Mentors
Please note here that
I am not talking about valued colleagues or friends, but people in a position
of seniority to me.
Sidney Field
(1907-80)
Sidney Field, looking suitably serious in his Second World War RAF uniform
I probably owe my interest in politics to my uncle Sidney
Field (1907-89). He was an intelligent
man who, as he told me with some regret in his retirement, had spent his life
‘chained to the shop counter’ as a newsagent.
He had started an engineering course at Woolwich Polytechnic (now the
University of Greenwich) but had been recalled by his father to the family
business. He was at last able to use
his engineering skills as RAF ground crew during the Second World War, probably
his heyday.
Every Sunday my father and I would walk down the hill from
Plumstead Common to my uncle’s premises in Lakedale Road, enjoying the views
over the Thames on the way. We would
get there late in the morning when the shop was quiet. As the gas lamps hissed away, my father and
my uncle would discuss football, politics and railways.
Lakedale Road
As I leafed through the Sunday papers, my uncle would advise
me to read between the lines. What was
unsaid was as important as what was said.
I should never accept anything at face value and read critically. It was good advice.
My uncle was something of a liberal humanitarian. In 1950s Woolwich it was usual to see people
of colour around. My recollection is
that there was little overt racism, indeed the Sikh student living in our road
was the subject of friendly curiosity. However, relations across racial groupings
were more controversial. Any
relationship between a white woman and an Afro-Caribbean man was not approved
of. When such a relationship developed
and the couple were shut out by her family, my uncle offered the private use of
his ‘best room’ at his house in Belvedere on a Sunday for them to meet. Sadly,
after she became pregnant, she died at the hands of a back street abortionist.
Ken Newman
He was my Geography teacher at school and a very good one. The
Oxford & Cambridge board allowed A level students to submit a dissertation
which he encouraged me to do. I still have a copy of it. When I was in the sixth form, he went the
extra mile by organising an after school class for an ‘AO’ level on British
Economic Organisation. About the
institutions of the economy, it stimulated my interest in economic policy. I don’t think we appreciated what he did at
the time, but my school friend Richard Thomas and I did try to make this up by
writing to him a few years ago.
Bob Borthwick
My personal tutor at Leicester, a very decent man who put up
uncomplainingly with the demands I made on his time. As the first person in my family to go to
university, I did suffer from ‘imposter syndrome’ (I had turned down a two E’s
offer from LSE as I thought I would be out of my depth there). Having gone to Leicester, I had to get a
first class degree and I wouldn’t have got it without Bob’s guidance.
Richard Rose
I correctly thought that the MSc course at Strathclyde would
provide the research skills I had not learnt at Leicester. Richard can be challenging and is certainly
a phenomenon, but he gave me one piece of very good life changing advice:
shorten my name from ‘Wynford’ to ‘Wyn’.
Richard was disappointed I did not stay at Strathclyde for my PhD, but
there were both push and pull reasons why I decided to go to Exeter. One of them was that I thought that Jeff
Stanyer would be a good PhD supervisor which turned out to be the case (see below).
I enjoyed reading Richard's memoir Learning About Politics in Time and Space. Richard describes himself as a Truman Democrat and Harry Truman always interested me. I have a collection of books about him and visited his home town of Independence, Missouri, including the library and his old home. It should be recalled that Richard started life as a journalist in Missouri. Ed Page, an academic for whom I have very high respect, is mentioned at the end of the book and he has always held Richard in high regard.
Malcolm Anderson
Some context is needed to explain why Malcolm was such a
significant figure in my academic development.
When I arrived in the Warwick department, it could not be said to have a
strong research culture which I think is one reason why Malcolm welcomed my
arrival as someone who had already had a reasonable portfolio of
publications. Members of the department
were not active researchers or publishers for a number of reasons:
1. The head of department, Wilfrid Harrison, had
been brought in as the (one) pro vice-chancellor to act as a safe pair of hands
back up for the brilliant but mercurial VC Jolly Jack Butterworth. Wilfrid was a much liked and sociable
individual who enjoyed a Friday lunchtime drink, but as far as writing was
concerned, he was an extinct volcano. Conversations about research topics were often closed down.
2. At least one member of the department adhered to
a viewpoint held by some at Oxford that argued that ‘scribbling’ was vulgar and
an indication that you were not sound.
Alan Ware has given me a full explanation of why at one time there was
something of anti-research culture or ideology at Oxford and why it declined
(starting in the mid -1960s with the appointment of Peter Pulzer at Christ
Church). The decline took a long time,
but has now disappeared completely.
3. At least two intellectually distinguished
members of the department had difficulty putting pen to paper. In this connection I would like to express
my great respect for David Caldwell.
David started a sabbatical leave and realised it was not going to be
productive. He therefore transferred to
the University’s registry where he was able to benefit from the guidance of
Mike Shattock. David went on to have a
distinguished career in university management on his native heath. One other member of the department took on substantial administrative responsibilities in the university which had the effect of holding back the development of his research career.
Jim Bulpitt has one of the strongest posthumous reputations
in the department. I chaired a session
on his intellectual legacy in the United States and I have met PhD students who
described themselves as ‘neo-Bulpittians.’ As one former colleague has pointed out, despite appearances, he was a very hard worker and would stay up half the night reading. However, he published relatively little and certainly not all he
could. This is perhaps an argument for
quality rather than quantity. In some
ways, as a former journalist, writing was just too easy for me, but I needed to
remember that I was not writing up the hospital fete for the Brentwood Gazette and Mid-Essex Recorder.
In any event Malcolm encouraged me with a great deal of
practical advice such as applying for small research grants from the Nuffield
Foundation which helped with my book on the CBI (written with Dave Marsh). He also helped me to spend a term on study
leave at Nuffield College, Oxford, enabling me to write up an extended version
of my PhD. This was published by Short
Run Publishing Services in a desk diary format, but had to be reprinted and is
still quoted today. He was also tolerant
and understanding of personal depredations on my part.
