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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…
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The Social Network and the Entrepreneurship Genre
During the 1993-94 academic year, as a visiting professor at the Kennedy School and resident faculty member at Quincy House, I discovered facebook. At the start of the year, the house published its facebook: a softcover booklet with pictures of and biographical information about all the students there, as well as lists showing the students…
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Waiting for Superman: Too Many Stories
I saw Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about American public education, “Waiting for Superman,” at the cinema recently because of its relevance to a chapter of my forthcoming book Governing Fables. The chapter deals with transformational teachers in inner-city public high schools and discusses stories of those who succeed (“Stand and Deliver” and “Freedom Writers”) and those…
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Social Studies: Confrontation and Celebration
I’m just back from the Social Studies event last weekend and here are my reactions. First, the confrontation. The issue of whether Harvard should accept the scholarship fund named in honor of Marty Peretz was passionately debated, but it did not dominate the day. The protesters outside the Science Building seminar and Adams House luncheon…
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Awaiting the Social Studies Celebration: With Anticipation or Apprehension?
When the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Harvard’s Social Studies program, in which I majored, was announced, I immediately made plans to attend. While the term “social studies” in Ontario, and likely many other places, refers to part of the elementary school curriculum, at Harvard it is something special. Social studies is an interdisciplinary…
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Neil Reynolds: Not Ready for Prime Time
For some time Neil Reynolds published his op-ed pieces in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, where they generally escaped readers’ attention. Now that he’s been moved to the op-ed page, he’s getting lots of attention. Reynolds’s take is what might be called Tea Party Canadian-style. For Reynolds, government is always parasitic and the…
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Why the Silence from Mr. Harper?
It intrigues me that during the entire long-form census controversy Mr. Harper has said nothing. The initial explanation is that he is on vacation at his summer residence at Harrington Lake. The tactical explanation is that on a controversial issue the relevant minister(s) should speak for the government, as Bernier and Clement are doing, and…
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Re-encountering Lorne Weil: A Narrative of Reinvention
Last week I was reading Walter Keichel’s The Lords of Strategy, a history of strategic management, a field in which both academics and consultants have made important conceptual contributions. Early on, there was a somewhat inside-baseball chapter about the development of the market growth-industry share matrix by the Boston Consulting Group in the late Sixties.…
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Statistics Canada: The Administrative Will or the Political Won
Yes Minister once referred to the clash between the political will and the administrative won’t, but in the case of retaining the mandatory long-form census, I think it is more appropriate to reverse the terms. Chief Statistician Munir Sheik’s resignation on a matter of principle is extraordinary and courageous. I heard him speak once or…
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The Census Long Form: Different Messages from Politicians and Public Servants
The census issue not only refuses to go away but during the last week has become more contentious. While more and more voices are calling more loudly for retaining the mandatory long form, the government is sticking more adamantly with the voluntary form. StatsCan is doing what public servants should be doing. They have accepted…
- 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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