The Free and Frank Series: How Do You Study What Nobody Has Defined?

02/05/2026

This is the eighteenth instalment in a series exploring what free and frank advice means in Aotearoa. In the last post, I drew together the two movements of the series so far, the public administration scholarship and the political theory, and offered a hypothesis: that the persistent failure to define free and frank advice is not a gap in our constitutional arrangements but possibly its most important feature (Honig, 1993). This week, the series turns to method. By the end of this post, I hope to have shown why the kind of question this research asks requires a particular kind of answer, and why the way one looks determines what one can see.

The theoretical landscape we have walked through over the past six months taught us something important, if uncomfortable. No single tradition can define free and frank advice. Consent theory cannot resolve the tension between professional judgement and democratic mandate (Finer, 1941; Friedrich, 1940; Simmons, 2001). Rationalism cannot ground the official’s authority without sliding into epistocracy (Brennan, 2016; Estlund, 2008). Republicanism reframes the question usefully but cannot account for the constitutional plurality that Te Tiriti establishes (Pettit, 1997; Waitangi Tribunal, 2011). Trust illuminates the substrate but not the thing itself (Baier, 1986; Luhmann, 1979; O’Neill, 2002). Each tradition grasped something real. Each left a remainder. And the remainder persisted.

So my question shifted. If scholars and theorists cannot tell us what free and frank advice is from above, perhaps the people who practise it can tell us something from within. Not because practitioners possess the answer that theory lacks, but because their agreements and disagreements about what the concept means may themselves be structured in ways that reveal something a definition would obscure.

That shift, from theoretical definition to practitioner meaning, is not merely a change of subject. It is a change of method. And the choice of method is itself a kind of argument. This post explains why.

Why Interpretation?

There is a simpler way to study advisory relationships. You could define “free and frank advice” in advance, construct a survey, and ask practitioners whether their experience aligns with the definition. You would get clean data, publishable results, and a set of findings that confirmed or disconfirmed whatever you had decided the concept meant before you started looking. The difficulty is that no settled definition exists. The statutory framework has been silent on substance for four decades (Kibblewhite, 2015; Public Service Act, 2020). The scholarly literature defines everything surrounding the convention whilst leaving the convention itself as the blank space at the centre of the map (Craft & Halligan, 2020; Eichbaum & Shaw, 2019; MacDermott, 2008; Mulgan, 2012). To impose a definition at the outset would be to answer the research question before asking it.

Alternatively, you could conduct interviews, listen carefully, and report what practitioners said. This would be closer to the mark, and it is where the investigation began. But interviews, for all their richness, carry a risk that is not always acknowledged (Rhodes, 2017). The researcher listens, codes, interprets, and the patterns that emerge may owe as much to the researcher’s own categories as to the practitioners’ meanings. When the researcher is an insider, someone who has spent decades in the world being studied, that risk is not reduced. It is amplified. I know the language. I know the dilemmas. I know what I think the answer might be. All of which means I need a method that can check my own assumptions as much as it illuminates other people’s.

So the approach I adopted was interpretive. It starts from a conviction that has been building throughout this series: that meaning is made in practice, and that the traditions people bring to their work shape what they see, what they do, and what they understand themselves to be doing when they offer candid advice to a minister (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003; Crotty, 1998; Taylor, 1985). The public administration literature and the political theory both pointed in this direction. The purple zone is not a process; it is a lived space (Matheson & Fancy, 1995; Cole, 2022). The public service bargain is not a contract; it is an inherited understanding, modified through dilemmas encountered over a career, and over generations (Hood & Lodge, 2006). Free and frank advice is not a product; it is a manner, perhaps even a way of holding oneself in relation to tensions that cannot be resolved (Public Service Act, 2020, s. 12(1)(b)). If the phenomenon lives in meaning and practice, then the method must be capable of recovering meaning from practice.

The Decentred Approach

The specific interpretive theory that grounds the research is Mark Bevir’s (1999), developed with Rod Rhodes into what they call the decentred approach (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003, 2006). Three premises structure the inquiry, and they are worth stating plainly because they have direct consequences for what the research can see.

