page_title: William A. Robson
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: William A. Robson / Career
caption_attribution_description: Left to right: Ken Ruck, Michael Thomson, George Jones, Gerald Rhodes, William Robson, Gilbert Ponsonby, Gordon Peters, Ken Young, David Regan IMAGELIBRARY/204 Persistent URL: archives.lse.ac.uk/dserve.exe?dsqServer=lib-4.lse.ac.uk&amp;a...
context_page_description: William Alexander Robson was a British academic who was an early and influential scholar of public administration while serving as a lecturer and professor at the London School of Economics. Upon his death, The Guardian wrote that Robson was an "internationally renowned authority on public administration". Indeed, Robson can fairly be said to have established public administration as a viable topic for academic study.
  Robson was also a lawyer, author, and editor. He co-founded influential journal The Political Quarterly in 1930 and remained a co-editor of it until 1975. With associations to George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Woolf, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Robson was known for being a Fabian, to the extent that his obituary in The Times stated that he "was the last of the great generation of Fabian scholars".
context_section_description: Robson entered the chambers of Sir Henry Slesser, devilling for him when he was Solicitor General in 1924; this gave Robson early insight into how governments operate.
  Robson's initial academic position was Lecturer in Industrial and Administrative Law at LSE from 1926 to 1933, followed by Reader in Administrative Law from 1933 to 1947.
  Robson married the French native Juliette Alvin (1897–1982), an internationally known cellist, in 1929.  In that same year she became a British citizen.  The couple had two sons and a daughter.  She would become a pioneering music therapist.  Remarks Robson made in America in 1923 drew the ire of syndicated columnist Winifred Black.  Robson deplored the fate of highly educated women who after becoming a bride found their mental abilities "stagnating in the backwater of marriage."  Black stressed the traditional values of being a wife and mother and said they required skills equal to that of most occupations.
  The idea of starting a serious political journal came to Robson and Kingsley Martin, who also had a teaching position at LSE at the time.  Among its goals was to publish articles which would span the difference between theory and practice.  Figures involved with the founding or funding of The Political Quarterly included Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes.  However, Robson's lack of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, compared to that of some other Fabian socialists, led to a partial split with Shaw during the 1930s.  As an editor, The Times characterised Robson as "stern and terrible in his demand for high standards and good English, however illustrious the contributor, but always patient and dutiful in reading contributions from unknown authors."
  During World War II, Robson served in a variety of roles: principal in the Mines Department within the Board of Trade from 1940 to 1942, then for the Ministry of Fuel and Power from 1942 to 1943.  Following that he received a promotion to assistant secretary in the Air Ministry, which he held from 1943 to 1945; a short stint in the Ministry of Civil Aviation before civilian positions became demobilised.
  After the war, Robson was named Professor of Public Administration in 1947, becoming the first such professor not just within the University of London system, but the first in the United Kingdom.  
  He founded the Greater London Group research centre at LSE in 1958, whose initial purpose was to conduct research on behalf of the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London.  Robson urged the idea of what one assessment has termed "a general purpose single municipality for London with smaller boroughs below", and while there were disagreements within the group on this matter, Robson's view held the most sway with the commission, and the group has been recognized as having had a significant impact upon efforts to reform London government during the 1960s and upon the creation of the Greater London Council in 1965.  Robson was the main leader of the group until his death.
  Robson was a co-founder of the Political Studies Association in the UK, and was very active in the formative years of the International Political Science Association, serving as its second president beginning in 1952.  Robson also served at some point as vice president of the Royal Institute of Public Administration.  Possessed of an international reputation, Robson did consulting work in city planning in countries that included Turkey, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Japan, and his former students became influential in areas such as India, West Africa, and the United States.
  Robson was known for meticulous scholarship.
  Some of Robson's most important books include The Town Councillor (1925, co-authored with Clement Attlee), Justice and Administrative Law (1928), The Development of Local Government (1931), Civilization and the Growth of Law (1935), The Government and Misgovernment of London (1939, revised 1948), Nationalised Industry and Public Ownership (1960), Local Government in Crisis (1966), and Welfare State and Welfare Society (1976).
  An LSE retrospective has stated that R
caption: Robson (center) with the Greater London Group in 1968
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:09:15 15:30:04", "Image ExifOffset": "172", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "310", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3450", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "600", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "269"}