300 words with...
Floris van Berckel Smit
PhD candidate in political history at VU Amsterdam and a visiting scholar at Ghent University
From the end of the 1970s, an economic crisis left its mark on the Netherlands, Belgium and the world. Against this backdrop, a public debate arose about the performance of the public and semi-public sectors. Politicians and administrators reflected on the functioning of these organisations. They would be inefficient.
In their search for efficiency, politicians and administrators turned to the business community. The idea that public and semi-public organisations could learn from methods, techniques and concepts originating from or inspired by the private sector became popular. At the end of the twentieth century, for example, Dutch parliamentarians undertook internships at companies during the summer recess to gain new insights. Management literature was also incredibly popular during that period. For example, the book In Search of Excellence (1982) by the McKinsey consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman was the most widely distributed library book in the world until 1997. We call this phenomenon New Public Management (NPM).
The rise of NPM took place in various sectors. One of those sectors is higher education. In my PhD research, I analyse the emergence of NPM within Dutch and Flemish universities between 1970 and 2020. During that period, for example, financial incentives were introduced, linked to, among other things, the number of diplomas and publications.
“What can we learn from the past when reviewing the funding system of universities or when reorganising business operations?”
The institutions also professionalised their business operations by, for example, organising support services such as HRM, finance and IT more centrally instead of at the faculty level.
By focusing on how and why stakeholders introduced new management ideas and mapping out how ideas were exchanged between universities, education ministries and on an international scale, my research aims to make the emergence of NPM clearer. At the same time, the historical perspective provides insight into learning experiences that may be relevant when reflecting on contemporary issues. What can we learn from the past when reviewing the funding system of universities or when reorganising business operations?
Floris van Berckel Smit (1993) is a PhD candidate in political history at VU Amsterdam and a visiting scholar at Ghent University. He has a background in history and public administration. In 2020, he received funding from NWO to conduct PhD research on the rise of New Public Management within Dutch and Flemish universities. He has published his research in international peer-reviewed journals such as Management & Organizational History and Higher Education Quarterly.
magazine for humanities alumni june 2024