have a start thinking about the idea of quality so now we want more public services with better quality now one of the problems that we have with this model is that if you think about Public Services Public Services are like a basket in which you know politicians and policy makers have very little trouble at putting more services on right they just put more but if you think about public services that recently have st
opped being Public Services you'll probably find very few examples around okay why because obviously it gets you more votes to add things to the you know services and to take them out and as a result of that we have ended up with a society and this applies to every oecd country that demands very good health services demands for example that we take care of our elderly people and you know that we have the Abit of living for longer right and this means that the expenses that the generate are going
to also be higher we ask for good infrastructure good education Police Services you know trains airports Judiciary systems cleaning services we ask and we ask can we ask but if we look at the resources that we are using to pay for this well it's getting very challenging right people is not really willing to pay more taxes in most countries most people okay and then governments have tried to find ways to really be able to finance this in Spain for example our previous government decided to use t
he money that we had save for pensions okay other countries and they empty or pockets in a in a way other countries have decided to use money for example from the European Union yeah but what we see is a huge tension a huge imbalance between the service demands and the resources that we have to provide these Services one particular way to try to balance this is what two colleagues of mine chav M and Alfred Beres coined as a relational State the relational state is a framework that has really gui
de most of my work it's basically the idea that public services are not simply the responsibility of the public sector and instead should be the responsibility of governments private organizations nonprofits and I would also add citizens okay this collaboration between governments nonprofits private organizations and citizens is what should help us to balance this idea between service demands and the resources that we have to meet them now what are the different roles of these actors well first
of all governments need to act as Leaders at the end of the day if we're talking about a public service we have to realize that the main role that governments have is to lead the implementation the design of these Services okay Citizens need to be entrepreneurs and more importantly they need to be corresponsive so if you don't want to pay more taxes for example to make sure that your streets are clean at the very very leas you should not you know throw garbage there right and we will see differe
nt options of co-production nonprofit organizations need to be economically sustainable what do we mean by this there are B basically two very different business models for NOS one would be the classic big NOS that we all know that basically leave out of uh the resources that they can get from private donors some public donors sometimes yeah but then we have another model in which NGS decide to compete directly with the market through products and then by competing with the market they raise the
resources that they need to do the social activities that they think are important in Catalonia for example we have a very nice case of a company called laa owned by a guy called Christoval colon and colon which has you know funny parents probably um that basically produces yogurts but what they are really doing is they only hire people with mental disabilities and as a result of that in the whole region where they operate not a single person with mental disabilities is an employed so they're r
eally an NGO but if you look at the yogurts you cannot really see nowhere what they are really doing and when you ask this guy but why are you not promoting this if this is something very nice he says because I don't want people to buy these yogurts to help us I want to buy buy them I want people to buy them because they taste good that's the real difference okay private organizations need to be socially responsible and this is something that we keep saying and it's difficult to see it really I
don't think some people would say that the only reason why the private sector exists is to make profit and I would tend to agree in most cases with this sentence but we have also seen that the public sector can give the private sector things that are interesting like for example very stable long term contracts which probably doesn't give the overall revenue of more risky options but it will certainly give the private company a very stable source of Revenue that they could use what is the change
in mindset well we're moving from the idea of welfare estate where there is a clear split between the public and the private sector to something where what really matters is this collaboration yeah from this idea that governments were very very powerful to governments that are much more focused on social needs okay there was a strong preference for monopolistic provision of public services and now we are moving towards empowering citizens and introducing Market competition for public services in
the welfare state we could say that government meant the spending and now the idea is that governance really means mobilizing the resources of as many stakeholders as possible okay what does it means I don't like to talk about privatization for me privatization is when a service is no longer considered a public service when what we have is the inclusion of the private sector into the delivery of a public service I like to talk about collaboration externalization Contracting out Partnerships Etc
