Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

76 Public Management and Administration
Fourthly, the public sector has inherent difficulties in measuring output or
efficiency in production. It lacks ‘bottom-line’ criteria analogous to profit in the
private sector. In government there is rarely agreement on goals or measures of
them, nor can it be assumed that everyone in the organization will abide by
either. The difficulty of measuring performance in the public sector, whether of
individuals, groups or whole organizations, permeates management as a whole.
Measurement and evaluation are possible in the public sector, but are more difficult
and perhaps less meaningful. The lack of suitable measurement may
enable parts of the public service to perform no useful function and to evade
scrutiny. This might occur in the private sector too, but is much less likely.
Finally, the public sector’s sheer size and diversity make any control or coordination
difficult. Somehow governments and their advisers try to coordinate
the activities of the largest and most complex part of society’s activities.
Coordination must be political and is never easy.
There are major differences between the sectors. The question is whether
these differences between them are, first, enough to require a specific form of
management and, second, to require a traditional administrative model and not
a managerial model. On the first point, it must be concluded that the public sector
is sufficiently different and needs its own form of management, not just that
borrowed from the private sector. Flynn, for example, argues that managing
public services is different from managing services in the private sector (1997,
p. 12). Allison, too, argues ‘public and private management are at least as different
as they are similar, and … the differences are more important than the
similarities’; further, ‘the notion that there is any sufficient body of private
management practices and skills that can be transferred directly to public management
tasks in a way that produces significant improvements is wrong’
(1982, p. 29). There may be advantages in adapting and using some practices
pioneered in the private sector, but the basic task is different in each sector.
However, the second point does not necessarily follow. Even if it is argued
that the sectors are different, this does not mean that the traditional administrative
model is the only valid way of managing in the public sector (see
Ranson and Stewart, 1994, pp. 270–1). The development of public management
is a recognition that the task of public servants is now managerial and not
administrative, that a form of management can be developed bearing in mind
the differences between the sectors.
‘Government’ and ‘governance’
There is an important distinction to be made between ‘government’ and ‘governance’.
Government is the institution itself, where governance is a broader
concept describing forms of governing which are not necessarily in the hands
of the formal government. Corporate governance, for example, refers to how the
private sector structures its internal mechanisms to provide for accountability to