Free and Frank Advice: Postures as enactments of tradition

09/05/2026

I read the six postures beside their nearest analogues in the scholarship on advice and the public service, and argue that they are situated enactments of tradition, orientations a practitioner takes up for a situation, which travel across office and belong to neither role nor personality.

This is the sixteenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. Having set out the six postures and the bounded plurality they form, I turn here to what kind of thing a posture is, where each posture sits in the existing scholarship, and why I read the postures as situated enactments of tradition.

In my thesis the six postures arrived as factors from a Q-sort, and a factor on its own says little about where a viewpoint comes from or why practitioners find it familiar. The decentred interpretive approach I worked from treats the viewpoints practitioners carry as traditions they inherit and then enact in the situations in front of them (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003), and reading the postures that way I do three things: first, I explain what a posture is and why I treat the postures as orientations that travel across office; second, I place each posture beside its nearest analogue in the scholarship on advice; and third, I set out what that placement contributes and why the word tradition needs some care.

Orientations that travel across office

The postures are subjectivities, by which I mean the organised viewpoints practitioners carry about what free and frank advice is for, recovered from the way they sorted a common set of statements and not from what they said about themselves (Brown, 1980). In the Q analysis each placement is read from the whole factor, since the meaning of any one placement lies in its relation to every other placement in the array (Watts & Stenner, 2012). I read the six as a plurality of orientations toward the same statutory duty, each one a coherent way of giving weight to the parts of that duty, and none a full account of free and frank advice on its own.

Two assumptions follow from reading the postures as orientations, and they shape the rest of this post. The first is that a posture is something a practitioner takes up and keeps for as long as a situation requires, so that one person may move among several as the issue, the setting and the risk change, as practitioners described in Stage Three. The second is that the postures travel across office, so that a minister, an official and a political adviser may take up the same posture, and a single office may work from several in the course of a day. In my view the postures name what practitioners believe the obligation asks of them, and belief moves more freely than role does.

The risk of mistaking an orientation for a role, or a role for a personal trait, is an old one in the study of bureaucracy, which long ago recorded “a temptation among all of us to describe as personal traits what are in fact organizational roles” (Wilson, 2019, Chapter 9). The postures answer both halves of that warning, in my reading, because their travel across office keeps them distinct from role, and the fact that one practitioner takes up several keeps them distinct from trait.

The six postures in the literature’s own categories

The six postures share one working space, and the literature already has a name for it in the purple zone, the overlap where political authority and administrative judgement meet (Alford et al., 2017). The public service bargain reads the relationship between minister and official as an exchange whose competency strand names the advisory skills a system asks of its officials (Hood & Lodge, 2006), and in my reading two of those competencies, the sage and the go-between, sit closest to the two postures concerned with craft.

The sage competency rests on political judgement, the ability, in the words of the bargain literature, to “read the runes and weigh the policy options” (Hood & Lodge, 2006, p. 103), and it sits closest to the Moment Chooser, whose craft turns on timing and on whether advice can be heard. In the array the four timing statements sit together on the agreement side, the careful selection of moments sits at the extreme of the factor, and the statement about shared responsibility falls among those least like this posture’s view, which happens in this factor alone. I read the Moment Chooser as the astute reader of the moment who carries evidence into a decision while the decision is still open, and the array suggests the posture treats that craft as work the adviser carries alone.

The go-between competency opens onto the Collaborative Sense-Maker, which carries the same attention to craft in the other direction, between people. Two literatures meet in this posture, collaborative governance, in which public agencies and other actors deliberate toward shared decisions (Ansell & Gash, 2008), and sensemaking, in which people talk an unclear situation into a workable shape together (Weick, 1995). In the array the statement about co-production sits at the extreme, with shared responsibility, the constant tending of the relationship and trust immediately below it, while the statements that give advice a direction of service to the ministerial mandate gather together at the least-like pole. In my reading the posture widens the go-between’s brokerage into a collaborative method of making advice, set apart from the sage’s more individual reading of the moment.

