ABSTRACT
Local authorities are especially complex maelstroms of competing assumptive worlds, multiple professional and managerial ethics, and modes of reasoning. Nick Raynsford, the minister for local government, a man whom the author respect and admire, met most of the London leaders and Chief Executives a couple of weeks after the May 2002 local elections, to discuss the forthcoming review of local authority funding mechanisms. Local authorities, like the health service and many other public institutions, have denial of this principle at their absolute foundations. Good local authorities work out processes that allow the local politicians to exercise this knack for impossible reasoning over as wide a field as possible, and quietly keep them from making technical mistakes, large and small. Local authorities are especially complex maelstroms of competing assumptive worlds, multiple professional and managerial ethics, and modes of reasoning. Fashionable cant demands that local politicians should concentrate on 'strategic' issues and leave the rest to the officers.