we see high levels of decentralizations we see high levels of consultation with social groups we see that most users of Public Services don't really know whether the organization that is providing a service is public or private and at some point we could discuss whether UCL is public or private because it took me a while actually to find out and according to some definitions well let's say that the answer is not very clear okay still very much perform Center and the idea that you know we're not
really claiming as the new public management advocate for some time that government should be run as private sector organizations but there are certainly some management skills some management Frameworks some management tools that could be very useful to at the end of the day provide better Public Services the idea here is that you know before the 80s we had big governments and with Margaret tcher with Rian the fashion was to have a small governments and I think that what we need nowadays is yo
u know I don't really care about the size of the government but I really think that government should be strong should have managerial capacities to really be able to lead this collaborations this relational estate okay with this framework I had to try to decide what to do with my career so I started trying to answer questions like when how and why collaboration would make sense so let me just show you very quickly uh some of the studies that I've done under this concepts of when how and why sho
uld we collaborate okay when should we collaborate uh actually the next couple of slides are part of what I presented in my chob talk at UCL 10 or 11 years ago okay so it's nice to see them again one of my first Works which was part of my PhD was to study what were the determinants of collaboration so why should governments collaborate we know from the literature that there are certain environmental factors and certain organizational factors that would push governments to collaborate so for exam
ple uh the bigger the organization is the more likely it is to collaborate right there are certain things like if they have positive past experiences with collaboration obviously they're more likely to collaborate but you didn't need to come to UCL to learn that that's standard um but among all these studies one thing that I was missing was what about policy makers what about public managers does it matter who you put in charge of these organizations so a big part of my PhD had to do with figuri
ng out what is the effect of the characteristics of public managers that you put uh on top of these agencies to basically decide whether projects should be done alone or in collaboration and what we found was basically that environmental variables matter that organizational variables also matter but funny enough What mattered the most was certain individual characteristics of public managers actually the variable with the largest effect is the eight of the manager younger managers tend to collab
orate more when I present these results to older students usually executive students they react saying but that might not be true right and I say well I'm not really measuring the success of the collaboration I'm just measuring whether they want to collaborate whether they engage actually in collaborations or not so maybe they collaborate a lot but they do it really bad badly because they don't have experience yet we don't know okay but what we really saw was that there are factors like for exam
ple self-development if they train for example if they get out of their offices they can meet potential partners and they end up collaborating more if you're doing a PhD in a business school and you find out that training is good for managers you get a bonus okay which was my case after this one of the other big questions that we had was what happens when elections come do we really see an effect the year that that government is having an election is people more or less willing to collaborate or
maybe it doesn't matter right so what we did in this study was trying to figure out whether there is something called opportunistic behavior and we took a sample of a Spanish municipalities from 2002 to 2014 so a pretty large um data set and we try to see what happens before and after elections and what happens on the very year that we have elections okay what we saw is that in pre-election years policy makers are want to engage in collaborations because they are afraid that maybe a local newsp
aper is going to say oh this government is privatizing the water and that would be bad for them right now the idea here is this was a clear effect and there are two main arguments to explain this one could think well you know collaborations are managerially very challenging if you're at the last year of your office you don't want probably to engage in something that might be very difficult for the next person the other argument is you're really afraid of the Electoral effects that this going to
have so what we did was try to see whether there was any difference between the political party that was in charge and we differentiated between right and left political parties what we found was that this results are particularly strong for left political parties so when left political parties are are in power they are very much against collaboration when we have elections okay right oriented political parties still you will see a significant effect but much less so and the funny thing is that
we then run another study asking citizens whether they actually care about this or not and in most cases what we found is that what people really want are good Public Services they are not that interested most of them them in whether these services are provided by the public or the private sector as long as you know tubes works the streets are clean Etc yeah how should then we manage these collaborations most of the work that we've done has really tried to delved into how we can train public man
agers and policy makers to be better at managing these collaborations one of the things that we've seen is that collaborating is actually very difficult it's very very challenging it can be very good but managerially it's very difficult to do why because you really have two sectors that have very different goals very difficult to align these objectives and in some cases you can agree on the objective of the collaboration but then there will be secondary objective of both parties the public and t