He also facilitated my early promotion to a senior
lectureship, although one of the appointing panel told me that I was helped by
a very positive reference from the late George Jones at LSE arguing that I was
a hot property in the study of local politics.
It was a great blow when Malcolm left for Edinburgh as his
successors regarded me as below the salt intellectually or ‘trite’. However, given the labour market in the
1980s, it was hard for me to move elsewhere.
A promising approach from a Canadian university in the late 1980s fell
through at a later stage when the post was changed from EU to Chinese politics.
Malcolm had set up an excellent 3rd year course on The Making of Economic Policy with John Williamson in Economics who went on to a very distinguished career at the World Bank, IMF and Princeton among other places. This was compulsory for 3rd year Economics and Politics students and I inherited it from Malcolm.
I had the privilege of teaching this course with many distinguished economists from whom I learnt a great deal (more of them later). It also led to a number of publications. With the late Shiv Nath, with whom I initially taught the course, I wrote a book on The Politics of Economic Policy-Making. One student remarked that, given our divergent views, it was remarkable that we had managed to complete the book! I subsequently wrote a short single authored book on The Politics of Economic Policy in which I pillaged the work of my distinguished Economics colleague Nick Crafts. Finally, I wrote a more substantial book on Economic Policy in Britain. In retrospect I should have emphasised the underlying theoretical perspectives such as the regulatory state rather more explicitly.
Jack Hayward
Jack was an external examiner at Warwick and it must have been a strange experience for him. On his first visit the dinner was held on campus. Highlights were Wilfrid Harrison singing ‘I belong to Glasgow’ and a member of staff being sick in the corner. In a subsequent year, the event was moved to Wilfrid’s house. At least Jack was not bitten by Wilfrid’s large Alsatian dog which is what happened to Alan Ware. Another colleague was told that Alan had made the mistake of moving slightly in his chair.
However, Jack, who was of Jewish heritage and had been born in China,
was told in no uncertain terms by Jim Bulpitt, then with Powellite sympathies,
that he was one of the liberals who had let immigrants into the country. (Another member of the department also contributed). Jack resigned as external examiner in the next day and refused a later invitation to apply for a professorial vacancy in the department.
I was able to meet Jack at a dinner at Wilfrid’s and he gave
me good advice on the CBI book, in particular the need to place the CBI within
the context of the system of business representation as a whole. He subsequently read and commented on large
parts of the book. He also invited me
to Hastings for an Anglo-French workshop to which I made a presentation with
Dave Marsh. This gave me one or two
useful contacts in France.
I also remember being at an Anglo-American workshop in
Stirling organised by Richard Rose. One
of the Americans, not realising I was there, laid into an article which Marsh
and I had written for Political
Studies. It wasn’t a very good
article, but the objective was to put down a marker. Jack gave it to the American with both
barrels, saying how good our book was.
I went to an event at the Holiday Inn in Hull to commemorate
Jack’s 80th birthday. This
was at the end of a workshop and was supposed to be a surprise. Jack spotted me and asked why I was in
Hull. I had to think quickly and say
that I was a supporter of Coventry Blaze ice hockey team [true] and here to see
them play the Hull team [not that weekend].
I was also one of the largest private shareholders in the food
processing company Cranswick [true] headquartered in Hull and had come for a
briefing [untrue]. This was the last
time I saw Jack.
Graham Medley OBE
Graham Medley is now at the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine and a prominent member of SAGE. My last big funded project (£1m+) was with
Graham who was then in Life Sciences in Warwick. The topic was the governance of livestock
diseases (GOLD) and I was deputy to Graham as PI: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/gld Graham
fully involved me in Life Sciences so I gave research seminars and was drafted
in to teach on an undergraduate course.
Above all, my understanding of interdisciplinary work was greatly
enhanced. Once Graham told me, ‘I
believe everything that I know could be wrong’ and coming from a scientist that
was an important insight. As an
epidemiologist he accepted the political model of infectious diseases I
developed and, along with his input and that of others, we got it published in Transactions of the Royal Society: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130389/
Friends and
colleagues
In this section I pay
tribute to friends and colleagues who helped me along the way.
King Edward VI
Grammar School Chelmsford, 1958-65
The school had (and has) high academic standards but Lords
Speaker Norman Fowler (who once caught me out of bounds in the cycle shed)
recalls in Ministers Decide that ‘he was bored both with the lessons and with
life as a very junior boy in a very big school.’ Consequently, I not only free wheeled like
him, but also caused a lot of trouble for the school authorities, bringing
myself ‘within an ace of expulsion.’
At the time I had a strong dislike for the headmaster, Nigel
Fanshawe, with whom I had many battles.
He almost exploded when I started quoting the 1944 Education Act at
him. As I learnt subsequently, he was
very keen to recruit pupils from working class or lower middle class
backgrounds like me and some of my friends fitted into that category. When he had his 100th birthday, I
sent him a card, although I still think he was excessively authoritarian. Anyway, when I scraped into the sixth form,
I started to realise my academic potential and got two A’s and a B at A level
(the B + Scholarship level in History was a disappointment after an O level which I was told saw
the highest marks the school had ever recorded, but I had a bit of a struggle
with the special subject on ‘The Age of the Chartists’).
My friends shared an interest in politics, but also had
little time for the school authorities.
In the 6th Form, we managed to publish two issues of a
satirical newspaper, Wreck, which
caused some humour in the staff room with a fake new year honours list. There had been a big fall in participation
in the Combined Cadet Force when it became an after school activity. The master in charge was demoted in his army
rank and we offered him a peerage for ‘services to army recruitment’.
It was in the public library in Chelmsford that I discovered
the Nuffield general election series. I
then learnt that it was possible to study politics at university rather than
one of my A level subjects of English, History or Geography. The school would have liked me to stay on
for a third year to try for Oxbridge, but it didn’t appeal to me.
