The New Public Service

Serving, Not Steering

Janet V. Denhardt, Robert B. Denhardt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317486916
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The New Public Service: Serving, not Steering provides a framework for the many voices calling for the reaffirmation of democratic values, citizenship, and service in the public interest. It is organized around a set of seven core principles: (1) serve citizens, not customers; (2) seek the public interest; (3) value citizenship and public service above entrepreneurship; (4) think strategically, act democratically; (5) recognize that accountability isn't simple; (6) serve, rather than steer; and (7) value people, not just productivity.

The New Public Service asks us to think carefully and critically about what public service is, why it is important, and what values ought to guide what we do and how we do it. It celebrates what is distinctive, important, and meaningful about public service and considers how we might better live up to those ideals and values. The revised fourth edition includes a new chapter that examines how the role and significance of these New Public Service values have expanded in practice and research over the past 15 years.

Although the debate about governance will surely continue for many years, this compact, clearly written volume both provides an important framework for a public service based on citizen discourse and the public interest and demonstrates how these values have been put into practice. It is essential reading fo students and serious practitioners in public administration and public policy.

Chapter 1

Public Administration and the New Public Management

Government shouldn’t be run like a business; it should be run like a democracy. Across this country and around the world, both elected and appointed public servants are acting on this principle and expressing renewed commitment to such ideals as the public interest, the governance process, and expanding democratic citizenship. As a result, they are learning new skills in policy development and implementation, recognizing and accepting the complexity of the challenges they face, and treating their fellow public servants and citizens with renewed dignity and respect. Public employees are feeling more valued and energized as this sense of service and community expands. In the process, public servants are also reconnecting with citizens. Administrators are realizing that they have much to gain by listening to the public rather than telling, and by serving rather than steering. At the invitation of public servants, even their urging, ordinary citizens are once again becoming engaged in the governance process. Citizens and public officials are working together to define and to address common problems in a cooperative and mutually beneficial way.

These developments can be understood as part of a movement that we call the “New Public Service.” The New Public Service seeks to pose and inform a number of central, normative questions about the field. How can we define the essential character of what we do in the public service? What is the motivating force that propels our actions? What gives us strength and capacity when the trials and turmoil of our work get us down? How can we keep going, even as we face problems that are complex and intractable, with extremely limited resources and a public that often resents and criticizes what we do? We think the answer lies in our commitment to public service.

We find no other reasonable explanation for the extraordinary dedication and commitment of the people who work to make the world safer and cleaner, to improve our health, to teach our children, and to unravel the host of societal maladies that confront us. Where else can we find the foundations for our efforts to facilitate citizenship and public engagement as a central part of our work? What else can keep the firefighters, the police officers, the social workers, the planners and the inspectors, the receptionists and the clerks, the managers and the analysts serving their communities and their country with energy, resolve, and determination?

Research tells us that the ideals of public service are critically important in understanding how public servants can be successful in the work they do. Our objective is to present a unifying set of themes and principles that both express and reaffirm the importance of these public service values. Questions about these values have, of course, been debated throughout the history of public administration in this country, and elsewhere, but there seems to be more concern for these issues today than before. Certainly, there are some important driving forces that have been widely discussed in the field of public administration: the New Public Management and the Managing for Results movement, to name just two. Although these influences have been important, none has satisfied our more basic yearning to answer some core questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What does all this mean? People in public administration throughout the history of our field have been encouraged to make things work, but that’s only a partial answer. We also want to do something of societal value.

Therein lies the soul of public administration. What is most significant, and most valuable, about public administration is that we serve citizens to advance the common good. Public administrators are responsible for improving the public health, for maintaining public safety, for enhancing the quality of our environment, and myriad other tasks. Ultimately, for them, for us, what really matters is not how efficiently we have done our jobs, but how we have contributed to a better life for all. In this book, we call for an affirmation of the soul of the profession through the New Public Service, a movement grounded in the public interest, in the ideals of democratic governance, and in a renewed civic engagement. This movement, we will argue, is more than ever being manifest in the way we interact with political leaders, in the way we engage with citizens, and in the way we bring about positive changes in our organizations and our communities.

We will approach the task of describing the various elements of the New Public Service by contrasting it with both traditional and more contemporary approaches to public policy and public administration. In this chapter, we will very briefly review the history and development of traditional public administration, what we must now call the Old Public Administration. Then, we will outline what has been the dominant or mainstream approach to contemporary public administration, the New Public Management. In Chapter 2, we will note some of the most important alternative views of public administration, views that have been less than “mainstream” throughout the history of the field, but are now being voiced with increasing urgency. Having examined the context and historical grounding for understanding the New Public Service, in Chapters 3 to 9, we will explore seven aspects of the New Public Service that we find most compelling. In Chapter 10, we provide some examples of how New Public Service values are being implemented in the United States and around the world. At the outset, we should note that we have not attempted to develop a complete theoretical argument for the New Public Service, nor catalog all of the many examples of its practice. Rather, our purpose is to simply lay out, in a very basic way, the normative issues and the alternative ways of thinking about public administration that may be helpful to those working to build the New Public Service.

