Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

204 Public Management and Administration
environment may make it more difficult than most public relations in the
private sector.
All these functions pose challenges for public sector management, especially
with the changes induced by managerialism, but also due to the greater demands
placed on governmental agencies by outside forces. External constituency management
now emphasizes service delivery, the beginnings of consumer sovereignty
and the ‘empowerment’ of clients. These all contrast with external relations
in the traditional model of administration. Dealing with the outside has become
far more important for public organizations with the decline of the traditional
model. It could be argued the apparent failure of the older model to look to external
constituency relations was probably a significant reason for its decline.
External relations in the traditional model
External relations were not considered to be particularly important in the traditional
model of administration. The focus of attention was inside the organization,
on structure and process, and external relations were to be handled by
politicians. As part of the strict separation between matters of policy, to be handled
by the politician, and matters of administration, the task of dealing with
the outside world was naturally reserved for the politician. Any dealing with
the press, the public, interest groups or other organizations was outside the
duties of the public servant. When individual public servants are regarded as
anonymous, they are neither able nor willing to appear on behalf of a department
or policy, let alone have any ownership of it in the public mind. Similarly,
the concept of neutrality means that a public official’s external focus is limited
by the fear of being ‘political’ and, in these circumstances, the public servant
was quite willing to defer to the politician. It is little wonder that with such a
theory being followed, ministers and parties were the sole target of interest
group pressure.
In the United States, where the strict separation between policy and administration
was not followed to the same extent as in parliamentary systems, there
was a similar division of labour between politicians and public servants.
American agencies were relatively open, with a major part of an agency’s
budgetary success being how well it could deal with outside groups such as
Congress and its committees, the press and the public. However, in the United
States, most outside contacts were not made by career public servants. They
were usually carried out by the political appointees to the bureaucracy who
came and left with a particular administration. In fact, that was their main purpose.
Career administrators did not usually deal with outside forces to the same
extent as politicians either outside or within the bureaucracy.
Looking again at Allison’s points for managing external constituencies, it
can be argued that all were either not handled at all or handled badly in the traditional
model of administration. First, coordination was handled bureaucratically,
if at all. Relationships between parts of the same agency were assumed to be