The SAGE Handbook of Public Administration

B Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, B Guy Peters, Jon Pierre

• Verlag: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781473971134
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Public Affairs & Administration

The original Handbook of Public Administration was a landmark publication, the first to provide a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the discipline. The eagerly-awaited new edition of this seminal international handbook continues to provide a complete review and guide to past and present knowledge in this essential field of inquiry.

Assembling an outstanding team of scholars from around the world, the second edition explores the current state-of-the-art in academic thinking and the current structures and processes for the administration of public policy.

The second edition has been fully revised and updated, with new chapters that reflect emerging issues and changes within the public sector:

- Identifying the Antecedents in Public Performance

- Bureaucratic Politics

- Strategy Structure and Policy Dynamics

- Comparative Administrative Reform

- Administrative Ethics

- Accountability through Market and Social Instruments

- Federalism and intergovernmental coordination.

A dominant theme throughout the handbook is a critical reflection on the utility of scholarly theory and the extent to which government practices inform the development of this theory. To this end it serves as an essential guide for both the practice of public administration today and its on-going development as an academic discipline.

The SAGE Handbook of Public Administration remains indispensable to the teaching, study and practice of public administration for students, academics and professionals everywhere.

PART 1

Public Management: Old and New

edited by Hal G. Rainey

In the past several decades, in nations around the world, the topic of public management has taken on an increased significance in the theory and practice of public administration (e.g., Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). One might wonder about this development, since public management and public administration sound synonymous. The authors in this first part of this book illustrate the significance of public management as a topic and its distinctiveness from public administration.

For people in public administration as scholars, and as practicing managers and professionals, this new interest in public management – or renewed interest, as Laurence Lynn will show us in Chapter 1 – has major implications. Scholars note that this worldwide movement has involved increased emphasis on certain patterns and reforms in the management of government agencies and programs (e.g., Christensen and Laegreid, 2007; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). For example, one major implication involves the widespread perception that government needs to give more attention to achieving effective management, often through the adoption of management procedures resembling those of business firms. Kettl (2000), for example, observed that the international movement towards ‘public management’, including variants of it called ‘New Public Management’, involves a number of common themes in many nations. These include increasing the productivity of government activities, using economic market or marketlike strategies, enhancing attention to citizens as service recipients, decentralizing responsibilities to local governments and to front-line managers, and sharpening accountability for results by focusing more on outputs and outcomes than on processes and structures. As the chapters in this section will show, other scholars interested in public management do not necessarily focus simply on borrowing procedures from business firms; they emphasize enhancing managerial capacities in government through such developments as improved performance measurement and strategic planning.

In addition to these developments in reform and practice, academics have pondered the implications of a public management emphasis for research and intellectual development. Some scholars in public administration employed the public management rubric to express their conviction that their field needs a richer base of theory and empirical research on management skills, responsibilities and procedures akin to that available in the academic fields of business management and organizational analysis (e.g., Perry and Kraemer, 1983). They pointed to the need for more research on how people in management positions in government can carry out their responsibilities and effectively operate their agencies and programs. In related fields such as political science and public policy studies, the prevailing assumption appeared to be that management matters do not matter much – that managerial activities by middle- and upper-level ‘bureaucrats’ in government simply do not play a significant role in the political system and public policy processes. Still other academics in prestigious schools of public affairs at leading universities also sought to develop the topic of public management, and expressed less concern with the field of public administration than with developing a body of knowledge to support high-level executive leadership in government (Lynn, 1996).

The chapters in this section represent this movement in several ways. Laurence Lynn’s chapter provides a rich description of the evolution of the topic of public management and of major current issues in its continuing development. He describes how the major public administration scholars early in the twentieth century concerned themselves with the role of ‘management’ in the field, often emphasizing its importance in relation to other foci, such as the legal context of administration. He describes how scholars have differentiated between administration and management, and between management in the public and private sectors. This leads him to consider several perspectives on public management: as a structure of governance, a ‘formalization of managerial discretion intended to enable government to effect the will of the people’, as a craft or set of skills applied by public managers and as an institution embodying legitimate values and constitutional constraints to which public managers adhere. Lynn also analyzes recent developments, such as a tendency for some scholars to so heavily emphasize the craft perspective that they lose sight of the others. Ultimately, he argues that the main challenge involves maintaining appropriate emphasis on all three of these perspectives simultaneously. Lynn also notes very recent developments in professional association and professional journal activities that pertain to public management.

