Professor Martin Lodge remembers a wonderful colleague and leading international figure in the fields of public administration and regulation.
It is a great honour and extremely humbling to reflect on and celebrate Professor Christopher Hood. I approach this occasion with a sense of extreme trepidation knowing that anything that I will say, Christopher would have said in much better and more concise ways.
So how can one approach a Commander of the British Empire, Fellow of the British Academy, a three time PSA Mackenzie prize winner, the John Gaus and Brownlow award holder?
One of the discoveries over the past few weeks has been Christopher’s ancestral roots in the shipbuilding industry in Moray, the place he and his family returned to frequently and where he also passed away. This connection offers me a fitting metaphor and also a starting point – one particular ‘ship’, namely Christopher’s inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics (LSE) in January 1990.
The lecture attracted considerable media and scholarly interest. Less well-known was that it represented the conclusion of a protracted ‘transfer’ period which involved questions being raised in the House of Commons as part of the 1988 Education Reform Act. In the lecture, Christopher Hood outlined four dimensions, mega-trends, teaching, problems, and research. The five mega-trends – privatisation, internationalisation, new public management, automation and public expenditure containment – were identified as intellectual challenges to the field of public policy and administration.
For Christopher, the interchangeable terms public policy and administration meant the study of the contract state. The idea of a ‘contract state’ emerged as part of a collaborative US-UK research effort in the early 1970s, led in part by Bill Mackenzie. The Carnegie-funded project focused on the way in which an assembly of non-governmental organisations were resourced to provide governmental functions. We have to thank this project for introducing the term ‘quango’ into the English language. The research already carried much of a ‘Hood flavour’ – carefully arranged typologies, an interest in explanation, case studies, and, most of all a concern with questions of control and accountability.
Christopher extended this interest in developing ‘bureaumetrics’, exploring cross-national varieties of para-public or private organisations, as well as the the way government regulated itself and sought to regulate risks.
All this work was shaped by a focus on control. The origins of this interest lie in Christopher’s undergraduate studies at the University of York with Andrew Dunsire. Drawing on Dunsire’s engineering background, Christopher approached his research through the lens of the fundamental components of control systems: directors, detectors, and effectors. The control perspective also was at the heart of the ‘tools of government’ work.
A more ‘informal’ perspective, placing tacit understandings at the heart of the analysis, influenced the work on Public Service Bargains. This, in turn, paved the way to a return to questions of accountability and ‘blame games’ which he pursued in the early years here at Oxford.
The second key theme in Christopher’s work is the ‘acceptance and performance factor’. Herbert Simon’s challenge to the field that it should move beyond proverbs was taken up by Christopher in two ways. First, he focused on the ‘acceptance factor’ – factors that might account for the rise (and subsequent fall) of particular administrative doctrines or proverbs. Most prominently, the creation of the term ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) summarised a set of doctrines associated with public sector reform. The ‘NPM’ label was jointly termed with Michael Jackson. The label is commonly and wrongly associated with the 1991 ‘A Public Management for all Seasons’ article in Public Administration which is the highest cited paper in public administration.
A significant part of this pioneering effort on the ‘acceptance factor’ involved the work on Administrative Argument and, subsequently, in Art of the State. This later work featured the growing interest in applying ideas from grid-group cultural theory, as put forward by Mary Douglas but first encountered through Christopher’s conversations with Aaron Wildavsky in Australia. The cultural theory lens provided a way of theorising and typologising different control relationships.
However, Christopher’s work extended to the other side of the ‘Proverbs of Administration’ challenge, namely the exploration of ‘performance’. We find that interest in the ‘structure-performance’ hypothesis regarding organizational forms, the interest in government expenditure management and cut-back, the work on performance indicators and targets as well as the joint work with Ruth Dixon on seeking to understand the consequences of ‘managerialism’ for administration in the UK.
The third key theme is the limits of administration. His 1976 book remains to this day unrivalled in its perspective on implementation. The focus on the ‘administrative factor’ – the going back to ‘first principles’, the emphasis on pre-requisites and on unintended consequences can be traced to his initial BLitt work on the taxation of horse-race gambling. Unintended consequences in the context of NPM were discussed in the inaugural lecture as ‘problems’, especially in terms of ‘waste’, ‘malversation’ and ‘catastrophe’.
If these three themes of control, acceptance and performance, as well as limits – might represent building blocks for an indicative Veen diagramme, there are some other common ‘Hood-shipbuilding’ characteristics. In the inaugural lecture, he noted that research had a range of functions, ranging from tracing and categorising, explanation, memorising to criticising. His work covered all of these dimensions. His work was distinct in being interested in both political and administrative logics, it was distinct because of its emphasis on ‘control’, the interest in exploring the boundaries of disciplines, and the blend of drawing on historical ideas and painstaking empirical work. Christopher had a unique talent to simplify complexity. In doing so, he revealed the often absurd nature of executive government.
