Number 8 Barbed Wire

The paradox of public sector managerialism and kiwi culture

Last week as I attended a public management conference in Seoul I noticed that as you shake hands with someone new, it’s common to peer at their midriff to read their conference lanyard and university affiliation. Where are you from? I tended to add that I’m originally from Berlin and have been in New Zealand for 15 years now. I do that to help people with identifying my accent, and to signal to other Europeans my neighbour status.

Often this lead to interesting chats comparing conditions in one’s respective countries – what is different and unique about New Zealand compared to the Netherlands, Malaysia, Italy, Brazil or Switzerland. Such conversations can make you look at your chosen home country in a different light, so today I want to reflect on a trail of thought that was kicked off in this manner. It concerns a paradox that I see in our culture – or what I as a naturalised European New Zealander perceive of it.

One limitation should be clear from the jump: this is an intensely Pākeha point of view. In parts it may even stand in cynical contrast to a Māori or Pacific perspective, but I can’t represent that, so I’ll speak to what I know as a Giwi – a German Kiwi.

Rule Kiwiana

What stands out to me about Aotearoa NZ is how “young” its current form is. To me and many visitors, its culture is fundamentally peaceful, friendly, egalitarian. In a small village where everyone is connected via two degrees it pays to avoid conflict, keep on the sunny side. Germans can bond over a shared complaint – I had to learn quickly that that doesn’t fly here. And we don’t like anyone getting too big for their boots. Being posh, assertive or overly formal marks you out as a weirdo here. I recall how amazing it was to me, fresh off the boat, that everyone goes by their first names – all the way up to the CEO.

All that is so lovely. But 15 years on, I observe that this “we’re all in this together” attitude in working environments obscures an unspoken class conflict, an unevenness in power and discretion that is as real here as anywhere in the world – but that we seem to politely ignore. Perhaps at our peril? Fundamentally, it concerns the question of institutional power.

It’s especially when I hear public management researchers describe conditions in their countries, that it strikes me how managerialist New Zealand’s public service is.

What do I mean by that? “Managerialism is the assumption that in any enterprise or organisation, managers are the most important people – more important than bureaucrats, clerks, accountants, teachers, doctors, nurses and so on” (Downs and Larkey 1986).

In organisations, managers hold most (or all of) the formal power, based on the assumption that they have superior knowledge and training, and that they can oversee work (and workers) from an elevated position – thus being the ONLY ones able to grasp the bigger issues, find the right strategic solutions, and carry out the necessary structural interventions. Ultimately, only managers can ensure that an organisation runs efficiently and effectively – that is how their position of power is justified.

While the idea of managerialism isn’t new, the “hero manager” à la Steve Jobs is very much a phenomenon of our time, globally. This culture seems to have permeated New Zealand’s public service culture deeper and more insidiously than elsewhere.

It’s almost like in a country that doesn’t have a long history of class and aristocracy – the doors were wide open for an ideology that cloaks sweeping power in the assumption of merit.

But let’s break it down – why do I say that?

After my first few working years in consultancies, here and overseas, I took specialist jobs first in a bank and then in the public sector because I wanted to better understand what the deal was with the “internal politics” that my clients kept invoking when they went through the umpteenth delay due to some sign-offs. I could not understand why the heck that was – so I wanted to see it for myself. And boy howdy, did I ever...

I vividly remember how often I’d wanted to go ahead with a task but was told I’d have to “check with ABC” first, or “run it past XYZ, just to be sure”. It was bad in the bank; it was worse in public sector.

You get immersed in this culture of running everything up the flagpole – I don’t think I even questioned why I as a specialist had little to no discretion on anything related to my expertise. Like the metaphorical frog in hot water, you learn to accept that that’s the done thing: you do the legwork, then you prepare a case, and you try your very best to put this case to a person with actual power - and with any luck that person waves their hand over you and lets you pass on to the next institutional power-that-be. And maybe not… maybe your expertise was not convincing enough - tough. Do better next time.

One single path to discretion

Now with some distance, a whole lot of reading under my belt, and conversations with peers from overseas, it strikes me how steep the reverse pyramid is in New Zealand – with so much of the corporate workforce committed to squeezing decisions through the same tiny bottlenecks of discretion on top.

It can seem like the nature of corporate life - but I’m here to tell you this is not a law of nature.

Sure, managers hold power in other systems too - and they’re also not wrong to. They themselves hold expertise and experience. But there are also systems that distribute discretion broader, based on formal education, expertise and tenure. Some systems favour commission-style group settings where subject matter experts are charged with decision-making. These specialists are not there because they are managers - but because they are experts. In NZ, we seem to conflate the two more and more. These systems also wrestle with imperfections, like the lenghtiness of decision-making - but they have more than one path to institutional power and consensus. And that’s something to behold.

In New Zealand’s public service, expertise seems to count mostly as a qualifier on the pathway to managerial power – but on its own, what significance does it hold?

And that leads me to wonder how this state of affairs can happen, in such a kind and supposedly egalitarian country.

Un-Kiwi?

We can’t talk about managerial power without looking at the pointy end of it. It’s all nice to be on first-name terms, talk about “my door is always open” and have skip-level days for Executives. But sometimes the going gets tough and difficult decisions have to be made. Part of managerialism is the conviction that radical actions have to be taken in order for the organisation to move forward. Managers earn their decisiveness-badges in these moments, when their stiff upper lip steers their ship through the rough seas of budget cuts, restructures and the re-formulation of institutional intent that ends up in the shedding of staff.