he private actors that will actually Clash while the project advances okay some authors had warned us this was 20 years ago go that public private Partnerships would be difficult to implement and we actually were one of the first showing some empirical evidence on some of these challenges at the end after these studies what we ended up concluding was that we are probably trying to mix oil and water so what I like to explain to my students is what are the skills that someone would need to write b
oth of these B by the way I don't imply any of these animals to any sector just I just like it the picture okay through the different studies that we've done we've realized that in public private sector collaborations we're going to have tensions between the public and the private sector for example when trying to develop objectives that are oriented to the public at large and therefore creating this idea of public value this is particularly the case in public private joint ventures not so much
in what we would call Contracting out initiatives in which you simply write a contract to run for example a highway right for next 30 40 60 years in which things are actually a little bit easier to manage but when you have a joint venture that is jointly governed by the public and the private sector some of these tensions are actually much more challenging more tensions for example with the lack of managerial autonomy of some public managers in some cases we would see how policy makers and publi
c managers would say yeah I want to do this but it's not up to me right even though I agree with you in this negotiation even though I see the benefit of this I don't really have the freedom to act on it and then we will also see how sometimes public managers would have challenges would have tensions because the private sector wants to take you know to Pi of a piece of the cake and this is something that we have seen for example in South European cases were due to the lack of capacity of the pub
lic sector sometimes private actor have really taken too big of a cake here okay uh and that's something that you know while I argue that public and private sector collaborations are very good I think that if we don't have a strong public sector able to manage face Toof face here the private providers the public sector is going to lose okay one of the things that we found were very important I don't know if you follow D MOSI and ameritus economic Professor from Chicago but she has this uh Great
Notion that what really matters she's an economist and she says that what really matters are warts and that everything is rhetoric one of the things that we have realized with public and private sector collaborations is the importance of building a good rhetoric for citizens to understand the benefits of these collaborations she is well known for a triology that it's called the Bas era where she basically defends the that uh the Industrial Revolution didn't really happen because of a change in a
manufacturing process but really because someone coined the concept of middle class and then if you were poor if you were to work really hard you would become middle class not high class don't go that hard okay but you could be something called middle class I very much recommend this book we appli this to a public private collaboration for water services in the city of Barcelona and we were working with a large private Corporation very large private Corporation from Spain and at the end I was t
elling them look um your communication policies are really really poor because people is not aware that actually this service is very well managed this was a few years ago when we had all these debates about remunicipalization certain Public Services I say that to the CEO and to the head of communications which didn't took my common very finally then he said but we have created a web page where we put all the information about our performance so it's there you can just check it but I was trying
to explain you know creating a web page means nothing my aunt is not going to go to your web page to see how well you're doing you have to actively manage this rhetoric okay this narrative and that's something that I think still the public sector and the private sector needs to do much better we then did another study looking at what particular management actions would matter for the outcomes and the outputs of networks of collaborations that were informal and what we found was that trust was on
e of the main factors that really matters trust between the two organizations now we want to delve a little bit more on this and differentiate that you can trust the organization or you can trust just the manager that you're dealing with or you can maybe trust a lot the project but we need to differentiate between these different types of trust and how they might actually affect the final project okay now why why should we collaborate we have also done a number of studies especially with some co
lleagues from economics departments uh looking at whether is it better or not to collaborate should we do things alone is actually you know the idea of the relational State might sound appealing but does it actually work in practice what we have seen first was what happens when you try to compare the efficiency of Public Services through different organizational forms and what we did here was look at four different options services that were basically uh directly provided by the public sector th
rough a public agency okay no private sector involvement whatsoever then we look at public corporations so still the public sector alone but operating with more managerial fre freedom than a public agency and then cases of mixed public corporations both with minority public ownership and with majority public ownership and we analyze 10 different Services SE Social Services sport facilities Etc okay from 2014 to 2017 on a rather large sample of municipalities and what we found was quite interesti