It’s difficult to single out individuals but I am still in
touch with Richard Thomas who lives in Orkney and Tim Watt in Essex. Both of them came to my 70th
birthday celebrations. David Nourish is in Australia and recently commented
that he did not think he would have got through his school years without me and
Rick. I owe a reciprocal debt.
University of Exeter
(1969-71)
This was an important friendship grouping for me and in 2016 we had a reunion of PhD students, staff (one still teaching at 90) and one of the secretaries. I went on to write books and articles with fellow PhD student Dave Marsh. Dave’s view of me was that I would not recognise a theory if I saw one walking down the street. This is not an experience I would like to have and admittedly Nevil Johnson referred to my ‘rather rickety theoretical frameworks’ in a book review, but he was an expert at flipping fag ash over people’s work. I certainly had a serious interest in questions of methodology and research technique as evidenced by the successful research methods book I later authored with Pete Burnham and Zig Layton-Henry among others. One of the pleasures of the last phase of my career was teaching a course with Ben Lockwood from Economics for the PPE degree on public choice, critiques of it and alternative frameworks.
To return to the rather sleepy cathedral town that Exeter
was at the time before the M5 was built.
Mike Hawkins was a good friend and went on to work with Ian Gordon, then
a staff member, at Kingston. Mike was
someone who very much had his feet on the ground which he had to as he was also
a successful weight lifter.
‘Terry’ Rees, working as a research assistant for Bob Dowse,
was a good friend. Dame Teresa Rees, as
she now is, went on to a distinguished academic career, becoming a
pro-vice-chancellor at Cardiff University.
She was kind enough when we met after 40 years to describe me ‘as the
sane person in the room’, although also ‘uptight’. Already unwell, Terry made the journey from
Cardiff for my 70th birthday party.
We subsequently met up in Cardiff from time to time when I was giving
evidence to the Sennedd.
However, one of the most important influences was Annie
Phizacklea, later a colleague at Warwick and a friend in Leamington. Annie arrived in 1970 from a year at
McMaster in Canada (where she was conspicuously unsuccessful at ice hockey)
having been an undergraduate at Exeter and a very successful (joint) social secretary
for the ‘Guild’ of Students. It was
evident that Annie had lots of new idea about the study of politics (although
she would define herself as a sociologist).
In particular, she shared my interest in social statistics
and what one could do with a main frame computer. This had been monopolised at Exeter by the
Physics department, but we managed to get a line into the social sciences
building at Streatham Court. Instead of
using a counter sorter which invariably chewed up data cards and involved doing
laborious calculations of statistical tests, I was able to do more
sophisticated work more quickly, for example, undertake logarithmic
transformations of linear data.
After Tony Birch arrived to succeed Victor Wiseman as head
of department following the latter’s death, he got PhD students to present
their work to the department in a seminar.
There was a big turnout, but only Annie, I and my supervisor Jeff
Stanyer had any real understanding of social statistics. As Bill Tupman remarked recently, ‘I didn’t
understand what you and Annie were doing, but I was very impressed.’ In her calm manner, Annie noted that the
statistical relationships in my data did not seem very strong. Of course, that’s not so unusual in
political science. At Strathclyde the
best product moment correlation I got on a project was .3 and the instructor
commented, ‘Welcome to social science.’
I said something about data analysis still being in
progress, which was true. Annie could
have followed up by stating that many of my relationships were not even
statistically significant, which would have holed me below the waterline, but
she stayed quiet and my growing reputation with Tony Birch remained
intact. Afterwards she suggested that
some of my data might be non-linear which turned out to be the case.
Willie Paterson and
Warwick
In 1971 I went for an interview for a lectureship at the
University of Warwick. I was also short
listed for posts at Newcastle and Essex, but the Warwick job was the most
appealing. Newcastle was too far from
London and I didn’t want to return to Essex.
However, when I got to Warwick, I discovered that Ivor Crewe was on the
short list.
Now Sir Ivor Crewe, he went on to be Vice-Chancellor at Essex and Master at University College Oxford, as well as a famous elections pundit. He was already recognised as a rising star in 1971 and I thought that I would stand little chance against him. However, I learnt recently that the panel was impressed by my published work on rancorous community conflict. In addition, Wilfrid Harrison formed the view that Ivor was a little too self-confident and that I would fit in better. (For my first staff meeting, I turned up wearing pink trousers and Wilfrid, who once told me that he would never consider himself in any way outré, asked if this was the Exeter style).
I was appointed at a salary of £1,491 a year (£21,500 a year at 2020 prices). I was also appointed a resident tutor in Rootes Hall which meant I had a rent free bedsit with no rates to pay and heating and electricity covered.
Willie Paterson had come to Warwick from Aberdeen as the
Volkswagen lecturer in German politics, although he drove another make. He was not on the panel and after the
interview I found myself in his office. I
think we hit it off after I asked him about his current research interests and
he gave me a lift into Olton in Birmingham where he then lived. I said that I did not think I had got the
job, but hoped we would meet up again somewhere.
Willie did express some scepticism about my first published
article which appeared in Parliamentary
Affairs in 1968. Written with R J C
Preece, a staff member at Leicester, it was on Welsh and Scottish
Nationalism. It was written when I was
an undergraduate and was undoubtedly rather superficial, although little of the
subsequent literature has sought to compare the two movements and at least I
recognised the importance of the topic.
A check on Google Scholar revealed just 13 citations.
Willie was my best man when I got married in 1978. In the 1980s we worked on a major comparative
study of the chemical industry in Britain and Germany as part of an ESRC
government-industry relations programme.
When Jack Lively took over the
editorship of Political Studies, Willie
and I were allowed to join the editorial team as subordinate members.
Willie left Warwick in 1990 for Edinburgh just when I became
head of department and subsequently returned to the Midlands as head of the new
Institute for German Studies at Birmingham. Warwick made a bid for this, but I did not
think that the then Bishop of Coventry’s vivid description of the bombing and
burning of Coventry Cathedral was that helpful to our cause, even though one almost felt the
melting lead.