Carolyn Heinrich then describes and assesses developments in one of the major trends in public management around the world: an increasing emphasis on performance measurement for public organizations and programs. Here again, as she describes, this topic has a classic character, because experts and scholars worked on it in a variety of ways for a very long time. Heinrich provides a historical overview of many of the conceptions and systems of performance measurement that have emerged and evolved since the nineteenth century. In addition, however, she points to new developments in the recent upsurge of emphasis on performance measurement, such as its increasing scope, sophistication and visibility, as well as certain common themes across nations, such as an increase in formal reporting requirements involving comparisons of performance measures to pre-established performance goals and standards. Heinrich goes on to discuss major current issues in performance measurement. These include the challenges of specifying and measuring goals, due to conflicting values and priorities for many public programs and agencies, and the multiple actors and levels involved. With emphasis on the need to provide public managers with information about how their decisions and actions affect performance, she also discusses prospects for addressing such challenges and provides numerous examples of recent models and methods of performance measurement.

As we come to John Bryson’s chapter, Lynn has told us that one major reason for increasing interest in public management arises from concern with enhancing the skills and practices that public managers can use proactively to increase agency performance, and to contribute effectively to governance. Heinrich has added valuable description and analysis of one the most important challenges in the pursuit of performance – its conception and measurement. Another of the most important challenges concerns formulation of purposes and of plans for pursuing them, through strategic planning and management. As Bryson tells us, these priorities are ‘becoming a way of life for public organizations around the globe’. Bryson, whose book Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations is the most widely used and cited book on the topic, provides a highly authoritative description and analysis of strategic planning and management. He describes strategic management systems and models, and current trends in thought and practice of the topic. These include increasing pursuit of speed, inclusion of diverse interests and groups, and systems thinking. Obviously, the analysis of public management and its relation to public administration derives its value not from the parsing of these two rubrics, but from the more fundamental issues involved. As these chapters show, these issues include the institutional and structural context of public management, and the roles, responsibilities, skills and practices it involves. These three authoritative chapters provide description, conceptualization and analysis of clear value to those who think, research and write about public administration, as well as to those charged with carrying out its vital responsibilities in practice.

REFERENCES

Christensen, Tom and Laegreid, Per (eds) (2007) Transcending New Public Management: The Transformation of Public Sector Reforms. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Kettl, Donald F. (2000) The Global Public Management Revolution: A Report on the Transformation of Governance. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Lynn, Laurence E., Jr (1996) Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.

Perry, James L. and Kraemer, Kenneth L. (eds) (1983) Public Management: Public and Private Perspectives. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield.

Pollitt, Christopher and Bouckaert, Geert (2011) Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis – New Public Management, Governance, and the Neo-Weberian State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1

Public Management

Laurence E. Lynn, Jr

[H]e liked to organize, to contend, to administer; he could make people work his will, believe in him, march before him and justify him. This was the art, as they said, of managing. ...

Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady

[P]ublic management ... is a world of settled institutions designed to allow imperfect people to use flawed procedures to cope with insoluble problems.

James Q. Wilson
Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It

INTRODUCTION

Public management is the subject of a rapidly growing literature that is international in scope and multifarious in content.¹ The common sense of public management is relatively straightforward. Good public managers are men and women with the temperament and skills to organize, motivate, and direct others toward realizing the complex goals of public policy in a political environment. Few public laws and policies are self-executing, and, in their formulation, all might benefit from managerial insight and experience. Under virtually any political philosophy or regime, then, the achievement of good government requires the responsible and competent use of public authority by a government’s managers.

Common sense obscures issues that have been at the heart of public management from its inception as a field of study and practice, however. What if the goals to be achieved and their possible costs and consequences are unclear or in conflict? What if public managers are given insufficient authority, resources, and tools to organize, motivate, and monitor the efforts needed to accomplish those purposes for which they are responsible? How does effective management compare in importance to good policy design, rational organization, adequate resources, effective monitoring, and the approbation of affected publics? What is effective managerial practice and how does it vary across the many contexts in which public management is practiced? How might effective public management be enabled by legislators, executives, and judicial authorities, and how might particular managerial reforms or strategies affect governmental performance?

