Kindle book 41 was the first thing I read explicitly for work at GDS.
Every now and then Mike chucks a book at me. They've never been things it would occur to me to read otherwise, public policy etc is just not a world I know much about. But they've all been good so far. Normally I go and download it on the kindle anyway; so I can take notes.
This was Motivation, Agency and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and Queens by Julian Le Grand. It was a fascinating introduction to a new world of thinking. Got me thinking about why people do things. Not consumers, but public servants. People inside organisations, not outside them. Helped me look beyond the civil service cliches.
I didn't highlight a lot, partly because I was just ploughing through. I should go an reread it. A year on, I bet it'd be useful again.
"Behaviour is the product of an interaction between motivation and constraints"
"As Michael Power (1999: ch. 5) has argued, in circumstances where they are regularly audited professionals feel (rightly) that they are no longer trusted; they feel resentful at the auditing requirements imposed on them by the inspection agencies; they become less committed to the service and more inclined to pursue their self-interest."
"Efforts to understand and persuade are both a cause and a consequence of respect for others; hence, since respect for others is morally desirable, so are understanding and persuasion, and so is the mechanism that brings them about: market exchange. "