Three of the postures answer a different question, about whom the adviser ultimately answers to, and the Political Servant answers to the Government of the day. It is the responsive official of the responsiveness debate, who reads advice as help to the government the public chose and warns it about political consequence (Mulgan, 2008). The array records the conditions this posture works under, with the statement about a good minister who actively seeks free and frank advice at the extreme least-like position, and the statement about the end of a golden age of free and frank advice toward the agreement side. My reading is that responsiveness is intact in this posture, and that what has grown scarce, from where it stands, is the occasion for it.

The Westminster Protector answers to the continuity of the institution, and it is the guardian of constitutional propriety who reaches for convention, warning and institutional memory when the system is at risk (Aucoin, 2012). In its array the protective failsafe sits at plus five and alignment with the ministerial mandate at plus four, while strategic silence and the careful selection of moments sit among the statements least like this posture’s view. I read that configuration as protection exercised from inside the mandate, with the warning kept in reserve as a threshold the adviser will cross when it must, and never used as a tactic.

The Democratic Constitutionalist answers to the law Parliament has made and to the public interest, kept in view beside the government’s political interest and at times ahead of it (M. S. R. Palmer, 2006). The array does not ration that duty, since the good minister who seeks free and frank advice sits at plus four beside challenge, disagreement and the value of different perspectives, while the statements confining the practice to senior officials, weighty portfolios, a protective failsafe or a chosen moment gather together at the least-like pole. In my view these three postures give three different answers about whom advice is for, the government, the law and the public, and the continuity of the institution, and the sixth posture asks another question again.

The Institutional Pragmatist asks whether the advice will work and measures it by delivery, in the terms of the public value and advisory systems literatures, for which advice fit for governing carries knowledge of what implementation will require (Craft & Halligan, 2020; Moore, 1995). Its array is the sharpest in the solution, because the statement naming free and frank advice as the combination of expertise, evidence and practical wisdom about implementation carries the highest score of any statement in any factor, while the statements that put the practice in constitutional terms gather at the least-like pole. I read the Institutional Pragmatist as the posture that speaks of free and frank advice in the vocabulary of work, and in my view it is the clearest empirical expression of the pragmatic constitutional culture I discussed in the previous post.

What the gathering adds, and the strain on tradition

What this placement contributes is for the most part confirmation and integration, since every posture appears in the literature’s own categories and the study gathers the six, for the first time, as one bounded set, and a gathering of that kind has a test to meet, set long ago by the study of bureaucracy when it found that the typologies of officials then in circulation offered “only labels for types of managers, rather than data on how many of each kind there are” (Wilson, 2019, Chapter 9). The six postures were recovered from the data and never proposed in advance, since they come from the way 58 practitioners sorted the same 34 statements, each is carried by flagged defining sorts, and the shape of the solution is reported with them. In my view that meets the charge on its own terms, although how many of each kind there are is a question the shape of the solution cannot answer, because four postures carry the larger share of the defining sorts while two are each defined by a single sort. In Q-methodology the unit of analysis is the configuration a factor expresses, whatever the number of people who load onto it (Brown, 1980; Watts & Stenner, 2012), so the four-plus-two shape is a property of the internal structure of the solution, and reading it as a measure of how common each posture is in the public service would import the assumptions of R methodology into a Q study. I read the six as one bounded plurality, every posture resting on practical statecraft, and whether the rarer orientations are as uncommon in practice as in the solution is a question for a different design.

The word tradition sits uneasily with the postures, and the strain follows directly from the methodology that revealed them. A tradition, in the decentred approach, is usually something carried across time (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003), yet these orientations can be taken up and set down inside a single advisory relationship. For that reason I read the postures as situated enactments of tradition, each one taking shape when a particular official advises a particular minister on a particular issue, drawing on an inherited orientation while answering to the demands of that occasion. A longitudinal design would be needed to show how stable each enactment becomes with experience, and in my view that is one of the more interesting questions the thesis leaves open.

Next, I turn to why free and frank advice remains undefined, reading the bounded plurality through the essentially contested concept, the remainder and agonism.

References

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Ansell, C., & Gash, A. (2008). Collaborative governance in theory and practice. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4), 543–571.

Aucoin, P. (2012). New political governance in Westminster systems: Impartial public administration and management performance at risk. Governance, 25(2), 177–199.

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

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

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