The Organization of Business
Interests Project
This multi-country project was organised from the International
Institute of Management in Berlin (IIM), part of the Wissenschaftszentrum
Berlin (WZB), by Wolfgang Streeck and Phillippe Schmitter. (The countries covered were Austria, Canada,
Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom with a
group of researchers from the US later affiliating to the project). In terms of research and subsequent publication,
it took up the greater part of the 1980s.
Much of the latter part of the activity took place from the European
University Institute in Florence where Philippe moved and Wolfgang spent time
as a visitor. Wolfgang was subsequently
a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I visited him. He later became co-director of the Max
Planck Institute for the social sciences in Cologne and made me a member of the
Beirat. Willie and I attended his
retirement event in Cologne which took place over two days.
I met some other key collaborators through this project, but
first let me discuss Wolfgang and Philippe who were very much ying and
yang. I would describe Wolfgang as very
German in the Prussian Protestant tradition.
He was one of a small minority of Calvinists in Germany and actually
attended a Calvinist school. He was a
hard worker and took life very seriously, including the Social Democratic
Party. After retirement he returned to
his left wing roots and has written in pessimistic but impressive terms about
the future of capitalism, also being very critical of the European Union in
monthly online missives.
For me, Wolfgang’s outlook was summarised by an incident
that occurred when I was a guest fellow in Berlin. We normally went to eat in the canteen
around 12.30, getting there just before the Cartel Commission who entered in
hierarchical order. A Bavarian
colleague took a serious interest in food and wine and one day Apfel Strudel
was on the menu. He told me that this
had to be eaten when first available at 12 noon and he went off to lunch. Wolfgang was not pleased when he discovered
this departure from routine.
The IIM was located in the old Nazi Air Ministry building
opposite Tempelhof airport in the Platz der Luftbrücke. It was so well protected that it survived
the war intact and one could just imagine Nazis in its Fascist
architecture. We shared the building
with, among others, the Cartel Commission, who were always losing their cases,
and the Zoll, whose band practised in the courtyard once a week. Once I noticed a room full of elderly people
and I learned that they were retired people from East Berlin there to get prescriptions
fulfilled through donations of samples by West Berlin doctors. As far as the DDR was concerned, they were
deeply suspicious of the IIM and once sent a cadre to complain that we were a
CIA front organisation.
Whereas Wolfgang was methodical and rigorous, Philippe was
an intellectual Catherine wheel, sparking off ideas, some of them brilliant,
some of them way out in left field. In
particular he revived the concept of corporatism which underpinned the WZB
project. I was more sceptical about
the concept of corporatism than Philippe and Wolfgang in both analytical and
prescriptive terms. As part of my work
at the IIM, I wrote a paper on government relations divisions in large firms
which I saw as part of a growth in direct company-state relations and which
occurred even in the associative state of Germany (see the discussion below of
my work with David Coen). As far as I was concerned, Philippe described me ‘as
one of the best supporting actors in the business’ which was a fair assessment.
Philippe was deeply opposed to the regime in the DDR, as
indeed I was, and liked to stage ‘provocations’ there. We crossed Checkpoint Charlie in his battered
Mercedes, Phillippe’s notion being that I was there to represent the UK as an
occupying power. On another occasion we
went to the outpost of Steinstucken which had to be reached by a road with the
wall on both sides. It was a slightly
surreal experience travelling along this road on the top of a West Berlin
double decker bus as Philippe railed at the Communists.
Whatever ‘provocation’ we staged, the East Germans backed
down. I thought we had gone too far
when we went to the suburb of Pankow which is where the party operated
from. We parked in a space reserved for
cadres and a Vopo rushed up, but Philippe told him where to go in no uncertain
terms, one term being ‘plastic ****hole’.
He retreated and we entered a local restaurant. On another occasion we went to the Ministry
of Culture and demanded to see Botticelli drawings, Philippe claiming that I
was representing the UK as a professor of fine art. On another trip we scoped out an apartment
claimed to be used by the East German leader Honecker. An East German policewoman who intervened on
this visit was told to ‘go away, Olga Kreb.’
On another occasion I took the U-Bahn to East Berlin to see
the weekly parade by goose stepping DDR troops to the war memorial. I managed to fit in so well in the west of
the city that people often asked me for directions and were surprised by my
response that I was an Auslander. I
was careful to dress shabbily for East Berlin so that I could mingle with the
crowds without standing out. Many years later as I was at a workshop in Kiel and decided to use German at one point: a surprised participant told me that I had the accent of someone who had grown up in a small town in the DDR. Possibly I
did too well in trying to blend in as someone approached me carrying a copy of the Party newspaper Neues Deutschland and asked me in German
if I was with the party delegation. In
any event I made a quick tactical retreat to the U-Bahn.
An important academic collaboration that emerged from the
OBI project was with Will Coleman of McMaster University in Canada. We published a number of articles together
and later wrote a book together with an agricultural economist, the late Tim
Josling of Stanford on the global agricultural economy. I also piggy backed on a multi-country
project that Will organised on agricultural finance, obtaining ESRC funding to
cover the UK and Ireland.
Alberto Martinelli of the state university of Milan, and at
one time an adviser to the Italian prime minister, was also a valued
collaborator. We worked together on the
chemical industry and together with Willie Paterson, we wrote an article on
state-firm relations in Britain, Germany and Italy published in West European Politics. This was the first article to deal with
this topic in a serious comparative fashion.
A colleague of Alberto’s who was also an adviser to prime minister Craxi
(who came from Milan) had recently been assassinated in Rome and while Alberto
felt he was safe in Milan, we had to take some security precautions, arriving
at a special parking place outside La Scala at the last minute. Another Italian colleague had a brother who
had been a naughty boy with his machine gun and was at the time in Milan’s
prison, although he had to be let out when charges could not be brought in
time.