The first is that actions are imbued with meaning (Bevir, 2012; Bevir & Rhodes, 2003). When a senior official decides to include unwelcome analysis in a briefing to a minister, or to leave it out, that decision reflects beliefs about what the advisory role requires, what ministers need to know, what constitutes loyalty, and what constitutes courage. These beliefs are not private quirks. They are shaped by traditions the official has inherited and by dilemmas they have encountered across a career (Rhodes, 2017).

The second is that beliefs are holistic. They form part of a wider web, what Bevir and Rhodes (2006) call a tradition, that individuals inherit and modify through engagement with the world. An official’s view about whether to include the unwelcome analysis sits within a broader understanding of Westminster conventions, of the five constitutional principles in the Public Service Act, of the tension between responsiveness and independence that this series has traced across multiple posts.

The third is that beliefs are historically situated and contingent (Bevir, 1999; Bevir & Rhodes, 2006, 2010). They are inherited within traditions and modified in response to dilemmas rather than determined by social structures or economic forces operating behind actors’ backs. People change their beliefs when a new experience unsettles what they thought they knew. That is how traditions evolve. And it is why variation in how practitioners understand free and frank advice is unlikely to be explained by organisational location or formal role alone.

That last point matters a great deal. The decentred approach predicts that you cannot read someone’s understanding of free and frank advice off their job title, their agency, their seniority, or their demographic profile (Bevir & Rhodes, 2006; Rhodes, 2017). A chief executive and a policy analyst may inhabit the same tradition. Practitioners from different agencies, different career stages, and different political administrations may construct meaning in similar ways. Whether that prediction holds is an empirical question, and the research design was built to test it.

The decentring operates at three levels. It recentres explanation on the beliefs and actions of individuals, refusing to treat official conduct as the automatic expression of role or position. It refuses the assumption that practitioner meaning will map neatly onto formal institutional categories. And, most significantly for this investigation, it unsettles the assumption that practitioner meaning can be interpreted within a single, settled, inherited frame (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003).

The Extension: Ata

That third level of decentring is where the approach required extension, and where this research departs from its British origins.

The decentred approach was developed within and for British governance. Its intellectual genealogy runs through British political science, its empirical applications centre on Whitehall, and even its comparative extensions treat Westminster systems as variations on a common inheritance (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003; Rhodes, 2011). The approach accommodates variation within that inheritance with considerable analytical power. What it was not specifically designed for is a context in which the traditions themselves proceed from constitutionally incommensurable premises: not variations within a shared grammar, but an unresolved negotiation between frameworks that carry different assumptions about the nature of authority, knowledge, and obligation (Jackson, 2016; Kymlicka, 1996; Palmer & Knight, 2022).

In Aotearoa, that is precisely what exists. Te Tiriti o Waitangi established a relationship between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga, between the governance authority extended to the Crown and the chiefly authority retained by hapū and iwi (Orange, 2015; Mutu, 2019). What that relationship means, what it requires, and how the two forms of authority relate to one another have never been settled and cannot be settled through the interpretive resources of either tradition alone. This is not the institutional differentiation of a British state into functional networks, which the decentred framework already handles well (Rhodes, 1997). It is a constitutional collision between English common law and tikanga Māori, whose legitimacy was never extinguished by the colonial settlement (MacDonald, 2009; Mikaere, 2011; Palmer & Knight, 2022).

Applying the decentred approach without modification in this context risks treating the Westminster inheritance as the natural frame within which governance in Aotearoa can be understood. It risks rendering invisible the constitutional plurality that Te Tiriti establishes (L. T. Smith, 2012). The extension I adopted is Ata, a methodology grounded in tikanga Māori, elaborated for research practice by Pohatu (2013). Ata is an orientation toward engagement: a way of approaching relationships that carries ethical and epistemological commitments inseparable from the practices through which they are enacted. Ata-haere, approaching with deliberation and care. Ata-whakarongo, listening with reflective attention. Ata-whakaaro, thinking with deliberation and depth. Ata-kōrero, communicating with clarity and purpose.

