Traditional Public Administration

1
Traditional Public Administration

• Lack coherence of a rigorous academic discipline
• Institutional features of traditional public
  administration
• monopoly of service provision by a government
  bureaucracy
• bureaucratic government with a strong bent on
  control by rules
• appointment and promotion on professional merits
• clear delineation of authority and jurisdictions
• stressing the distinctiveness of public
  administration

2
Major Challenges (I)

• From Public Choice or new institutional economics
• incentives of individual bureaucrats
  (self-regarding) and the inherent inefficiency of
  large bureaucracy and bureaucratic monopoly of
  service provision
• a preference for consumer choice, for
  smaller-scale rather than larger-scale service,
  for organizational rivalry and contest rather
  than monopoly, and for provision of government
  services on the basis of competitive performance
  contracts or franchises rather than permanent
  public bureaucracies etc.

3
Major Challenges (II)

• From private business management theory and
  practice
• the seemingly superior efficiency of private
  business management
• need for high level of managerial discretionary
  power free to manage
• need for measuring performance and results

4
Other Circumstances

• The rise to power of right-wing parties and
  politicians in Britain, the U.S. and other
  Western countries
• need for high quality government services
• public fiscal crisis

5
Public Management (I)

• Two basic design co-ordinates of public sector
  organization
• Grid extent to which public management is
  conducted according to well-understood general
  rules.
• Group extent to which public management involves
  coherent collectivities, institutionally
  differentiated

6
Public Management (II)

• Going down-grid reducing the extent to which
  power is limited by rules
• Going down-group making the public sector less
  distinctive as a unit from the private sector
• public management denotes a movement to reform
  government organization on the model of business
  organization as well as an area of study

7
Public Management specific doctrines

• Hand-on professional management
• explicit standards and measures of performance
• greater emphasis on output controls
• shift to disaggregation of units
• shift to greater competition
• stress on private-sector styles of management
  practice
• stress on greater discipline and parsimony in
  resource use

8
Public Management Three Assumptions

• Modernity and convergence
• Novelty of public management ideas
• public management brings more efficiency

9
A Public Management for All Seasons?

• Three clusters of administrative values
• sigma-type values keep it lean and purposeful
• theta-type values keep it honest and fair
• lambra-type values keep it robust and resilient
• Compatibility and public management ideas and
  institutions

10
Three Questions for Public Management

• Whether and how it has delivered the sigma-type
  values
• Even if it could be established that public
  management is associated with the sigma-type
  values, it remains to be seen whether it is
  brought at the expense of other types of
  administrative values
• what effect public management would do to those
  countries where there is little capital base of
  ingrained public service culture?

11
Constitutional Issues of Public Mgt. Reforms

• The issue of developing the core competencies of
  the nation state can the government retain real
  steering capacity?
• The need for developing an overall view of the
  governments core functions

12
Grid/Group Cultural Theory and Public Management

• It aims to capture the diversity of human
  preferences about ways of life and relate those
  preferences to different possible styles of
  organization, each of which has its advantages
  and disadvantages but is in some sense viable.
• Grid and group dimensions, and the plurality of
  organizational forms

13
Core Arguments of the Cultural Theory

• The grid and group dimensions represent basic and
  enduring human preferences, and controversies
  about how to organize government are not likely
  to disappear
• Each of the four organizational forms are equally
  viable and no one has an unambiguous claim to be
  more modern or better than others
• Hence there are limits to convergence and
  historical inevitability of a particular form of
  organization

14
Four Types of Public-Mgt Organization

• The Hierarchist way high grid and high group
• The individualist way low grid and low group
• The egalitarian way low grid and high group
• The fatalist way high grid and low group

15
Responses to public management disasters

• There is no universal agreement on what counts as
  problem and what as solution (Table 2.1)
• Each of the four major organizational styles has
  its own in-built failure (Table 2.2)

16
In-built failure of the individualist way

• Misappropriation, extortion and bribery
• Front-line abandonment
• Grandeur, self-indulgence

17
In-built failure of the hierarchist way

• Excessive faith and trust in organizational
  procedures and authority
• a high trust relationship makes the bureaucracy
  impervious to doubts and criticisms

18
In-built failure of the egalitarian way

• Unresolved conflict and internecine strife

19
The Hierarchist way (I)

• Three different meanings of the group dimension
• degree of separation of public and private
  sectors
• ability/willingness to sacrifice individual
  interests for group interests
• to organize works and rewards on the basis of
  groups

20
The Hierarchist Way (II)

• High group in which of these two meanings?
• High grid high density of rules and clear
  authority structures to govern individual behavior

21
The Hierarchist Way (III)

• Not a single form of organization, but a family
  of organizational types
• The hierarchist doctrines are stressed, a the
  point that they are equated with management (e.g.
  David Rosenbloom equates the managerial approach
  to public administration with a Weberian
  bureaucracy)

