Running Government Like A Business Implications For Public Administration Theory and Practice

Box / RUNNING
ARPA / March 1999

GOVERNMENT LIKE A BUSINESS
RUNNING GOVERNMENT
LIKE A BUSINESS
Implications for Public Administration
Theory and Practice
RICHARD C. BOX
University of Nebraska–Omaha
The public sector faces increasing demands to run government like a business, importing private-
sector concepts such as entrepreneurism, privatization, treating the citizen like a “customer,” and
management techniques derived from the production process. The idea that government should
mimic the market is not new in American public administration, but the current situation is particu-
larly intense. The new public management seeks to emphasize efficient, instrumental implementa-
tion of policies, removing substantive policy questions from the administrative realm. This revival of
the politics-administration dichotomy threatens core public-sector values of citizen self-
governance and the administrator as servant of the public interest. The article examines the political
culture that encourages expansion of market-like practices in the American public sector, explores
the issues of the purpose and scope of government and the role of the public-service practitioner, and
offers a framework for the study and practice of public administration based on citizenship and pub-
lic service.
Increasingly, public administration practitioners and academicians are

faced with demands from politicians and citizens that government should be
operated like a business. By this, they mean that it should be cost efficient, as
small as possible in relation to its tasks, competitive, entrepreneurial, and dedi-
cated to “pleasing the customer.” But, despite the considerable success of
market-like reforms in increasing the efficiency of governmental bureaucracies,
there remains a sense that something is wrong. For people who are concerned
about the quality of public service and attention to issues of social injustice, fair-
ness in governmental action, environmental protection, and so on, something
about running government like a business does not feel right. It seems to degrade
the commitment to public service, reducing it to technical-instrumental market
functions not unlike the manufacture and marketing of a consumer product.
Gone is the image of citizens determining public policy and its implementation
to shape a better future because customers do not actively participate in
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author wishes to thank the reviewers for their very thoughtful and useful
comments.
AMERICAN REVIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Vol. 29 No. 1, March 1999 19-43
© 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.
19
20 ARPA / March 1999
governance but wait passively to respond to an “agenda set by others”

(Schachter, 1997, p. 65).
The idea that the public sector should conduct its affairs in a businesslike way
is not new in the United States. Though there are enduring classical republican
elements in American political thought that emphasize citizens working
together for the good of the community, the American public sector exists within
a context of market capitalism and classical liberalism. The values of this con-
text include limited and efficient government in combination with individual
liberty and political competition. Relatively little attention is given to problems
associated with the workings of the market, such as economic inequality or
reduced opportunities for collective citizen decision making through discourse.
A strong governmental apparatus can operate to set the parameters of market
activity and its impact on the lives of citizens, but in the United States big gov-
ernment must exert control without seeming to be like a centralized European-
style state. Although they wanted a stronger government than that provided by
the Articles of Confederation, the founders of the United States intended to
avoid forming a state apparatus with a purpose and values of its own and a man-
date to shape the broader society. This initial “statelessness” (Stillman, 1991) is
manifest in contemporary public administration debates over the issue of legiti-
macy (Public Administration Review, 1993). The concept of statelessness can be
overdrawn, as Americans built an extensive government to meet the challenges
of the years 1877-1920, including “the emergence of a nationally based market”
and “the growth of trusts and oligopolies with national orientations and national
economic power” (Skowronek, 1982, p. 11). Because of this institution-
building effort, contemporary American government has a significant interac-
tive relationship with the private economy, but it retains from the founding era
the cultural expectation of minimal interference in the private sector. This
expectation forms a political-cultural context in which the values of the private
sector are primary and the values of collective citizen deliberation and the public
interest are secondary. Even in this setting, there historically has been recogni-
tion of a unique and different role for the public sector, however difficult to
define. This was true in the founding era, in the era of Jacksonian democracy, in
the reform era, and through several decades of the post–World War II era.
Today, even those elusive public-private differences are fading as the public
sector is increasingly penetrated by the metaphor of the market, of “running
government like a business.” The expansion of such thinking in the public sector
has important implications for theory and practice. This article examines the
nature of the political culture that encourages market-based practices in the
American public sector, explores the issues of the size and scope of government
and the role of the public service practitioner, and offers a framework for the
study and practice of public administration in this economistic environment that
is based on citizenship and public service. The article is not about the specifics
of any particular reform effort, and the intent is not to bemoan the condition of
Box / RUNNING GOVERNMENT LIKE A BUSINESS 21
the public sector. Rather, the article suggests constructive ways that public-
service practitioners and academicians can approach these issues in their work,
seeking to preserve and enhance the essence of public service within the market
context.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION’S RESPONSE