ng because what we found is that there is really no evidence that corporatization will bring any cost advantages which very much goes against what the literature will suggest so giving more freedom to the public management to the public managers in this case and policy makers don't really translate into more efficient Public Services actually the least efficient organizational form was a corporation with private sector collaboration in which the private sector has a minority of shares in other w
ords if you want to collaborate with the private sector and ask them to behave like you would normally do it doesn't really work very well okay why do we think that this happens why do we think that what we found is actually against the literature we think that this is because when top managers top policy makers are appointed in these public corporations they don't really have a strong incentive to be efficient nobody knows whether the organization running the tube made a profit or a loss last y
ear what they know is whether the tube was working well or not so if we were now a union and we knew this unions know that and we went to for example negotiate a new Collective Agreement for our salaries we would say we want a higher salary or we will stop the tube and the CEO the manager the policy maker would say well if you stop the tube I'm going to probably you know I'm going to have I might lose my job because I'm politically appointed so they have a strong incentive to increase salaries r
ather than look for efficiency and this leads to at least in a Spain where we measure that public corporations that end up being more expensive despite what the literature might said okay then we look at something different which is well you can be very efficient at providing a very poor service what happens when you include quality in this service what happens when you measure efficiency but you also include the variable quality and what happens when you also look at whether governments pay dir
ectly for the service to the private provider or citizens pay a fee every time that they use a service what is the difference in terms of quality of the service and efficacy here we had data again Municipal data from Spain from 2014 to 2016 uh from waste removal services and also from water services and we were trying to differentiate between direct Public Service provision externalization so you know the public service signing in contract with the private provider in which the public service pa
y bill at the end of the year okay or cases in which we have a private provid provider but we ask users to pay a fee every time that they use a service or in the case of water for example according to how many uh liters of water they are using okay what we found here is that Contracting out is less efficient than public provision when accounting for service quality in other words you want something cheap you don't really care about the quality externalizations would work very well but if you car
e about the quality the performance differences among externalizations and direct Provisions are not that clear not that large at least yeah what we saw is that the case in which we could provide high quality services more efficiently again the difference was not that large but if you ask me so what's the best option it was service quality through user fees even though probably policy makers are not going to be very willing to implement this sort of measures because obviously they are not very p
opular yeah but the idea that I want you to kind of remember is externalization with Public Funding would work probably worse than public service provision which would work a little bit worse than externalizing with user fee funding okay what is next what should we do next well I I realized that my Studies have had a a pretty good impact a pretty significant impact among my field uh but at the same time I have the feeling that they haven't really had such a big impact among policy makers so I th
ink that you know I've uh feel many research gaps as we would say I've answered many research questions but I still have the feeling that the societal impact of my work could be much higher so what I would like to do is focus prec precisely on having more policy impact maybe less studies but hopefully with more impact and in terms of topics I would be interested for example in exploring how different Innovative forms of Contracting out actually can bring benefits to public services so for exampl
e if I was to contract Out imagine that now you were the directors of a hospital and we agree and the public sector and say how much would you charge me for every knee replacement and you would say I don't know it's a €2,000 perfect we're gonna sign a contract I'm gonna pay you €2,000 EUR every time that you perform a surgery on a knee perfect but because you're very good managers you will innovate your processes will be better and after a few months the cost of that surgery will will go down ri
ght maybe now it's 1,500 we say that collaboration brings Innovation but I usually say that this is something that stays within the private sector if we don't manage well our contracts why because if we save 500s for every surgery in our contract I'm still paying you 2,000 so you're now earning 500 plus but for the public sector this Innovation doesn't exist not even probably for the user because we are not talking about innovation in terms of the process or the product right so we are now seein
g some Innovative forms that could account for that saying look if you're able to do this cheaper we will split the difference or maybe we'll go s 203 so you have a strong incentive to innovate okay and I'm also interested in what is the role that citizens have within this relational State and I'm not the first one there is a huge co-production literature but one of the things that we are now delving into is when is it actually good to have citizens implementing Public Services themselves are we
