Public Management: Old and New

Laurence E. Lynn, Jr.

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134445585
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Business General

Offering much more than a purely theoretical or retrospective view of public management, this exciting text is an invaluable new addition to the field of public management. Putting the American model in perspective, it establishes the historical, theoretical, analytical, practical and future foundations for the comparative study of public management.

Taking a boldly integrative approach, Laurence E. Lynn Jr. combines topics of best practice, performance, accountability and rule of law to provide a much-needed umbrella view of the topic.

Well-written and illustrated with case study examples, this is one of the most exciting books on public management available today. As such it is an essential read for every student of public management, administration and public policy.

Chapter 1
Public management comes of age

INTRODUCTION

Effective management of public organizations – departments, agencies, bureaus, offices – is vital to the success of government programs, policies, and regimes, and perhaps even of democracy itself.¹ Although generally accepted around the world, this seemingly sensible statement would have been only barely intelligible within the public administration profession as recently as the 1970s.² From a subject widely regarded as “new” only a generation ago, public management is now a field of policy making, practice, and scholarship which enjoys international recognition. “Public management” and “public management reform,” along with concepts and terms of art associated with them, have entered the languages of practical politics, scholarship and instruction.

A number of factors impelled the rapid growth of interest in public sector management. Among the most prominent were the national economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, which opened disconcerting gaps between government outlays and revenues and suggested the need for more tight-fisted management of public agencies. Other contributing factors included heightened expectations for effective government on the part of citizens around the world following the end of the Cold War; growing interdependence within the global economy, which increased pressures for efficient regulation and reliable and frugal administration of government functions (Caiden 1991, 1999); and the growing popular appeal of neo-liberal, that is to say, business-and-market-oriented, ideologies, policies, and political programs intended to reduce the scale, scope, and fiscal appetite of governments. The era of generous, unmanaged, rule-governed social provision, of the welfare state, was, it was widely argued, history.

As forces and ideas threatening the status quo of national welfare state governments gathered momentum, the ideology of managerialism and strategies for public management reform became a priority of the international community, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, the European Commission, the Inter- American Development Bank, and many other regional bodies, as well as of bilateral aid donors, trade partners, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with “unmistakable impact” (Common 1998, 61). Among such organizations, as well as among many national advocates for governmental improvement, the belief took hold that external pressures for change had created new opportunities for public management reforms by national governments (Fuhr 2001). National and international public management consultancies began to proliferate and flourish, sustaining the momentum for change, and academic interest in these developments burgeoned.

Because improving public management in more than specifically technical ways virtually always requires active political and expert support, neologisms that incite approval, such as “new public management,” “reinventing government,” and “state modernization and reform,” entered the vocabularies of policy makers, practitioners, and scholars world-wide. Surveyed by the OECD, few countries failed to report deliberate efforts at governmental improvement, and most claimed actual, albeit largely uncorroborated, achievements (OECD 1994, 1995, 1996). Discussions of public management that were once confined within national boundaries are now the subjects of a thriving international discourse featuring comparative analysis, evaluation, and lesson-drawing.

These developments have spawned new programs of public-management-oriented teaching and research and, as well, have energized, although not in any coordinated way, academic fields concerned with various aspects of the subject. The disciplines of political science, economics and sociology, policy subfields such as health, education, public welfare, and information technology, professional fields such as financial management, personnel management, and accounting, and private-sector-oriented fields such as organization studies, management, and non-governmental or non-profit sector studies have come to be viewed as intellectual resources for the study and practice of public management, and their practitioners regularly participate in international public management forums. The sense of urgency about public management reform and the casting of a wide net to capture useful ideas are thought by many to have thrown the traditional field of public administration into crisis by revealing the inadequacy of its intellectual apparatus for addressing twenty-first-century problems of resource allocation, coordination and control (Kettl 2002).