The 1990 inaugural lecture also noted the changing nature of the who, what and how of teaching. Christopher was interested in customer orientation and ‘learning outcomes’ before the term became a standard requirement for course reading lists. My own first encounter involved a lecture on the privatisation ‘mega-trend’ which concluded on a futility-type argument which appealed to me greatly. He was also a strong believer in teaching-related peer-review. As a prospective GTA, I was permitted to join in a ‘pre-course’ planning session. I found Christopher standing on a chair, diligently scribbling on a whiteboard with two colleagues watching on.
This same customer orientation characterised his approach towards research supervision. Even if every session did involve the kind of trepidation I already mentioned, there was deep engagement with whatever one may have produced – and without the expectation to become a ‘mini-Hood’. How influential Christopher was to his students was evident in the 65th birthday celebration at the Institute for Government which included participants flying in from Brazil, Israel and Japan. For those of us who had the honour to collaborate with him, it was near impossible to keep up with Christopher – for some intercontinental collaborators, like Michael Jackson, this involved being woken by lengthy faxes at 2am in the morning.
Internationalisation was not merely a mega-trend; it also represented Christopher’s outlook. Moving between York and Glasgow (with the possibility of joining the Bank of England), seeking to escape from the Glasgow University environment through research stays at York, residing at the renowned Bielefeld centre, spending time in Singapore, holding a chair at Sydney, following in the footsteps of another Mackenzie scholar, Dick Spann, and subsequently joining the London School of Economics (LSE) and Oxford University, this international perspective stood out in unique contrast to the more conventional North Atlantic perspective that permeates much of contemporary scholarship.
Regardless of location, there was institution building. Christopher was not a person interested in vanity or empire building exercises. Rather ‘management’ was a necessity, executed with extreme diligence, fairness and humility. At Sydney, he launched new teaching initiatives and sought to build new avenues for research and practice, involving the police. The same can be said about his time at the LSE. As convenor between 1995-98, he inherited a financially bust and mismanaged department. He displayed crisis management skills when the departmental computers vanished over night. He managed a successful first ever RAE exercise and reformed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. He also applied architecture in terms of a student-facing ‘one stop shop’ in in the dilapidated LSE Government Department’s King’s Chambers.
Christopher played a pivotal role in setting up the interdisciplinary MSc Regulation and the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Subsequently, and others will elaborate on this further, one could witness his talents as programme director of the ESRC public services programme.
Beyond LSE, Christopher was at the heart of leading science-practice initiatives. One of them involved, together with (now) Lord Butler, LSE-Whitehall seminars to encourage greater academic-civil service exchanges in the early 1990s. Working with natural scientists of the Royal Society on risk ended in a more controversial outcome, but it set the path for further work on questions of government of risk.
In preparation for this text, a former LSE colleague and ‘convenor alumni’, Rodney Barker, contacted me. Sadly, Rodney passed away in late May. As a tribute to Rodney, I would like to add his heartfelt tribute to Christopher:
Losing Christopher takes away from academic life a colleague who combined intellectual sharpness with a calm, quiet and critical air of supporting the work of others. Nothing was left out of a solidly supportive critical assessment delivered with a discrete sense of elegant enjoyment of both work which went well and of that which didn’t. This combination of thorough research with an insistence on the value of collaboration made him a perfect head of department, combining thorough leadership with a generous provision of time and attention to common issues. A conversation with Christopher was always both profitable and enjoyable. A perfect colleague and a good friend.
Professor Rodney Barker
Christopher’s intellectual life was dedicated to, what Bentham called, ‘chrestomathic knowledge’. He was like his mentors Dunsire and Mackenzie shaped by his Scottish-English background, as well as ambivalence towards the English class system. The academic world had little knowledge of his Scottish roots, the lifelong pursuit of Scottish dancing, his knowledge of Gaelic and engagement in the London Gaelic scene, and his enthusiasm of classic cars.
Our last conversation was in late November 2024. We had intended – for some time – to write a book on regulation together – taking a ’30 year perspective’. During that conversation we managed to develop a new ‘hook’ and my side of the bargain was the delivery of ‘homework’. I regrettably never got to share this work.
But what remains is deep gratitude, not just for the past; but for all the future that would not be as bright without him.
This is a revised version of a text originally presented at Christopher Hood’s memorial celebration at All Souls College, Oxford, 17 May 2025.
If you would like to find out more about Christopher’s manifold contributions to his field, Explorations In Governance, published to mark his 65th birthday, examines some of the key ideas and themes of his research with contributions from some of the esteemed colleagues he influenced and worked with.
Image credit: 16 January 1990, Old Theatre, Christopher Hood, Inaugural lecture. (LSE Library/LSE Government)