Another OBI colleague from whom I learnt a great deal was
Frans van Waarden from the Netherlands who was very interested in how changing
technology impacted on industrial structures. He made an important contribution
to the book I edited on the food processing industry from the project.
An earlier visit to
Berlin
Colleagues in
Economics
Over the years I benefitted from teaching with some superb
colleagues in Economics on the Making of Economic Policy course. My first colleague was Shiv Nath who sadly
died at a relatively young age. After a
break from the course, I resumed teaching with Nick Crafts whom had joined
Warwick around the same time as me. I
don’t think Nick was very impressed by political science as a discipline, but
he was very tolerant of my excursions into economics, telling me once that I
was literate in the subject (but not numerate). Nick pioneered quantitative analysis in
economic history and went on to do some very impressive policy work with
CAGE. Needless to say, I learnt a great
deal from him.
Professor Lord Skidelsky of Tilton was a very different
teaching partner. He was very widely
read and was, of course, a world authority on Keynes. When President Clinton came to Warwick, he
sought out Robert. For part of the time
when we taught together he was Conservative Treasury spokesman in the Lords and
sometimes had to leave the class to deal with urgent faxes.
I also spent some time teaching the course with Geoff
Renshaw who had a rather different perspective on economic policy from my own
which led to some healthy disagreements.
My final teaching partner was Mark Harrison who remains a friend and
whose work on the former Soviet Union I have greatly enjoyed.
My final Economics teaching partner was Ben Lockwood with
whom I taught the Economics and Politics course for 3rd year
PPE. Ben was a superb lecturer with great mastery
of his subject and I did persuade him after I retired to write something with
me for Political Quarterly. Like other Economics colleagues, I think that
he was somewhat sceptical of what political science had to offer in terms of
theory and methodology, but was too polite to say so to my face.
I should also mention Robert Lindley who created the
Institute for Employment Research and with whom I had a small research project.
I never taught with the late Alec Ford, but I got to know him as a pro-vice-chancellor chairing appointment panels and also through being the Politics representative on the Economics exam board. When the former President Gowon of Nigeria was a student, there was a coup in Nigeria and media swarmed all over the then Arts Building. I had to interrupt Alec's seminar and advise General Gowon to leave the building by a rear entrance as soon as possible.
Pete Burnham
Pete was appointed to the department from Sociology when I
was chair and eventually became chair of department himself. A professorial colleague came to see and
said, ‘Do you know he is a Marxist?’ I
said that I did and I had no problem with the open Marxist tradition which, for
example, recognised the existence of ‘fractions’ of capital or drew on the work
of Gramsci.
As far as my own general theoretical perspective was concerned,
I was very interested in the concept of political economy, which for me was
about the interaction between the market and the state (not forgetting the
‘third sector’ of not for profit organisations). (See my forthcoming book on Political Football: Regulation,
Globalization and the Market). In
general terms, I was influenced by Polanyi’s concept of ‘fictitious’
commodities which cannot be treated as market commodities without being morally
devalued: money or the financial system; labour; and land or the environment.
Beyond that, I was primarily interested in middle range
theories in Merton’s terminology. I got
involved in the debate about corporatism, although I always had reservations
about its analytical and normative value (indeed the confusion of the two was a
central problem). I subsequently
became interested in depoliticisation which Pete also explored. The concept of policy communities has less
relevance than was once the case, but still applies to the case of football.
I also took part in
discussions on globalization and regionalization in the CSGR, being
particularly inspired by Ben Rosamond who later became head of department. I was very pleased to be able to attend his
inaugural lecture at Copenhagen University when he took up his post there
(although he lives in Sweden). In my
view Ben was one of the best things ever to come out of Guernsey. Like corporatism, globalization often
confused the normative and the analytical, although CSGR never developed a
distinctive theoretical or empirical line on the topic.
Much of my work in recent decades has been concerned with
the regulatory state, particularly in the interdisciplinary projects with life
scientists in the RELU programme, first on biopesticides and then on cattle
diseases. Justin Greaves was my
research fellow on both these projects, having been my PhD student, and we did
some work together on interdisciplinary methodology. I greatly appreciated working with Dave
Chandler at Warwick HRI at Wellesbourne and later with Graham Medley OBE and
others in Economics and Law.
Pete and I collaborated on an advanced text on Research Methods in Politics which sold
well and went into a 2nd edition.
The late Zig Layton-Henry and Karen Gilland Lutz were the other
authors. I did start work on a 3rd
edition, but one day I walked round the corner to Pete’s research shed and we
mutually agreed that we had too many other commitments to complete it.
One of the influences that Pete had on me was that I started
to do a lot more archival work, principally at the National Archives at Kew. I also served on committees of the Modern Records Centre at Warwick. The Advisory Board was chaired for a while by Sir George Bain whom I had known in the Business School before he went to be principal of the London Business School and then vice-chancellor of Queen's University Belfast. I had great admiration for him and I was pleased that he liked something I had written on the history of fire cover policy (he chaired an investigatory panel on this subject for the Blair Government).
David Coen
David first contacted me when he was a PhD student at the European University Institute. He then spent a term at Nuffield College, Oxford when I was on study leave there. Our first collaboration was a journal article on the Transatlantic Business Dialogue. In 2006 we produced a short edited book on Business and Government: Methods and Practice for an IPSA series. Our major collaboration was on The Oxford Handbook of Business and Government with Graham Wilson. This came out in 2010: plans for a second edition never came to fruition because of other commitments. In 2017 we published a collection of key articles on business and government with Edward Elgar (see photo above).
We also taught the Warwick MPA module on the EU in Brussels together for a number of years. I acted as an external examiner at UCL where David became a professor and head of department for some years. Above all, David has been a friend as well as a collaborator and I was delighted to attend his wedding reception with my late wife.