The objective of public management scholarship is to provide theoretical and empirical foundations for addressing the above questions. In addition, researchers take up the myriad specific issues that arise in organizing and carrying out managerial responsibilities in government departments, bureaus and offices.² Theoretical issues include means– ends rationality; the influence of politicallegal constraints; appropriate distributions of managerial discretion and allocations of financial and human resources; ex ante versus ex post controls over administrative behavior; accountability to the public, constituencies, and stakeholders; criteria and methods for measuring, motivating, and evaluating performance; public management reform; and the role of government and governance in democratic societies. Issues concerned more directly with practice include leadership, public service values, evidence-based practice and the determination and promulgation of ‘best practices’, organizational change and development strategies, and decision making.

It will be useful at the outset to introduce distinctions that are fundamental to the perspective of this chapter. Public administration’s classic American literature understood management to be the responsible and lawful exercise of formally delegated discretion by public administrators. In this view, public management is a structure of governance (Scott, 1998): that is, a constitutionally appropriate formalization of managerial discretion intended to enable government to effect the will of the people. In contrast, recent literature has tended to view public management as a craft: that is, as skilled practice by individuals performing managerial roles. When public managers evince values that are widely held to be legitimate and mindful of public interests rather than narrowly partisan or self-regarding, public management becomes even more an institution of constitutional governance (Weimer, 1995; Bertelli and Lynn, 2006). Public management as an institution observes ‘rules of practice’: that is, de facto restraints on or guides to behavior, that ensure their legitimacy within a constitutional, or de jure, regime. Properly understood, then, public management is structure, craft, and institution: ‘management’, ‘manager’, and ‘responsible practice’ (Hill and Lynn, 2009).

In the initial sections of this chapter, two issues that define the scope of public management as a field of scholarship and practice are discussed: the relationship between ‘public administration’ and ‘public management’ and the similarities and differences between ‘public management’ and ‘private management.’ With these discussions as background, public management as structure, as craft, and as institution are explored in detail in the following three sections. There follows in the penultimate section a consideration of public management as it relates to the concept of governance. This discussion brings into focus the broader systemic challenges of public management in theory and practice. Summary observations conclude the chapter.

MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION

When we talk of ‘public management’ or of ‘public administration,’ are we talking of the same subject or of different subjects? Arguments to the effect that management and administration are fundamentally different have a long history in American literature, although the distinction often seems arbitrary.³ Many such arguments relegate management to subordinate, specialized or even stigmatized status. The result is that the structural and institutional aspects of public management which are vital to understanding its significance are overlooked.

Numerous early commentaries either view the two terms as synonymous or regard management as the more general concept.⁴ In public administration’s first textbook, published in 1926, Leonard D. White rebuked the notion that public law is the proper foundation of public administration. He argued that ‘The study of administration should start from the base of management rather than the foundation of law. ...’ (White, 1926, p. vii).⁵ According to Henri Fayol (1930), ‘It is important not to confuse administration with management. To manage ... is to conduct [an organization] toward the best possible use of all the resources at its disposal ... [i.e.,] to ensure the smooth working of the ... essential functions. Administration is only one of these functions ...’ (quoted in Wren, 1979, p. 232). In Roscoe C. Martin’s view, by 1940, ‘administration was equated with management,’ although, he noted, there was comparatively little talk about the ‘nature of the craft’ (Martin, 1965, p. 8). Paul Van Riper (1990), in assaying mid-to-late nineteenth-century antecedents to Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 essay, says: ‘Note ... that the words administration and management have been treated here as synonymous’ (p. 8). Observed Dwight Waldo, ‘Perhaps as much as any other one thing, the “management” movement has molded the outlook of those to whom public administration is an independent inquiry or definable discipline’ (Waldo, 1984, 12).

Yet many public administration scholars have held that, of the two concepts, administration is original and primary, public management is novel and subordinate or specialized. ‘Public management as a special focus of modern public administration is new,’ say Perry and Kraemer (1983), a view echoed by Rainey (1990, p. 157): ‘In the past two decades, the topic of public management has come forcefully onto the agenda of those interested in governmental administration,’ perhaps, he suggests, because of the growing unpopularity of government. In their Public Management: The Essential Reading...