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Energy Choices after Fukushima
I have been thinking about energy policy – a field in which I claim no expertise – as the ongoing catastrophe unfolds at the Fukushima nuclear reactor. The quandary is that, as Jeff Sommer argues in an article in the New York Times on Sunday March 20 entitled “A Crisis that Markets Can’t Grasp,” markets…
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If he says you’re fat, you say he’s bald
This was a political maxim Liberal strategist Jim Coutts told my public management class on a visit several years ago. Tit for tat. Continuing from last week’s post, this is not the strategy the Liberals are following as they choose not to respond to the Conservatives’ attack ads. Perhaps they simply don’t have the money…
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The Narrative Model Applied to Federal Politics
In an excellent column on March 5, The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson critiqued the federal Conservative’s attack ads by showing how Stephen Harper’s policy positions on health insurance, bilingualism, regional development, and proportional representation have changed, and then asking “what if the PM’s previous views were used against him?” I will put Simpson’s point…
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Why Did Three Management Narratives Win Oscars?
It is unusual for three management narratives – The King’s Speech, The Social Network, and Inside Job – to win Academy Awards in one year. Why did they win, and does three wins in one year represent something more than serendipity? Two of the three movies are products of the times. Inside Job dealt with…
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“Making Narrative Count” Now Available Online
My article “Making Narrative Count: A Narratological Approach to Public Management Innovation” has now been published by the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the top-ranked public administration journal. Here is an abstract of the article: Though the use of narrative has become widespread through many disciplines, it has yet to establish a strong…
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Sunnybrook Tells its Story
Toronto narratologists certainly must be noticing Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s narrative-based fund-raising campaign. You can see the ads on television, on radio, in print, and, if you’ve missed them in the media, on the Sunnybrook Foundation’s website (http://sunnybrook.ca/foundation/). Sunnybrook, located in the Don Valley in suburban Toronto, was established as a veterans’ hospital after World…
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Bertie’s Stammer or The King’s Speech ?
In my study of management and narrative, I occasionally confront a work that challenges the genre’s boundaries. So is The King’s Speech in or out? Is it primarily a buddy story and a therapeutic saga rather than a political or managerial story? Anticipating that to be the case, I concentrated recently on overtly managerial movies…
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My Common Ground with John Boehner
At first glance, Republican House leader John Boehner, the chain-smoking “congressman from K Street,” didn’t appear to be the sort of person I could in any way identify with. But, reading Peter Boyer’s profile of him in The New Yorker of last December 13, I recognized something in common in our family backgrounds. Like my…
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Do the Nation’s Media Have Any Place in the Bedrooms of its Politicians?
A comment on my post about Eliot Spitzer asked about the role the media play in disseminating stories about the personal lives of its politicians, and suggested that the Canadian media are less likely to do so than the American media. I think the point is well-taken, and have some suggestions why this may be…
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Michael Robinson, Artist in Glass
While visiting the Whetung Ojibway Arts and Crafts Gallery last week, I learned that the Metis artist Michael Robinson died last summer at the untimely age of 62. I never met him, but I mourn his passing. I had the good fortune to discover his glass sculptures at Whetung’s thirty years ago. As I understand…
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Eliot Spitzer and the Politics of Sex
The protagonist in C.P. Snow’s novel Corridors of Power, a politician who is having an affair, quotes an old Anglican Church maxim, “You can get away with unorthodox behavior. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.” That, in a nutshell, explains…
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Fair Game: Speaking, Mumbling, or Shouting Truth to Power?
I admire Jeffrey Skoll and Participant Media, the company he founded. They have a clear vision: hire name directors to make aesthetically compelling political films that show heroic individuals fighting corporate or government bureaucracies and conclude with an actionable message to the audience. Sometimes this formula works well, on other occasions not so well, and…
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The Two Nixons: A Natural Experiment
Recently I attended my first Live in HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s das Rheingold. I’m not exactly a Ringhead, but I’ve always enjoyed the Ring Cycle, in particular because of its attention to the theme of how power corrupts people. This is, of course, one of the main themes of political narrative. Das Rheingold,…
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Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job: The Treason of the Technicians
Documentary film-maker Charles Ferguson is a bona fide scholar with a 1989 Ph D in Political Science from MIT and several books about the IT industry with respectable Google Scholar counts on his cv. He also cofounded a high-tech startup, Vermeer Technologies, which was sold to Microsoft in 1996 for $133 million. He has in…
- 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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