A personal path
Framed in the doorway of a student house in Leicester
When I was applying to university I was given at two E's offer by LSE having made a good impression in interview. I decided instead to go Leicester, a decision I never regretted. I was concerned that at LSE I could end up commuting to university (in the summer vacations I spent some time in the LSE library). I also thought that I would be a small fish in a big pond at LSE. What I did not anticipate but avoided were the student protests that hit LSE in the time I would have been there. A pull factor was that Leicester offered a common social science first year before you committed to a major. I learnt a great deal from the first year courses in Economics, Sociology and Economic History (the latter including a term on Japan which widened my horizons). The Geography course was less satisfactory.
I should add that I was fortunate enough to receive a full grant which more or less covered my term time living expenses and I did not have to pay fees. Essex County Council even paid me to stay at the university in my last Easter vacation to revise. There was enough vacation work to keep me going out of term time. My postgraduate fees and living costs were covered by the ESRC and I was able to earn extra money through part-time teaching and part-time military service. My oldest granddaughter, about to embark on a postgraduate degree in the autumn, faces a very different financial scenario. But then when I went to university only about seven per cent of the age cohort was doing so. (I don't think there is any magic formula that can fix what the percentage should be).
I have already explained why I went to Strathclyde and then to Exeter. As I had anticipated, Jeff Stanyer was a meticulous and knowledgeable supervisor who had an encyclopedic knowledge of Devon politics. His 'brown peril' book on County Government was a model of rigour. He always commented on work very promptly and thoroughly. Not everyone at Exeter was such a good PhD supervisor. Jeff didn't publish as much as he could have done, particularly later in life, with unpublished manuscripts left in drawers.
In applying for posts, I was short listed at Warwick, Essex and Newcastle. I felt that Newcastle was just too far from London. I didn't want to return to Essex and the department there had a particular view of what constituted political science. Warwick was more tolerant of a variety of approaches in line with the eclectic tradition in the UK.
My PhD had been in the area of local electoral politics. This was very 'dans le vent' at the time because of the influence of the community power debate in the US and the more specific debate in the UK about local government reorganisation. In part I captured a form of politics in small urban district councils that was about to disappear. No more would Dawlish could be convulsed by the fate of six illuminated gnomes on the local amusement arcade that were said to be turning it into the 'Las Vegas of Devon'.
When I was appointed to Warwick it was as a public administration specialist. I had decided to move away from election studies because I could see it was (quite rightly) going to move in the direction of using econometric techniques. I could cope with intermediate level statistics in the form of correlation and regression, but my maths would fail me beyond that point.
I could also see that traditional public administration was a dead end and that the focus would move to the outputs (and possibly the outcomes) of public policy so I became someone who worked on comparative policy in advanced industrial countries (principally I covered the UK, Germany, Italy, Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and to a limited extent Japan).
My main areas of specialism were agricultural policy; environmental policy (and increasingly the interface between agriculture and the environment); economic policy; and trade policy. In general terms I would see myself as someone who worked on comparative political economy with special reference to the UK, although I was also interested in globalisation and hence international political economy.
Other areas I worked in were the history of political science, pressure groups and lobbying and business-government relations. I advanced a distinction between and a typology of 'insider' and 'outsider' groups at an ECPR workshop in 1978. The British Journal of Political Science rejected it for publication, but I was nevertheless able to attract rent from it in terms of citations for the next few decades, although the distinction increasingly lost traction as the world of lobbying changed. (For an update see my book on Lobbying).
Published by Manchester University Press (2018)
I was always aware in studying UK political economy that the real leaders in the field in Britain were Mick Moran and Andrew Gamble It is fitting that Andrew published an excellent review of Mick's contribution in Government and Opposition in 2021. Mick's death was a great loss, but I continue to benefit from his work on the regulatory state, while also benefitting from Andrew's insights on the particular trajectory of the UK.
I was always keen to engage with the world of practical policy and chaired the Warwick Commission on Elected Mayors which got me an invitation to an event at 10 Downing Street when Dave Cameron was prime minister. I worked on this commission with Graham Wilson who subsequently undertook work on the subject in the United States: https://warwick.ac.uk/research/warwickcommission/electedmayors/summaryreport/
One bonus in retirement was being made Reports and Surveys editor of Political Quarterly. I have always been of the view that academics should engage with policy makers and PQ operates along that interface. The contributions and the readership are drawn from both the world of politics, broadly conceived, and the world of the academic study of politics.
The wider profession
From 2002 to 2005 I was chair of the Political Studies
Association, probably brought in ‘as a safe pair of hands’. The late John Benyon who was for many years
the Association’s Treasurer was a great servant of the PSA in terms of building
up its funds, but also was inclined to view himself as the real power behind
the throne.
The PSA’s office was then situated in Newcastle and Jack
Arthurs as company secretary worked effectively and competently, aided by
Sandra McDonagh who looked after the membership. Jack played a particularly important role in
the organisation of the annual awards ceremony which connected us with
decision-makers and gave us some useful publicity. I also had a very interesting conversation
with Gordon Brown at one of these events when he was Chancellor. He was very proud of his PhD and the fact
that he had lectured in politics for one year.
Where I think I did a good job was building up an effective
working relationship with the British International Studies Association which
had been formed as a separate entity in the 1970s, in part because there was a
wish to move beyond the traditional international relations focus of ‘relations
between states’ represented in the PSA.
We needed to work effectively together because of the upcoming research
assessment exercise and we were able to make a joint nomination of Professor
Tony Payne as chair and split the other nominations between us.
Where I was less successful was in the forward looking
strategy exercise towards the end of my period in the office. Holding meetings in a hotel in the Lake
District didn’t help (not really my idea) as one group went off on a boat
trip. Whilst we came up with some
useful ideas, it wasn’t the strategic overview that was really needed.
Subsequently I joined the executive committee of the
International Political Science Association as in effect a PSA representative,
becoming vice-president for Europe and Africa from 2009 to 2012 and academic
convenor of the IPSA congress in Madrid in 2012. At this event I and some other EC members had
an audience with the future King of Spain who impressed me with his questions
and understanding of contemporary issues (he was a Georgetown graduate).