The Old Public Administration

Although governments have used complex structures of management and organization throughout human history, public administration as a self-conscious field of study and practice is generally thought to have begun around the turn of the century. Its American version, for example, is typically dated to a well-known essay by Woodrow Wilson, then college professor, later president of the United States. Wilson acknowledged the growing and increasingly complex administrative tasks of government by commenting that, “it is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one” (Wilson 1987/1887, 200). In order to more effectively run government, Wilson advised that we look to the field of business, as, “the field of administration is a field of business” (209). In order to follow the model of business, Wilson advised, government should establish executive authorities, controlling essentially hierarchical organizations and having as their goal achieving the most reliable and efficient operations possible.

Those residing at these centers of power, however, were not to be actively or extensively involved in the development of policy. Their tasks were, instead, the implementation of policy and the provision of services, and in those tasks they were expected to act with neutrality and professionalism to execute faithfully the directives that came their way. They were to be watched carefully and held accountable to elected political leaders, so as not to deviate from established policy. Wilson recognized a potential danger in the other direction as well; the possibility that politics, or more specifically corrupt politicians, might negatively influence administrators in their pursuit of organizational efficiency. This concern led to Wilson’s well-known dictum, “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices” (Wilson 1987/1887, 210). Thus, Wilson established what was known for many years as the politics–administration (or policy–administration) dichotomy.

Two Key Themes

In Wilson’s essay, we find two key themes that served as a focus for the study of public administration for the next half-century or more. First, there was the distinction between politics (or policy) and administration, with its associated ideas of accountability to elected leaders and neutral competence on the part of administrators. Second, there was concern for creating structures and strategies of administrative management that would permit public organizations and their managers to act in the most efficient way possible. Each of these ideas deserves further comment.

First, the idea of separating politics and administration received much early commentary and came to guide practice in a number of important ways. For example, the dichotomy is clearly the basis for the council–manager form of local government, which involves the council being given the responsibility of establishing policy and the city manager being charged with implementing it. Of course, in the council–manager example, as in other areas, a strict separation of politics and administration proved difficult. Members of governing bodies, whether members of city councils or state or federal legislators, always maintained an active interest in the operations of administrative agencies. Especially through the oversight function, they exercised considerable influence in the operations of agencies. Conversely, administrators came to play a more active role in the policy process, especially as they brought expert advice to bear on the legislative process. Over time, many commentators, such as Luther Gulick, first city administrator of New York and a founder of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), argued that policy and administration could not be separated, that every act of a public manager involves a “seamless web of discretion and action” (1933, 561). Others, such as Paul Appleby, dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, were even more to the point: “public administration is policymaking” (Appleby 1949, 170).

The distinction Wilson drew between politics and administration has certainly blurred over time. Yet, in many ways, the relationship between politics and administration remains important to the field of public administration. Although a dichotomy between politics and administration is over-drawn, the interaction of political and administrative concerns is certainly key to understanding how government operates, even today. Perhaps more important, however, the separation of politics and administration lies at the heart of the Old Public Administration’s version of accountability, one in which appointed administrators were held to be accountable to their political “masters”—and only through them to the citizenry. In this view, the requirements of democratic governance are satisfied where a neutral and competent civil service is controlled by and accountable to elected political leaders. Frederick Cleveland, an early writer, commented that democratic accountability is maintained where there is a “representative body (such as a legislature) outside of the administration with power to determine the will of the membership (the citizens) and to enforce (that) will on the administration” (Cleveland 1920, 15; parentheses added). In this view, the legislature operates somewhat like a board of directors overseeing a business operation.

Second, Wilson held, and others agreed, that public organizations should seek the greatest possible efficiency in their operations, and that such efficiency was best achieved through unified and largely hierarchical structures of administrative management. Certainly, that view was consistent with thinking among business managers of the period. Many, such as the efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor (1923), employed a “scientific management” approach to try to learn, through detailed “time and motion” studies, exactly how the productive process could be improved. Taylor, for example, sought to determine the “one best way” to shovel dirt by designing an experiment that would calculate the ideal weight of a single shovelful of dirt—ideal in the sense of producing the most shoveled dirt per day!