22
The Hierarchist Way (IV)

• While the hierarchist ideas are often traced to
  Max Weber and Woodrow Wilson of the late 19th
  century, fairly well-developed ideas had existed
  long before that.
• The most important example of this is the Chinese
  bureaucracy

23
The Individualist Way (I)

• A focus on specific problem, not the state
  bureaucracy
• To start from the assumption that rulers will
  tend to look after themselves at the expense of
  the ruled unless the institutions and incentive
  structures are very carefully engineered

24
The Individualist Way (II)

• to start from the assumption that market will
  normally produce better results than bureaucratic
  hierarchies.
• All actors are inherently rational and
  self-regarding
• these four assumptions make a coherent philosophy
  of institutional design for government.

25
The Individualist Way (III)

• Reward and incentive structures
• Competitive provision of public services
• creating special purpose authorities and small
  units to provide public services

26
The Egalitarian Way

• Against both market and hierarchy, and a third
  alternative participation and community
• self-governing bodies and empowerment
• the roots of problems in public management lie in
  the self-serving behavior of those at the top of
  big organizations and the wide gulf between them
  and the rank-and-file members
• the preferred recipe for holding individuals
  responsible is to use group solidarity and norm
  rather than hierarchical rules
• Two main sources of the egalitarian way radical
  feminism and green politics

27
Three Elements of the Egalitarian Way

• Group self-management
• Control by mutuality
• Maximum face-to-face accountability

28
Group Self-Management

• The producers and consumers should be the same
  people co-production (citizens are not passive
  consumers of what professionals or specialized
  organizations provide, but a crucial part of the
  production process.
• Against the policy-administration dichotomy and
  direct democracy
• Examples of group self-management citizen
  militias, neighborhood watch, enlisting of
  parents in school administration (empowering
  parents)

29
Group Self-Management

• Another core idea of group self-management is to
  limit the difference between the top level and
  the rank-and-file members in organizations
• Ways to do this limited terms of office,
  rotation of offices election and recall
  procedures, and requiring top officials to do
  their share of real work
• Example management of universities

30
Problems of group self-management

• Shirking
• Free-riding

31
Control by Mutuality

• Maximum participation and minimum differentiation
  of rank or status, with each individual
  continually subjected to mutual surveillance and
  veto from the rest of the group
• informal group criticism, more formal performance
  appraisal by fellow workers
• this type of control is viewed as a viable
  alternative to the information asymmetry noted in
  the individualist approach

32
Maximum Face-to-face Accountability

• Not only putting leaders under maximum scrutiny
  from the led, but putting all public officials
  under the most popular scrutiny
• Implying a highly decentralized approach to
  management to make the distance between
  office-holders and citizens as small as possible

33
A Sure Recipe for Chaos or a triumph of hope over
experience?

• Example of failure of the egalitarian way the
  Great Cultural Revolution in China under Mao
  (look no further beyond the community
  organizations in your neighborhood for possible
  problems of the egalitarian way)
• Inherent strengths and weaknesses
• the hope keeps on coming back

34
Criticisms of the Egalitarian Way

• Demanding too much on the time and energy of
  members (socialism would never come because there
  are not enough evenings in the week).
• Shirking and deadlock
• not suitable for many functions in modern society

35
Green Theory of Value versus green theory of
agency

• Green theory of value environmental protection
• Green theory of agency green doctrines of
  egalitarian organization such as rotation of
  offices, participation, and decentralization

36
The Egalitarian way and socialism

• Not all socialist regimes have practiced
  egalitarian forms of public management
• iron law of hierarchy and socialism
• withering of the state (Karl Marx) and the
  growing importance of hierarchy (Max Weber)

37
Variants of Egalitarianism

• A family of related approaches to organization
• Two dimensions along which egalitarian
  organizations can be differentiated
• self-maintaining or transformational
• self-contained or community wide

38
Self-maintaining or Elitist egalitarianism
39
Radical and Transformational egalitarianism

• Advocating an egalitarian way not only for the
  elite but also for other members of the public
• green politics and radical feminism interested
  not only in environmental protection and
  advancing the status of women but also the
  egalitarian organizations

40
Egalitarianism and free choice

• Egalitarianism features strongly in Reinventing
  Government combining free to choose and
  community government
• Same emphasis on enhancing greater control over
  officials by citizens and clients of public
  services what is better?
• citizens versus clients
• self-management or co-production versus market
  and choice

41
Inherent Weaknesses of the Egalitarian Way

• Difficult to sacrifice individual interests for
  collective good
• Hard to resolve disputes
• Free-riding and shirking
• Manipulation by leaders
• Paradox egalitarianism in public management is
  likely to last longest in its elitist form