In the courtyard of the presidential palace in Chile, the best glass of red wine I ever had.
The preceding Congress had been held in Santiago, Chile and
I was one of those invited to the presidential palace to meet the impressive President
Michelle Bachelet who had been imprisoned by the Pinochet regime. She asked me if I had ever been to Buckingham
Palace and I said I had been a couple of times for garden parties. ‘Did the Queen give you a tour? ‘she asked, ‘Well,
I am going to give you a tour of my palace.’
What she really wanted to show us is what I can only describe as a
shrine to President Allende at the point where he had fallen during the coup.
Some people have questioned the need for IPSA, arguing that the American Political Science Association is better placed and resourced to act as a worldwide organisation for political science. Indeed, to some extent it did carry out this function. When I was PSA chair I attempted with some success to build links with APSA. Perhaps the high point or low point of this process was when I was invited to attend the 'regionals' meeting at the APSA congress. This was for the various organisations covering regions of the US like the south or the north-east (I attended a couple of these regional conferences myself).
APSA did play an important and positive role in IPSA, but I think there was a need for a distinct organisation that was in principle multilateral. In particular IPSA could and did help political science in the Global South where it faced many challenges from funding to repressive regimes. The Global South fund, to which I contributed, helped political scientists from these countries to attend the Congress and we were able to offer some help and support to newly formed associations in countries where there had been a measure of democratisation (things are, of course, going backwards in that respect).
As far as APSA was concerned, apart from being a regular attender at congresses for many years, I served for two years as president of the British Politics Group. Its existence reflected an era when there were a number of Anglophiles in American political science who taught courses specifically on the UK. The doyen was Sam Beer at Harvard who wrote some superb interpretations of British politics.
The BPG continues to function, but I am old fashioned enough to miss the printed newsletter which contained short articles, book reviews and news of members.
'Grade inflation'
The correspondence and editorial columns of the newspapers often contain complaints about 'grade inflation' in the award of degrees. I had extensive experience as an external examiner and in the past I think that marking was often too harsh. This was particularly the case in relation to the first class category with the bar being set too high so that students were given a very good upper second which did not differentiate them from students who had scraped an upper second. One problem was a reluctance to give high marks in the first class category which could be a problem when there was an averaging convention. Warwick and other institutions got over this by adopting a 17-point grading scale.
Over time we learnt to be more explicit in explaining to students what we expected of them. Students in turn have become more focused on achieving a good degree. When I graduated you could get a graduate level job with a third, but now many employers will not consider anyone who has not got an upper second.
Some of the students I taught in the 1970s were interesting characters. One Communist would sit glowering in the seminar until eventually he asked his standard question: 'This is all very well, but what is the attitude of the chiefs of police on this issue?' One day he varied his question and asked what I would do when the revolution came. My response was that no doubt he would be my local commissar and I would await his instructions.
The students whom I taught in the later phase of my career were much more challenging intellectually and I learnt a lot from my interactions with them, but they were also fewer characters than in the early days. One student who was on the hard left subsequently worked for Tony Blair and is now a Viscountess.
One final comment I would make about teaching is that the PhD students I supervised at Warwick were not generally as good as I would have had at, say, Manchester or LSE. Some of them were a struggle. There were exceptions such as Justin Greaves and Richard Youngs. I should also add that the quality of the PhD students has approved considerably over time, in part because they were recruited in large part from the MA programmes. The training offered to PhD students also became much more systematic, in part stimulated by the ESRC. Pete Burnham also did a lot of work in this area as chair.
Head of department
In 1990 I became chair of the merged Department of Politics
and International Studies. Willie
Paterson had set up the merger as chair, but I needed to see it to
completion. In particular, I need to
assure Barry Buzan and Charles Jones that the future of international studies
was safe in my hands. Along with acting
chair Zig Layton-Henry we had a series of quadrilateral meetings. What I was trying to get across was that I
saw the future expansion as being largely on the international studies side
where there was scope for attracting graduate students in accordance with the
vision of the new Graduate School led by Professor [later Sir] Bob Burgess.
Barry and I established a good working relationship which
produced an enhanced MA in International Studies and a new MA in International
Political Economy. We complemented each
other well as Barry was good on strategic vision and I was happy to do all the
detail work necessary to get University approval for new programmes and
modules. It was a setback when Barry
decided to base himself in London at the University of Westminster (and later
at LSE).
Professor Iain McLean was recruited from Oxford with the
intention that he would become head of department after I had completed my
three year term. I think that Iain and I
respected each other and we had a common interest in a Welsh narrow gauge
railway, albeit that Iain was a trustee.
We even started to discuss possible joint research projects. However, after just two years, Iain was
understandably attracted by a return to Oxford at Nuffield College. This meant that I had to carry on as head of
department, eventually serving for seven years given that there was a lack of
enthusiasm for the poisoned chalice.
Hugh Beale in Law and I had carried out a survey of work
being done on the EU in the Faculty and out of this came an idea for an
interdisciplinary European Public Policy Institute (EPPI) which would
coordinate and stimulate this work.
Professor Jeremy Richardson was appointed to head this new body.
Unfortunately, Jeremy and I did not work together as well as
I would have liked which was disappointing given that we both valued research
and had related interests. Jeremy went
to Essex which was, I think, a better fit for him. I am pleased that we got back on good terms.
We are good friends and I have been a reviewer for many years for the Journal of European Public Policy which
Jeremy co-edits from New Zealand.
Jeremy thought, with some justification, that I was not
shaking the department up quickly enough, but that would have been easier for
an outsider like Iain McLean. There were
also some real obstacles in easing out members of staff who were not research
active which posed some real dilemmas for Mike Shattock as registrar. Managing academics has been likened to
herding cats, given their tendency to think of themselves as independent
contractors while drawing a salary, but arguably this was a more than usually
difficult department to manage. There
was a lack of recognition in some quarters of how quickly universities were
changing towards a more managerial model (which, of course, is contested:
personally I think the pendulum has swung too far).
