Does governance require skill?: Goh Keng Swee's institutionalization of managerial expertise in Singapore

• In Event: Social Engineering: Technical Knowledges for Governance and Surveillance

English Abstract

The Singaporean system of governance is built around the stance that good governance is produced by technocratic management, but existing academic work either treats the government’s rhetoric about its development and valuation of managerial skill as evident or mere rhetoric. This paper instead approaches skill as a real but contingent way of knowing and ordering the world. By examining oral history records of civil servants and the historical speeches, writings, and reports of the institution-building founding father Goh Keng Swee from the 1960s to 1979, I first present Goh’s understanding of the needs of post-colonial Singapore. I argue that he made a crucial distinction between technical skills and leadership skills, both of which had to be initially acquired from existing experts overseas. For Goh, managerial skill related to technical skills in two overlapping ways: First, managerial skill provided the overarching purpose to which technical skills would be put to use. Second, administrative experts would plan the organizational set-up and continuously manage the technically skilled to ensure successful coordination and communication. While existing academic work by Michael Polanyi and Harry Collins have demonstrated that technical skills have a tacit dimension that makes their transfer capricious and rational planning difficult, for Goh, it is instead the tacit aspect of administrative skill that must be acquired for effective management. Finally, I end by showing that paying attention to Goh’s worldview matters because these views were institutionalized, and over time normalized into the system of governance that Singaporeans still live with.

Author

• Sharad Pandian, Nanyang Technological University