Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

280 Public Management and Administration
better – democratic accountability, stability, fairness – although it remains to be
seen if the new model is in practice any worse than the old on these points. No
model can perform perfectly on all points. It is, however, time for critics to
state what they now advocate in place of public management.
The traditional model of administration is argued here to be obsolete and to
have been replaced by public management. However, the new public management,
or any theory arguing that the public sector requires its own specialized
form of management, is itself under threat from the idea that management is
generic and technocratic. This argument is that management is the same anywhere,
that the public and private sectors are sufficiently similar for expertise
to be readily transferable. A particular manager, such as a human resource
manager, may regard herself or himself as a professional in that area with their
current employment in the public or private sector being relatively unimportant.
This genericism points to a real threat for public management. Unless it
can be established that the public sector is distinctive enough to require its own
form of management, public management of any kind may become as marginalized
as traditional public administration.
The way ahead
It is not easy to see where the discipline of public management will proceed in
the future. In one respect the future is relatively bright: if during the early
1980s the ideologues argued that the best public sector was that which was
most minimal, such arguments have faded. Government, as an idea, is back.
However, the discipline of public administration as the best way of classifying,
arguing about and managing in practice is terminally ill. Even if public management,
particularly that part of it termed new public management, is currently
dominant in the operations of governments, there will be other
approaches to appear.
There are already possible candidates to be alternative models. E-government
may be one, as discussed earlier (Chapter 10). Another may be the new contractualism,
with Davis arguing there have been two ideas at work (1997a, pp. 61–2):
The first, managerialism, sought to reform public administration while keeping many of
its essential features. It drew on values and techniques developed in business to improve
efficiency in government. Managerialism is an agenda now largely played out in most
places … The second trend, the move to contracting, has proved the more significant. It
draws explicitly from economic theory. Contracting suggests it is not enough to import
business practices. Government services must be delivered by business, according to contracts
won through competition. The result is a hollow state, a government which regulates
markets but does not participate in them, a remnant public service which sets policy
but relies on others to deliver the goods.
To follow Davis there have been three stages in the history of public sector
change: (i) the traditional bureaucratic model of public administration; (ii) the