Ata does three things in this research. It shapes research relationships and creates the conditions for genuine disclosure from elite practitioners: recruitment proceeds through relationships rather than sampling frames, interviews create space for practitioners to articulate understandings in their own terms, and the pace of engagement is governed by participants rather than by the researcher’s timeline (Hudson et al., 2010; Pohatu, 2013). It ensures the sample is constitutionally representative in ways that make the Westminster character of the findings, if that is what emerges, a meaningful empirical result rather than a sampling artefact. And it creates the relational conditions within which practitioners themselves can name the limits of the Westminster frame.

What Ata does not do is equally important to say. It does not constitute a kaupapa Māori methodology in the full sense (G. H. Smith, 1997; L. T. Smith, 2012). It does not claim synthesis between Western interpretive theory and tikanga Māori (De Sousa Santos, 2004). The two frameworks sit alongside each other, each contributing something the other cannot provide, neither absorbing the other into its categories. Whether that juxtaposition works, whether tikanga methodology can be held alongside Western interpretive theory without one domesticating the other, is a question the research surfaces rather than settles. In that respect, the researcher navigates the same condition of unresolved plurality that Te Tiriti itself establishes (Mutu & Jackson, 2016; Palmer, 2008).

The Methodological Problem That Remains

The interpretive framework, extended through Ata, establishes how to approach the question: with attention to meaning, to traditions, to dilemmas, and to the constitutional plurality within which practitioners construct their understanding of a convention no one has defined. It shapes the researcher’s orientation. It does not yet solve the hardest methodological problem.

That problem is this. Elite interviews can reveal how individual practitioners understand free and frank advice. They can access the richness, the texture, the dilemmas navigated across a career (van Dorp & ‘t Hart, 2019). But they cannot reveal, except in impressionistic terms, whether shared patterns exist across those individual understandings. And impressionism is precisely where the insider researcher is most vulnerable, because the patterns I would see in the data might owe more to my own career in the advisory relationship than to anything the practitioners actually said. I needed a method that could map subjectivity itself and reveal structure in the field of practitioners’ meaning without my imposing that structure through my own categories (Brown, 1980).

That is the puzzle of method, and it is the subject of the next post.

Next in the Series

Next week, I introduce Q-methodology: a technique specifically designed to study contested and subjective concepts, and one that inverts the conventional logic of social science (Brown, 1980; Stephenson, 1953). Instead of measuring people against variables, it discovers shared ways of seeing by allowing practitioners to model their own viewpoints. From there, I will explain how the three-stage research design, from elite interviews through Q-sorts to validation with over a hundred practitioners across wānanga, workshops, expert interviews, and academic conferences, was built to answer the kind of question that free and frank advice poses. The method, I will argue, is itself a contribution. Its combination with the interpretive framework and Ata has not been done before in public administration, and it was designed for exactly this kind of problem: a concept that everyone invokes, that no one has defined, and whose meaning lives in the space between what practitioners think and what they do.

References

Baier, A. (1986). Trust and antitrust. Ethics, 96(2), 231–260.

Bevir, M. (1999). The logic of the history of ideas. Cambridge University Press.

Bevir, M. (2012). The logic of the history of ideas (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Bevir, M., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2003). Interpreting British governance. Routledge.

Bevir, M., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2006). Governance stories. Routledge.

Bevir, M., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2010). The state as cultural practice. Oxford University Press.

Brennan, J. (2016). Against democracy. Princeton University Press.

Brown, S. R. (1980). Political subjectivity: Applications of Q methodology in political science. Yale University Press.

Cole, R. (2022). Purple zone practitioners: Portfolio private secretaries in New Zealand ministerial offices [Doctoral dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington].

Craft, J., & Halligan, J. (2020). Advising governments in the Westminster tradition: Policy advisory systems in Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. Cambridge University Press.

Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research: Meaning and perspective in the research process. Allen & Unwin.

De Sousa Santos, B. (2004). The World Social Forum: Toward a counter-hegemonic globalisation. In J. Sen, A. Anand, A. Escobar, & P. Waterman (Eds.), World Social Forum: Challenging empires (pp. 235–245). Viveka Foundation.

