Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

Conclusion 261
founded on a different basis of legitimacy: perhaps different forms of rationality,
different jurisprudential principles, a different allocation of property rights’
(Lynn, 1997, pp. 109–10). In other words, a Weberian bureaucracy is regarded
as being necessary for the modern nation state. However, Lynn overstates the
case in three ways. First, market rationality is a valid alternative in many settings
and a familiar one in that it is the central organizing feature of the private
sector. It could even be regarded as more rational in the economic sense; indeed
one of the criticisms is that it is too rational, rather than not rational enough.
Secondly, no advocate of public management reforms proposes totally overthrowing
the system of government, the rational/legal authority of jurisprudence
and property rights. It could be argued that contracting to the private
sector enhances the system of property rights rather than derogating it. Thirdly,
it is possible to have a bureaucratic system of government where there is a very
small public service to carry out its functions through contract.
In one sense, however, Lynn is correct. To move completely away from
a rational/legal paradigm is to require a different form of government, but which
theorist has ever suggested that? The public management reforms may have wide
effects but what we have as a result is a form of management within government
elected by the normal means, not from a totally different form of politics altogether.
Some parts of government can and should be provided bureaucratically,
but this does not mean that all government functions and services must be provided
bureaucratically, nor does it mean that all public servants need be
employed for life under the career service model. One of the key aspects of the
public management reforms has been to push the envelope as to those functions
that should be provided by a bureaucracy and those that should not, those to be
contracted out and those which would be provided ineffectively if they were. No
one advocates a totally different system of government, nor is that necessary if
some services are provided in other than bureaucratic ways. What has been
argued is that there should be a different kind of management of government.
Lynn argues that the profession of public administration ‘mounts an unduly
weak challenge to various revisionists and to the superficial thinking and easy
answers of the policy schools and the ubiquitous management consultants’
(2001, p. 155). He continues ‘basic political and legal issues of responsible
management in a postmodern era are inadequately defined and addressed. Such
a result ill becomes a profession that once owned impressively deep insight into
public administration in a representative democracy’ (2001, p. 155).
Such is the fate of old paradigms. The decline of one school of thought
occurs as a result of the rise of an alternative. Or as Kuhn argues, ‘the decision
to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another,
and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms
with nature and with one another’ (1970, p. 77). The problem with the
traditional model of administration is that its underlying theories lost support
and lost relevance, so much so that the defence of the old model has been weak.
It is not the case that in one moment everyone decides that public administration