In memoriam: Professor Christopher Hood, CBE, FBA (1947-2025)
The Department is saddened to learn that former DPIR Emeritus Professor of Government and Fellow of All Souls College Christopher Hood passed away earlier this year aged 77.
In memory of their colleague and friend, former DPIR researcher Dr Ruth Dixon and Dr Rikki Dean, Associate Professor in Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Futures at the University of Southampton, have written the following tribute:
Christopher Hood joined DPIR in 2001 as Gladstone Professor of Government and Fellow of All Souls College. He previously held chairs at the University of Sydney and the London School of Economics as well as other posts in the UK and around the world. Among his awards and honours, Christopher was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996, appointed CBE in 2011, and received the John Gaus Award for his lifetime achievements from the American Political Science Association in 2021. As the award committee noted, he “…made substantive contributions to the fields of public administration and political science for five decades. There are entire fields of knowledge that would look substantively different without his work.”
The breadth of Christopher’s work on executive government and public administration defies brief summary. It made deep contributions to addressing the core “big-picture” questions of public management. Explorations in Governance, a collection of essays to celebrate his 65th birthday in 2012, demonstrates his profound influence on how the field understands topics such as the machinery of government, regulation and control of the public sector, and performance, risk, and blame. But perhaps the best example from more than 20 books that Christopher wrote or edited is The Art of the State. Awarded the WJM Mackenzie Prize by the UK Political Studies Association in 2000, and setting out the work that Christopher himself considered among his most significant, it maps the cultural biases of public organisations from Imperial China to the contemporary moment, connecting these to characteristic failures of government.
His work had the uncanny knack of capturing the present and even foreseeing the future direction of government. He is perhaps best known for coining the term New Public Management to encapsulate a managerial approach to public sector organisation that spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s. He quickly perceived the implications of the 2008 financial crash, nimbly re-orienting the ESRC Public Services Programme (2004-2009), a major ESRC investment that had been conceived during a period of rising public spending, to the new context of retrenchment and austerity.
These concerns for how to govern in times of fiscal constraint were a recurrent theme of his later work, resulting in several further important contributions. An investigation of whether New Public Management delivered on its claims to make public services more efficient and effective was published with Ruth Dixon in 2015 as A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? It resulted in a second WJM Mackenzie Prize from the Political Studies Association, something Christopher particularly appreciated as William (Bill) Mackenzie had been his graduate supervisor at Glasgow in the 1970s. This was followed by an ESRC professorship which produced A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics with Rozana Himaz (OUP, 2017). Following his retirement in 2014, Christopher was appointed a visiting Professor at the Blavatnik School and became principal investigator on a study of fiscal control, published as The Way the Money Goes with Maia King, Iain McLean, and Barbara Piotrowska (OUP, 2023).
The practical relevance of Christopher’s research was coupled with extensive, though lesser known, efforts to ensure academic research was accessible to policymakers. We saw this first-hand when he was director of the ESRC Public Services Programme, where we were each part of Christopher’s administrative and research team. He went to great lengths to convey the messages of the almost 50 projects of the Programme in multiple formats. From his office in All Souls, many hours were spent making posters for every project, initially to present to HM Treasury, but subsequently taken on tour by Christopher across five continents, as well as videos for the OECD, and newsletters for parliamentarians and civil servants. He had the unerring ability to draw out the pragmatic relevance of every project and knew precisely how to communicate it in an engaging fashion. We recognised then that we were receiving a masterclass in effective research communication.
Christopher also engaged with the question of the development of the discipline, notably in Forging a Discipline (OUP, 2014), a history of academic politics and international relations at Oxford, which Christopher edited with Gillian Peele and Desmond King. The concluding chapter echoes his work on organisational culture. As he and his co-editors wrote, “the complex institutional/cultural context in which the academic study of politics developed in Oxford may be a critical case for those who see ‘messy’ or ‘clumsy’ institutions—that involve multiple cultural biases—as something other than an obvious case for rationalization and tidying up.” This is indicative of Christopher’s conviction that, whether a university or a government, an organisation is better served by drawing insights from multiple worldviews than a dogmatic adherence to ideological purity.
Beyond the intellectual contributions of his own work, Christopher will also be gratefully remembered for his generous encouragement of other scholars. This extends to his rigorous comments on drafts and ideas, but in particular to the mentorship he offered junior and mid-career scholars. His directorship of the ESRC Public Services Programme opened up opportunities for a generation of scholars of administrative reform. We both personally benefited in this respect. Christopher employed us from backgrounds in unrelated fields and transformed us into public administration scholars. We have seen many messages from other colleagues in recent days that attest that this generosity was widespread. His death is a great loss to the academic community.
Head of Department, David Doyle, paid this tribute:
“Professor Christopher Hood made major contributions to public administration and political science. He was a wonderful colleague, educator, and supervisor. The DPIR greatly mourn his passing. He will be sorely missed.”
Dr Ruth Dixon joined DPIR in 2006 from a background in medical research to work with the Public Services Programme. She worked there until 2015, co-authoring with Christopher “A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less?” Until her retirement in 2023, she held research posts at the Blavatnik School of Government and as a parliamentary academic fellow with the House of Lords library. Her most recent work with Christopher was a chapter for a forthcoming edited volume on civil services around the world.
Dr Rikki Dean is Associate Professor in Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Futures at the University of Southampton. After working with the Public Services Programme from 2005 to 2008, he was inspired to shift his research interests and pursue a PhD at the London School of Economics on the democratic reform of public administration. His thesis “Democratising Bureaucracy” drew extensively on Christopher’s work on organisational cultures to develop a typology of four modes of participatory governance. Before recently moving to Southampton, he worked for several years at Frankfurt University.