Eichbaum, C., & Shaw, R. (2019). Ministerial advisers in Westminster systems. In R. A. W. Rhodes (Ed.), Narrative policy analysis (pp. 203–224). Palgrave Macmillan.

Estlund, D. (2008). Democratic authority: A philosophical framework. Princeton University Press.

Finer, H. (1941). Administrative responsibility in democratic government. Public Administration Review, 1(4), 335–350.

Friedrich, C. J. (1940). Public policy and the nature of administrative responsibility. In C. J. Friedrich & E. S. Mason (Eds.), Public policy: A yearbook of the Graduate School of Public Administration (pp. 3–24). Harvard University Press.

Honig, B. (1993). Political theory and the displacement of politics. Cornell University Press.

Hood, C., & Lodge, M. (2006). The politics of public service bargains: Reward, competency, loyalty, and blame. Oxford University Press.

Hudson, M., Milne, M., Reynolds, P., Russell, K., & Smith, B. (2010). Te Ara Tika: Guidelines for Māori research ethics. Health Research Council of New Zealand.

Jackson, M. (2016). Keynote address. In Decolonisation, self-determination, and constitutional reform [Conference]. Wellington.

Kibblewhite, A. (2015). Free and frank advice and the Policy Project. Policy Quarterly, 11(4), 3–8.

Kymlicka, W. (1996). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford University Press.

Luhmann, N. (1979). Trust and power. Wiley.

MacDermott, K. (2008). Whatever happened to frank and fearless? The impact of new public management on the Australian Public Service. ANU Press.

MacDonald, L. T. (2009). The rule of law in the ‘grey’ area. New Zealand Law Review, 3, 309–344.

Matheson, A., & Fancy, H. (1995). Future directions in public management in New Zealand: Towards strategic management. Paper presented at the Public Sector Convention, Wellington, November 1995.

Mikaere, A. (2011). Colonising myths, Māori realities: He rukuruku whakaaro. Huia Publishers.

Mulgan, R. (2012, May 30). What future for free and frank advice? [Address to IPANZ]. Wellington, New Zealand.

Mutu, M. (2019). ‘To honour the treaty, we must first settle colonisation’ (Moana Jackson 2015): The long road from colonial devastation to balance, peace and harmony. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 49(sup1), 4–18.

Mutu, M., & Jackson, M. (2016). He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu mō Aotearoa: The report of Matike Mai Aotearoa. Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation.

O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002. Cambridge University Press.

Orange, C. (2015). The Treaty of Waitangi (2nd ed.). Bridget Williams Books.

Palmer, G. (2008). The Bill of Rights after twenty-one years: A constitutional role for the judiciary. New Zealand Universities Law Review, 23(3), 257–277.

Palmer, M. S. R., & Knight, D. R. (2022). The constitution of New Zealand: A contextual analysis. Hart Publishing.

Pettit, P. (1997). Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government. Oxford University Press.

Pohatu, T. W. (2013). Ata: Growing respectful relationships. He Pukenga Kōrero, 8(1), 1–8.

Public Service Act 2020 (NZ).

Rhodes, R. A. W. (1997). Understanding governance: Policy networks, governance, reflexivity and accountability. Open University Press.

Rhodes, R. A. W. (2011). Everyday life in British government. Oxford University Press.

Rhodes, R. A. W. (2017). Interpretive political science: Selected essays (Vol. 2). Oxford University Press.

Simmons, A. J. (2001). Justification and legitimacy: Essays on rights and obligations. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, G. H. (1997). The development of kaupapa Māori: Theory and praxis [Doctoral dissertation, University of Auckland].

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonising methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.

Stephenson, W. (1953). The study of behavior: Q-technique and its methodology. University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, C. (1985). Philosophy and the human sciences: Philosophical papers (Vol. 2). Cambridge University Press.

van Dorp, E. J., & ‘t Hart, P. (2019). Navigating advisors and advisory systems. In R. A. W. Rhodes (Ed.), Narrative policy analysis (pp. 73–96). Palgrave Macmillan.

Waitangi Tribunal. (2011). Ko Aotearoa tēnei: A report into claims concerning New Zealand law and policy affecting Māori culture and identity (Wai 262). Legislation Direct.