comfortable for example having neighborhood watch patrols what happens if if a citizen that is part of one of these neighborhood watch patrols over steps with someone because he or she is not very well trained how can we hold that person accountable is it always good to have co-production these are the sort of questions that we will try to answer okay and I'm going to leave it here thank you very much for coming it's been a pleasure okay thank you good evening everyone I'm slightly too tall for
this microphone um it's my distinguished pleasure to provide an appreciation uh for my colleague and co-author Marcus St uh I should thereby first or I first need to appreciate that I'm the last thing standing between you here and the drinks um so I will try to keep this short and fortunately Mark has been kind enough uh to lead the kind of professional life that makes my task of appreciation here a very easy one let me start with the sheer numbers uh Mark is as a scholar an absolute force of n
ature he is an author who writes papers faster than most of us can read them um his Google Scholar profile currently lists 77 Publications but of course the sheer numbers matter less than academic contributions and within the field of public administration Mark is outstanding in the breath of contrib tions he has made he presented today on collaboration Contracting and the relational State and the range of contributions he has made in that area what I want to do in this appreciation is to unders
core just how wide ranging Mark's contributions have been beyond that and I want to do that by talking about two topics that Mark's research has centrally contributed to one of them is a perennial classic in public administration and that is public service motivation the other is a topic IC that is Central to the present and future of public administration and that is artificial intelligence let me start with the latter two of Mark's most cited papers look at artificial intelligence and what Mar
k has done in particular with colleagues is to assess how governments can effectively integrate data science and artificial intelligence uh in Service delivery and my voice apologies is gone today Mark's Work is outstanding and contributing particular evidence on how to manage this process for instance by collab by governments collaborating with universities and other sectors through policy Laboratories and this kind of evidence on how governments can effectively integrate AI data science into t
heir operations is obviously crucial for governments today uh and for governments in the future uh as many of you know there's a large multi-billion pound graveyard of failed attempts to integrate Ai and data science into governments around the world world and that is meant that the data Revolution that we've seen uh in the public sector sorry in the private sector in many countries has not translated into a data revolution in many public sectors so understanding how to get this right is importa
nt both for government Effectiveness and for government legitimacy and Mark's Work contributes importantly uh in this debate some of Mark's other work is on public service motivation Public Service motivation is the notion that many of those who work for the public sector do so because they're motivated to serve the public they're motivated to help others and that's particularly important in the public sector because it's one of the unique motivators the public sector has that is easier to imple
ment in the public sector than the private sector and it's of course in the public sector harder to implement other motivators such as higher pay for instance to be competitive I've had the pleasure of witnessing Mark's mind in action in this area uh in several joint pieces of work including a book on motivating public employees but beyond that Mark has undertaken a range of empirical assessments of the antecedence and consequences of this motivation for instance Mark's early cor at work has und
erscored that this this motivation as measured in hundreds of surveys in fact translates into pro-social behavior in the lab his more recent work has looked at antecedence for instance who is motivated to serve society and who is not and Mark's Work has shown for instance that there are certain personality traits such as emotionality for instance which predict greater public service motivation and understanding that of course M matters very practically for for instance when you think about how y
ou screen for this motivation when recruiting new Personnel in a public sector organization so in short Mark is a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to a wide range of public administration debates both substantive and methodological he is a wonderful collaborator who as his broad and diverse network of qus also under schools is deeply appreciated by a wide range of colleagues in the discipline but his contri contributions do not stop at research Mark is also an outstanding educator
be that as in augural and long-standing director of our MPA program uh or when teaching senior Executives in governments around the world and he's also a wonderful colleague beyond that in our department we have an unsung hero award and thinking about who should receive this next I do want to volunteer one piece of information here and that is that among Mark's lesser known contributions is picking up colleagues at the airport on the back of his motorcycle as I understand from secondhand sources
some colleagues have enjoyed that others have made rather loud shrieking noises for everyone it was an experience on a more serious note and in short public administration scholarship teaching and practice and our department are richer and better thanks to Mark's Work Mark I'm grateful to have you as a colleague as a coauthor as a friend allow me to close this appreciation with a quote from one of the most famous sons of Mark's Hometown Barcelona and that is Pep Guardiola as Pep Guardiola once
put it in reference to Messi but surely no less fitting for Mark that guy is exceptional thank you so much and congratulations professor
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