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Innovation: What a Minister Says, What the Media Write
I am always on the lookout for stories about public sector innovation, and I heard one last week. John McCallum, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, was on CBC radio news announcing that his department had introduced innovations to reduce the processing time for spousal immigration applications from two years to one. He mentioned that this…
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Public Servants, Prepare for War
One thing I learned in economics graduate school is the doctrine of revealed preference, which recommends evaluating people on the basis of the choices they make rather than the things they say. That doctrine is turning out to be particularly relevant in understanding Donald Trump, who will say anything on any side of any issue.…
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Richard Posner’s Academic Hyper-Productivity
One of the strongest influences on my research on narrative has been Richard Posner’s Law and Literature – all three editions of it. What I like about the book(s) is his thoughtful readings of literary texts dealing with the law and the legal system, and the way his book has evolved from a focus on…
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Analyzing US Presidential Campaign Ads
This is a report on an ongoing research project on public sector narrative. With the support of my latest SSHRC Insight Grant, a research assistant and I have been recording and coding all the ads posted on their YouTube channels by the Clinton and Trump campaigns and their associated PACs. We have coded their ads…
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How to Wear a Phi Beta Kappa Key (if you choose to)
Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest, best-known, and most prestigious academic honor society in the US. Graduates in the top 10 percent of the undergrad class in 284 member universities are elected to Phi Beta Kappa, which I estimate gives a total of one million people eligible to join. (This background information is for the…
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A Canadian Take on American Greatness
I’ve missed posting for a while: blame it on a perfect storm of obligations – the Jewish holidays and an assignment to grade – and celebrations – a fantastic reunion of my Harvard undergraduate class and two post-season games that we saw the Blue Jays win. A Toronto-based social media campaign titled Tell American its…
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Reading Peter Singer While Visiting Fallingwater
Our older son is very interested in Frank Lloyd Wright’s archictecture, so we took the family on a road trip last week to visit two of his landmarks, Fallingwater, outside of Pittsburgh, and the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo. It also happened that the book I was reading at the time was Peter Singer’s The…
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My Brain for the Picking?
Recently I was approached by an NGO that deals primarily with the public sector and invited to give a lecture about an area of my expertise to a visiting group of overseas public servants. I responded that I was interested and would be willing to modify a lecture I give my public management students about…
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Make Citi Great Again
A recent New York Times article by Michael Corkery observes that Citi is running an advertising campaign in the US during the Olympics that includes ads explaining why it is sponsoring the US Olympic and Paralympic teams and an ad first aired three years ago celebrating the 200th birthday of its precursor, the First National…
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Chaos Monkeys: An Unfinished Bildungsroman
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been reading Antonio Garcia Martinez’s autobiography Chaos Monkeys. It’s been a slow read, which explains the hiatus between this and my previous post. Writing an autobiography when in your early thirties requires great hutzpah, especially if your life has not been truly exceptional. Martinez had a background in physics…
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Howard Raiffa and Airport Development
Yesterday, I read Sam Roberts’s New York Times obituary of the distinguished statistician and decision scientist Howard Raiffa. Raiffa was one of the “founding fathers” of the Harvard Kennedy School, and it was in his capacity as one of the core instructors in the early years of Harvard’s MPP Program that I got to know…
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New Public Management and the Presumptives
Public management academics never talk about New Public Management any more. Some believe it is dead, and others believe it has been transcended, with its most valuable insights now incorporated into public sector practice. Nevertheless, the two presumptive nominees seem to me to be incorporating certain aspects of NPM into their words and deeds, and…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- My latest book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, co-authored with Beth Herst, was published in April 2026 by University of Toronto Press (open access).
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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