Of particular interest to public management specialists are the insistent claims by many scholars, policy makers, and public officials that the field of public management has crossed a historical watershed. A new paradigm of public management emphasizing incentives, competition, and performance – termed New Public Management or, more generally, managerialism – is said by many to be displacing traditional public administration’s reliance on rule-based hierarchies overseen by the institutions of representative democracy, a development with profound implications for democracy itself. The mantra has grown in volume: the bureaucratic paradigm is dead; long live quasi-markets and quangos, flattened hierarchies and continuous improvement, competitive tendering and subsidiarity. Other anti-traditional paradigms emphasizing, for example, deliberative democracy, or networked relationships and partnerships – joined-up government – or “governance” are also claimed to be gaining in popularity in national, state, and local governments around the world. A grand, global isomorphism of governmental structures and practices is thought by many to be well under way.

These remarkable claims and developments and their implications for public management thought, policy, and practice are the subject of this book. Although the impressively growing literature of public management records the views of numerous skeptics and critics of recent developments (discussed further in Chapter 6), there have been relatively few systematic attempts to examine managerialism’s central premise: that the field of public management is experiencing a historical transformation that is realigning the relationships between the state and society, between government and citizen, between politics and management. The book’s primary questions are these: In the light of the long history of public administration and management in organized societies, are claims on behalf of such a transformation credible? What is actually new, and to what extent is “the new” changing in fundamental ways not only public management policies and practices but the field’s intellectual and institutional infrastructure? To the extent that we can discern significant continuity in the managerial institutions of mature democracies, what are the implications of such a reality for the prospects of further managerial reform?

The argument of this book is that the old and the new, that is, public management’s historical and contemporary structures, practices, and institutions, are so intimately interrelated that answers to the foregoing questions require an understanding of the paths and patterns of national institutional development. While reform, change, and adaptation of contemporary national administrative systems may be nearly universal, it follows centuries of reform, change, and adaptation that have resulted in national institutions whose function is to guarantee a certain stability and continuity in democratic governance. To imagine that such institutions can be overturned in a generation is an unwarranted conceit. The past constrains and shapes the present and constrains the future in comprehensible ways.

The heart of the book is an examination and analysis of public management, old and new, in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Intellectual boundaries for this inquiry must first be laid, however. These boundaries are the subject of the first two chapters of the book. (The plan and method of the remaining six chapters are outlined at the end of this chapter.)

Because the very idea of a new public management conveys the notion of divergence from past practice – from “traditional public administration” – the question arises as to how the history of a rapidly obsolescing field can be relevant to understanding contemporary developments. Public administration was “then”; public management is “now.” Moreover, because a premise of contemporary managerialism is that the functional distinction between the public and private sectors is, and ought to be, breaking down – that public and private management are, or at least ought to be, increasingly indistinguishable – the question arises as to how a history of institutions formed when industrial capitalism was rudimentary at best can be relevant to understanding governance in an era of transcendent global capitalism and stateless enterprises, instantaneous communications, and the extensive interpenetration of public and private sectors.

The present chapter takes up two issues related to these questions: the relationship between “administration,” “management,” and a third, more recent and related concept, “governance” and the distinguishability of public and private management. Concerning the first of these issues, the conclusion is that it is generally impossible to establish, either historically or conceptually, a definitive distinction between administration and management; in effect, the history of public administration is a history of public management, a notion that many readers, especially in Europe, may find uncongenial or unhelpful. While governance may yet emerge as a distinction with a difference, such a conclusion is as yet premature. Concerning the second of these issues, the conclusion is that a distinction between public and private management is virtually axiomatic; the two sectors are constituted in fundamentally different ways, one through sovereign mandate, the other through individual initiative enabled but not mandated or directed by the state.

In the light of these conclusions, Chapter 2 discusses why and how history matters to a proper interpretation of contemporary developments in public management. Using social science concepts such as path dependency and punctuated equilibrium, an initial conclusion is that there have emerged inextricable links between the past and present of public management that, as illustrated by the four countries discussed in this book, both ensure the fundamental continuity of national institutions and enable change, adaptation, and reform without debilitating disruption, albeit – and this is fundamental – on different terms in different countries. Next, a concept of public management emphasizing three dimensions – structures, practices, and institutionalized values – is set forth in some detail to provide a framework for interpreting the specific character of both continuity and change. Reference to these three dimensions will be made throughout the book.