To me, this is where managerial culture stands on conflict with the cultural contract of Pākeha New Zealand: we’re in this together, we trust each other, we avoid conflict – until the firm requires us to do the opposite. If it’s just what needs to be done, then so be it. It’s not personal, it’s just business. The strategy demands it. Then the clever kiwi number 8 wire has to be wound with barbed wire - can’t be helped.

Barbed wire - photo by Megan Clark

But the thing is – we have little to no evidence that we ARE making progress this way. So many of our policies and programmes are repeating with tweaked semantics. And that is again uniquely New Zealand: in public service, we do SO many things in aid of progress and efficiency gains, but we seem to be positively allergic to measuring, qualifying after-effects and recording the impacts of what occurred, as I’ve alluded to in a few previous posts. We’re masters at wording intent, strategy and action plan – and paupers on follow-through or metric.

In this sense, we really might have introduced a class divide into our institutional lives, without really being aware of its existence.

Our public service managerial culture is extreme. And we’re too nice and trusting to recognise it.

And that may not be by accident…

Dressing-down ones power

I reckon we don’t see and feel the class differences between managers and the rest as clearly as me might, because technically - anyone can aspire to join their ranks. In most corporate professions, the only path of progression is into a managerial position. And though we know that being a great expert and being a great manager does not always go together, we have few alternatives. Since institutional power is only vested in management titles, all paths of seniority must lead here.

Moreover, the low power-distance and under-statement of kiwi culture means that those who have joined the “ruling class” know very well not to parade their power on a daily basis.

One of my managers once corrected me when I introduced him at an event as “my manager” by clarifying: “I work with Annika”. It was important to him not to use hierarchical language, show me that I’m not his subordinate, as such. That was meant nice enough, I’m sure. But the thing is… I was a subordinate. And that became all-too apparent when a few months later, a restructure initiated by him put me hierarchically into an impossible position, no matter my counsel and pleading. He “worked with me” in the same way that a chess player works with a pawn. And trying to say it’s all not like that doesn’t change the bottom line. It puts a nice touchy-feely-spin on it that benefits him, not me.

In my jobs in Germany, my managers did not try to dress down who they were: they were my bosses. That’s just a fact - they hold power over my employment. It’s not the power that’s the problem, but the way you yield it. The rest is marketing.

Editing ones language to veil the markers of power doesn’t negate it. It just shows that those in power have learned to be low-key about it. That makes them polite, but no less powerful - quite the opposite: it makes it harder for everyone to openly point to power discrepancies and their consequences without being indelicate.

This is the nubbin of it all: New Zealanders don’t like to think of power, I believe we really hold egalitarian values in principle. And I love that for us. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are power imbalances, and that there are people who sit at the long end of the lever, and others who do not.

I don’t mean to sound like a bleeding-heart socialist, rallying against power. Let’s be clear - the existence of formal power in institutions is unavoidable and not problematic in itself. But the level of discretion that is handed over, and the degree of concentration and distribution make a massive difference in how it is wielded. When we down-play the existence of power imbalances and funnel even minor decision-making upwards, we obscure not only its existence - but crucially the responsibilities that should come with.

This recent paper (co-authored by one of my supervisors) describes how in their own perception, organisational managers in the public sector perform “a support function for frontline services”, which:

“enables them to re-articulate managerial activities as supportive rather than controlling.” (Alamaa, Hall & Löfgren, 2025)

So in other words, manager’s self-understanding as “serving” leaders can be a way to interpret their choices as something self-less – something that the system requires of them. So when managers have to make “tough” decisions, let people go, put their teams through restructure processes that they know people will suffer under – it’s all for the greater good. Business is business, it has to be done. Or as I cited senior leaders in a previous post: “the turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.”

Performatively asserting that there is no power imbalance is a prerogative of those who hold power, a pacifying spoon full of sugar.

Last week’s Guardian interview with Succession writer Jesse Armstrong noted a similar interesting observation made by him on what people with a lot of power have in common:

“A wilful positivity about their own effect on the world.”

I’m not saying that people in manager positions are all callous to this, or that they don’t groan under the weight of the responsibility – I’m certain that they do. But I do suggest that a coping strategy might be to just think of yourself as a player in the game, and downplay your capacity to shape how it is being played. If you can’t fight them, join them - right? Because that’s the one way out: become a manager yourself.

Unbounded?

The difference between how we handle this problem in NZ and elsewhere is this: Countries that have historically seen more direct class confrontation, from general strikes to royal revolutions, may be more cognisant of the societal consequences that power imbalances have. And in many cases, they have put more nuanced institutional checks in balances in place to cap how far managerial discretion can go in public institutions. All that also creates different expectations on public managers and their performance- which may be difficult to translate to from where we are sitting in one leap.

I’m sure many public managers in NZ have the sense that they do not have a lot of liberty to decide and “rule” at will. But from the talks at the conference, it very much seems that formal accountability in the form of assessments of managerial decisions and institutional metrics are taken more serious elsewhere. Though I want it on record that I’m not saying anyone else out there has found a perfect solution.

I wonder if New Zealand’s history may have created us a “working class” (not in the literal sense, mind you) with less of a sense of self-efficacy. It may have fed the unarticulated conviction that you can’t possibly do anything against the powers to be. Plus – who even would think of themselves as “working class”, when I go to work in nice clothes, sit at a desk and have coffee catch-ups?