Other early theorists, such as Leonard White (1926) and W.F. Willoughby (1927), focused on building organizational structures that would operate with high efficiency. Again, most found attractive the idea of a strong chief executive vested with the power and authority to carry out the work assigned to the agency. Moreover, that chief executive would be most successful if he or she operated through an organizational structure characterized by unity of command, hierarchical authority, and a strict division of labor. The job of the executive, therefore, was to determine the best division of labor, then to develop the appropriate means of coordination and control. Or, following Gulick’s classic acronym POSDCORB, the work of the executive was planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting (1937, 13). But again, efficiency was the key value accepted by most early writers and practitioners.

Dissenting Views

That is not to say, however, that all accepted efficiency is the ultimate criterion by which to judge administrators. Marshall Dimock, an academic and practitioner, challenged that idea, writing that mechanical efficiency is “coldly calculating and inhuman,” whereas, “successful administration is warm and vibrant. It is human” (Dimock 1936, 120). Successful administration, he continued, “is more than a lifeless pawn. It plans, it contrives, it philosophizes, it educates, it builds for the community as a whole” (133). Others suggested that administrators, as well as political leaders, were ultimately concerned with issues such as justice, liberty, freedom, and equality—issues far more formidable and difficult than efficiency alone.

Finally, many writers noted that the search for organizational efficiency might easily occur at the expense of involving citizens in the work of government. Writing somewhat later, Dwight Waldo, perhaps the best-known public administration theorist of his generation, summarized the emerging orthodoxy in the field of public administration by writing that, “The means and measurements of efficiency, it was felt and strongly stated, were the same for all administration. Democracy, if it were to survive, could not afford to ignore the lessons of centralization, hierarchy, and discipline” (Waldo 1948, 200). Moreover, he commented, “Both private and public administration were in an important … sense false to the ideal of democracy … by reason of their insistence that democracy, however good and desirable, is nevertheless something peripheral to administration” (Waldo 1952, 7).

So, in contrast to using efficiency as the sole criterion for assessing administrative performance, one might employ other criteria, such as responsiveness to the concerns of citizens. An appealing view, one might say. Yet these alternative voices were counterpoint at best, as the emerging field of public administration moved firmly through the ideas of “politics and administration,” “scientific management,” “administrative management,” and “bureaucratic management.” In each case, theory and practice confirmed the importance of tightly integrated hierarchical structures, controlled from the top by managers interested in achieving the organization’s goals and objectives in the most efficient manner possible. Interestingly, even as the field moved through the next several decades and into its behavioral or “scientific” phase, these same issues continued to be highlighted. Though the justification was somewhat different, the resulting recommendations were much the same.

The Rational Model

The classic Administrative Behavior (1957), written by Herbert Simon, a political scientist who later won a Nobel Prize in economics, laid out the argument best. According to the positive science viewpoint Simon represented, statements may be classified according to whether they are true or false. Scientists, of course, are concerned with establishing the truth of certain propositions. In order to do so, they must strip away those pesky “values” that tend to interfere in human affairs. So, those terms that speak to individual or group preferences are not to be admitted into scientific study, in this case the study of administrative behavior. Rather, Simon argued that a single standard, the standard of efficiency, may be used to help remove values from the discussion of organized action.

The key to this argument is the concept of rationality. According to Simon, human beings are limited in the degree of rationality they can obtain in reference to the problems they face, but they can join together in groups and organizations to deal effectively with the world around them, and they can do so in a rational manner. After all, in the abstract, it’s not hard to develop a rational course of action to achieve most objectives. The problem comes when we insert real live people, with all their human concerns and idiosyncrasies, into the picture. The issue then becomes one of how to match these people with the rational plan and how to assure that human behavior follows the most efficient path possible.

In contrast to a long philosophical tradition that holds human reason to be concerned with such issues as justice, equality, and freedom, Simon’s more restricted view is that rationality is concerned with coordinating the proper means to accomplish the desired ends. In this view, rationality is equated with efficiency. For what Simon called “administrative man,” the most rational behavior is that which moves an organization efficiently toward its objectives.

Administrative man accepts the organizational goals as the value premises of his decisions, is particularly sensitive and reactive to the influence upon him on the other members of the organization, forms stable expectations regarding his own role … and has high morale in regard to the organization’s goals.

(Simon, Smithburg, and Thompson 1950, 82)

Then, through what is called the inducements–contributions model, by controlling the inducements offered to members of the organization, its leaders could secure their contribution and compliance with the rational design of the organization, the result being a far more efficient and productive organization.

Public Choice

Some years after Simon’s work, an interesting interpretation of administrative behavior, and one more closely allied with the classic “economic man” position, emerged. This new approach, called “public choice theory,” actually provides an interesting bridge between the Old Public Administration and the New Public Management, for, although public choice theory was developed during the time period we generally associate with the Old Public Administration, as we will see later, public choice became much more significant as the key theoretical basis for the New Public Management. For this reas...