Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

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The same reforms were adopted, the same items taken out of the public management reform toolbox – in Kuno Schedler’s phrase – just later or to a different extent. Pollitt argues that reform ideas themselves ‘have also varied considerably from country to country, and certainly the priority given to different components (e.g. privatization, contracting out) has fluctuated enormously’ (2000, p. 184). Obviously a nation with little public enterprise, such as the United States, is not going to have much to privatize but the underlying theory that privatization is a good thing, or rather that government ownership of enterprises is not, is very widely spread in developed and developing countries alike. If there was really no global movement of public sector reform, it would be expected that countries would behave more randomly than they have. Some would be moving towards more bureaucracy, the nationalization of industry not its privatization, increasing budgets and adopting more Weberian-style bureaucracy. The evidence for this is just not there. There is an international public sector reform movement. It does not require exactly the same reforms to be undertaken at exactly the same time. As Behn argues ‘the new public management is a worldwide phenomenon but with different strategies employed in different governments in different situations’ (2001, p. 26). The most important similarity is that of underlying theory. The ideological basis of managerialism It has been argued by some (Pollitt 1993; Dunleavy, 1994; Kearney and Hays, 1998; Minogue, 1998) that the public management reform changes are ideological. Pollitt (1993, p. 49) argues that managerialism is ‘the acceptable face of new-Right thinking concerning the state’ and that ideological considerations may be part of the argument for reducing government through marketization. Although improving productivity has a logic of its own, ‘simultaneously, for new right believers, better management provides a label under which private sector disciplines can be introduced to the public services, political control can be strengthened, budgets trimmed, professional autonomy reduced, public service unions weakened and a quasi-competitive framework erected to flush out the “natural” inefficiencies of bureaucracy’ (1993, p. 49). There are two main problems with this claim. First, the ideological nature of public management reform has diminished since the demise of the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom. Secondly, defending the public administration paradigm or a particular level of government involvement in society may be as ideological as its obverse. Differences in ideology Conclusion 269 In the United Kingdom in the 1980s it was easy to regard the public management reforms as part of Thatcherism. There certainly was an assault on the public
270 Public Management and Administration sector and the universities by that government and anyone who was there at that time could be forgiven for seeing the entire movement as ideological. In a later article Pollitt argued (1996, p. 86): The trajectory of pro-market, anti-state doctrines probably reached its apogee at the end of the 1980s, during Mrs Thatcher’s third term of office. At that time, resort to market or market-like solutions to the problems of public administration had begun to seem automatic, almost ritualistic. The distinctiveness of the public sector was repeatedly minimized, its particular values ignored or downgraded. Some of those involved in both the Thatcher and Reagan governments had a profound distaste for the public service and this was ‘new Right’ ideology. However, while this may have been an appropriate way of looking at the early reforms in the United Kingdom, the fervent ideology was not as evident later and neither was it so evident in other countries. Public sector reform did not stop after Thatcher; in fact it had barely started. What happened was that the intensely ideological attack on the role of government in society was replaced by intensified efforts to improve its management. In New Zealand and Australia, the most radical of the public service changes were introduced by Left governments, and the movement was more about management and responding to economic crisis than new Right ideology. Canadian and French governments of Left and Right have introduced similar reforms. As the reform movement has spread any party-political aspect seems harder to show. It is easy to point to governments that were not ‘New Right’, but still introduced managerialist reforms of their own. But as the movement towards public management has proceeded, the ideological element has become far less visible and new public management ‘seems now to have no evident coupling to a specific point on the traditional ‘right–left’ political spectrum’ (Jones, Guthrie and Steane, 2001, p. 3). Ideology and the old model It could be argued that opposition to public management reform is itself driven by ideology. It could be equally ideological even to argue to maintain particular activities in the public sector. Pollitt and Bouckaert, for example, describe their stance as ‘sceptically open-minded’ and doubt whether many of the ideas behind the NPM are ‘quite as new as some of their more enthusiastic proponents claim’ (2000, p. 15). A few pages on they state (2000, p. 22): We share several values and beliefs: for example, that the public sector is distinctive, that public sector (collective) approaches to many social problems are desirable/necessary/ ultimately unavoidable; that the dull stuff of administrative implementation is actually crucial to the final effects of reforms; that the eventual impacts on citizens is usually the most powerful (though often fiendishly difficult to execute) test of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of a management ‘improvement’. Further, we recognize that language is both rich
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Public Management and Administratio
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Also by Owen E. Hughes AUSTRALIAN P
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© Owen E. Hughes 1994, 1998, 2003
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Preface Over the past 20 years the
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viii Preface the Colorado link such
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3 Public Management Introduction Th
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5 Public Enterprise Introduction Pu
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7 Strategic Management Introduction
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10 E-government Introduction In the
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11 Managing External Constituencies
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Page 293 and 294: 284 References Borins, Sandford (19
Page 295 and 296: 286 References Glor, Eleanor D. (20
Page 297 and 298: 288 References Jordan, Grant (1997)
Page 299 and 300: 290 References Monroe, Kristen Renw
Page 301 and 302: 292 References Putt, Allen C. and S
Page 303 and 304: 294 References Wilson, Graham K. (1
Page 305 and 306: 296 Index bureaucracy 1-5, 9, 15-43
Page 307 and 308: 298 Index information and communica
Page 309 and 310: 300 Index ‘one best way’ thinki
Page 311 and 312: 302 Index Ritter, G. 85, 86 role of
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Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

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