Jeremy and I also had a genuine difference of opinion on the
role of normative political theory in the discipline. I thought that it was still an important
strand, although I did think that conventional history of political thought modules
considered too narrow a range of theorists and omitted some of the most
interesting ones. I did, however, think
that what might broadly term the post-Rawlsian debate on justice was
significant and needed to be addressed.
I was not convinced that the department could build up an expertise in
area like electoral studies from a standing start. I also thought that it had
in many respects ceased to be a research frontier in the sense that most of the
important theoretical and methodological breakthroughs had been made whereas in
areas like public policy there was scope for using quantitative analysis or
other new approaches.
With the departure of Willie Paterson, our historic strength
in European Integration had been weakened, as had our former strengths in
French and German politics. Whilst I
think I started a rebuilding process in areas like IPE, it happened too slowly
in my watch to safeguard our research rankings.
When I took over as chair, the departmental office, although efficient in its way, could fairly be described as ‘state of the art for the 1950s.’ With the appointment of the capable Hayley McConville (nee Gilder) as departmental administrator we moved into the micro-computer age. Email came later, and was both a blessing and a curse
Recruitment interviews
Over the years I have been involved in numerous recruitment interviews, both as the 'spare tyre' for appointments in other departments at Warwick and as an external assessor. The one general observation I would make is how frequently candidates shoot themselves in the foot, more often than not the favoured candidate. One piece of advice: when you are asked at the end of interview is there a question you would like to put to the panel, it's probably better to say nothing. If you get the job, there will be a subsequent negotiation (for full professors usually with the vice-chancellor). If you do ask a question, don't ask what the dental plan is!
Advocacy
I was never interested in a career in politics. I knew enough about it to realise that it's an awful job and I am always intrigued by why anyone wants to do it, although I appreciate that many are motivated at least initially by the desire to shape a better world. However, that can be done from behind the scenes as well by feeding ideas and evidence into the policy process.
I never found the 'my party right or wrong' aspect of partisan politics easy, although I can see the need for a measure of party discipline. As a media commentator, I was required not to be a member of a party and I had to sign a declaration to that effect (and also that I was not campaigning) at each general election.
It was only after Wilfrid Harrison retired that we discovered he was a Labour voter. These days staff tend to more up front about their ideological preferences and there are clear arguments for doing that. I did cross the line and became an advocate on issues relating to agricultural policy and in particular its relationship with the environment (indeed it may have cost me an advisory post in government).
I have made the case for using biocontrol as a more environmentally friendly form of plant protection, for example to a committee of the European Parliament. I also advised and spoke at the meetings of the European organisation for developers of biocontrol products. They felt that I could say things to the European institutions which came better from me than from them. I have written on this topic in non-academic as well as academic publications in conjunction with David Chandler at Warwick HRI. I have also valued a good working relationship with Roma Gwynn, an adviser to growers across the world on the use of biocontrol. We recently wrote a chapter together on the regulation of biocontrol products, existing regimes in the EU and elsewhere often frustrating their wider use.
Emeritus professor
Universities are unsure whether emeritus professors are an asset or a liability. They can consume resources and get in the way of necessary modernisation as a brooding presence. Being an emeritus professor gives me online access to the library, which is important for my continuing work, and also maintains my email address which many people know. I also work with the University's communications team for print media, radio and television.
The department, however, gave the misleading impression that I was not wanted on board. I understood that I could not be given office space when I stopped teaching, but predecessors were allocated a desk. I was told I could use a computer in the visiting fellows office. What I was not aware of at the time (and could have been explained) was that the department was facing serious space constraints which have since become worse.
An attempt to make a presentation to a departmental seminar was unsuccessful. I did have good relations with individual members of the department and helped them with their work and when I attended a research day I got a friendly reception, so I was never quite sure what the issue was (and perhaps there wasn't one, it's easy to put two and two together to make five). It certainly wasn't my intention to interfere.
Through David Coen, I did have an associate fellowship at University College London but I quickly learnt I could do all I wanted to do, including peer review work, from home. I even got a 'reviewer of the year' award from the Journal of European Public Policy after retiring. My general practice is to try and confine academic related work to the morning when I am more alert.
Final thoughts
One Christmas I was given one of those 'reflect on your life' books by my oldest granddaughter (she will be starting a MA in the autumn of 2021). One comment I made was that I could have had as as successful a career, or made as great a contribution, if I had not published 25 per cent of my output: the problem is I didn't know which publications would constitute the 25 per cent.
On the whole, I enjoyed my career and the colleagues and students I worked with. The alternative career for me would have been journalism, but relative success there would have been more uncertain. I did have an interview as an undergraduate with Michael Heseltine's Haymarket Press, but wasn't excited by the offer of working on a golf magazine!
The 1980s were the worst period, both for universities generally and me personally. Universities and politics departments in particular are now facing a new an unprecedented set of challenges, not just arising from the pandemic, and I empathise with those who have to face them. They are more difficult than the challenges I faced and the future is more uncertain.
Teaching
Some of the principal courses I taught at Warwick:
Introduction to Research Methods (1st year undergraduate)
California Government and Politics (1st year option)
Politics in the UK (2nd year)
European Integration (3rd year)
Making of Economic Policy (3rd year, jointly taught with Economics)
Economic and Political Theories (3rd year PPE, jointly taught with Economics)
Advanced Research Methods (3rd year option)
Politics of International Trade (MA optional module, initially with Nicola Phillips, later with Dominic Kelly with whom I produced a co-edited book on international trade)
Graduate Seminar in European Integration (MA option, later taught by Ben Rosamond)
Public Policy in the European Union (WBS MPA programme, taught in Brussels with David Coen)
Problems of British Economic Management (MA option)
Core module, MSc in Plant Science for Crop Production (Warwick HRI) (I also taught on a 2nd year undergraduate module in Life Sciences)