ADMINISTRATION, MANAGEMENT, AND GOVERNANCE

The terms “public administration,” “public management,” and “public governance” entered academic discourse more or less in that order. They are sometimes used as if they were virtually interchangeable, sometimes held to be conceptually distinct. Unfortunately, the considerable intellectual effort that has been devoted to differentiating them has failed to converge on a conventional scheme of conceptualization and usage, largely because each of the three terms itself lacks a definitive conceptualization.

In the most general sense, both “administration” and “management” when referring to the public sector seem to encompass methodical efforts to accomplish the goals of sovereign authority. Yet as already noted, public management has been widely acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic to represent a new approach to governing, a new ideology, or perhaps a new paradigm. In sorting out this issue, it will be helpful to review briefly the evolution of each of the two ideas.³

The idea of administration: inordinate magnitude and difficulty

The general notion of administration as methodical effort associated with securing the goals of sovereign authority is of ancient origin, as is awareness, or, as it might be termed, “common knowledge” (Hood and Jackson 1991b) or “practice wisdom,” of the techniques of administration.⁴ However, it is in the literature of cameralism – a theory of managing natural and human resources in a way most lucrative for the ruler and his interests, and the precursor of modern administrative science – that one finds systematic recognition of the idea of administration that anticipates later intellectual developments.

Motivated in part by hostility to the kind of manipulative and opportunistic advice to rulers associated with Machiavelli, cameralism identified “techniques and objects of administration” for state domains the use of which would stabilize and increase the ruler’s powers (Tribe 1984, 268). The term polizei (referring to the maintenance of internal order and welfare) was defined as “activity of interior state administration . . . which is established as an independent means for achieving general objectives of the state, without consideration for the individual and without waiting until its service is specifically called for” (F. Rettig quoted by Anderson and Anderson 1967, 169). According to Georg Zincke, perhaps the foremost cameralist academic scholar, “a prince needs genuine and skillful cameralists. By this name we mean those who possess fundamental and special knowledge about all or some particular part of those things which are necessary in order that they may assist the prince in maintaining good management in the state” (quoted by Lepawsky 1949, 99; Small 1909, 253).⁵

Early usages of the term “administration” in the English language were primarily descriptive and only implicitly conceptual. In 1836, Sir Henry Taylor, in a book, The Statesman (1958), which has been termed “the first modern book to be devoted to the subject of public administration,” argued that without “administrative measures” we have but the potentiality of government (quoted by Dunsire 1973, 10). John Stuart Mill wrote that “freedom cannot produce its best effects, and often breaks down altogether, unless means can be found of combining it with trained and skilled administration” (Mill 1861, quoted by Dunsire 1973, 73). In The Science of Law (1874), Sheldon Amos (quoted by Fairlie 1935, 19–20) said that administration consists

in selecting a vast hierarchy of persons to perform definite work; in marking out the work of all and each; in taking such measures as are necessary to secure that the work is really done; and in supplying from day to day such connections or modifications as changing circumstances may seem to suggest. . . . In a very complete and advanced condition of society . . . the task of administration is one of inordinate magnitude and difficulty, but it is only a subordinate agency in the whole process of government.

One writer referred to administration as occurring at “the lower ranges” of government (Fairlie 1935).

The term “administration” began to find its way into technical dictionaries, especially those concerned with the law. Bouvier’s Law Dictionary (first published in 1839), at the end of its article on the administration of estates, gives a brief definition of the administration of government: “The management of the affairs of the government; the word is also applied to the persons entrusted with the management of public affairs” (quoted by Fairlie 1935, 14–15). Black’s Law Dictionary, first published in 1891, defined “the administration of government” as “the practical management and direction of the executive department, or, of the public machinery or functions” (quoted by Fairlie 1935, 25). Note the habit of dictionaries (also true of the Oxford English Dictionary) of using each of the terms “management” and “administration” to define the other, a habit that, as already noted, originated with seventeenth-century cameralists.

The most systematic attempts to define administration in the English language were associated wit...