TO MARKET PRESSURES
Expansion of market concepts in the public sector is taking place at the end of
the 20th century thrust to build administrative systems that address the problems
of a growing urban-industrial nation. That thrust produced a public sector that
appears today to be large, cumbersome, wasteful, and beyond citizen control
(King & Stivers, 1998b, p. 11), isolated from and out of touch with the rest of
society (Peters & Pierre, 1998, pp. 228-229). Large government requires that a
few elected people represent the wishes of the masses, and representative
democracy has grown so remote from the everyday lives of people that it no
longer bears a clear relationship to common experience (Hummel & Stivers,
1998). Many citizens are so alienated from the concept of self-governance that
they think of government as something separate, not a reflection of their own
will, though some others would like to participate directly in re-creating the
machinery of government to allow for genuine self-governance. As a potential
remedy, many politicians and citizens believe that government should be run
more like businesses, becoming trim and lean, exhibiting competitive behav-
iors, and giving greater attention to the needs of “customers.”
Evidence of the expansion of market concepts in the public sector may be
found in the literature and practice of public administration in an emphasis on a
constellation of cost-cutting and production management concepts taken from
the private sector, currently drawn together as new public management. These
concepts include, among others, privatization, downsizing, rightsizing, entre-
preneurism, reinvention, enterprise operations, quality management, and cus-
tomer service. New public management seeks to separate politics (in the sense
of decision making by the people or their representatives) from administration,
allowing (or making) managers to manage according to cost-benefit economic
rationality, largely free from “day-to-day democratic oversight” (Cohn, 1997).
Such a separation resembles the old politics-administration dichotomy and Her-
bert Simon’s (1945/1997) description of administrative decisions that are
largely “factual.” In this reformed management setting, the public-private dis-
tinction is “essentially obsolete,” and management is generic across sectors
(Peters & Pierre, 1998, p. 229).
This desire to separate the activities of politics (deciding about public poli-
cies) and administration (implementing them) is part of a redefinition of the
function of government based on “a new elite consensus on the role of the state
in society. A substantial public sector is to be maintained, but its purposes and

operating values are considerably different from that which was characteristic
of the social welfare state. The goal is no longer to protect society from the mar-
ket’s demands but to protect the market from society’s demands” (Cohn, 1997,
p. 586). This is both an American and international phenomenon (Cheung,
1997; Cohn, 1997; Hood, 1996; Kettl, 1997; Lan & Rosenbloom, 1992), and it
may be seen as evidence of a new equilibrium in relations between economic
classes. We may no longer find useful the “stale discourse of class warfare”
(Barber, 1998, p. 8), but expansion of economistic concepts in the public sector
could reflect the reality that “big government has always been an ally of the little
guy, and downsizing it has generally been a recipe for upgrading the power of
private-sector monopolies. Schoolroom bullies are forever questioning the
legitimacy of hallway monitors” (Barber, 1998, p. 5).
At the level of governmental operation, the question is the extent to which the
functions of government should be modeled after the private sector. This gets to
the heart of the matter for public-service practitioners, who want to know what is
expected from public agencies, how they should relate to citizens (their custom-
ers, to use the language of the market), and what is the proper source of policy
direction—professional interpretation of the public interest, decisions by
elected officials, or the desires of citizens. For over a century, public administra-
tion practitioners and academicians have debated the normative role of practitio-
ners, with opinions ranging from neutral implementers of policies determined
by others to practitioners as active participants in the policy-making process
(Kass & Catron, 1990; McSwite, 1997). Despite the intent of new public man-
agement, market concepts are not likely to remove the practitioner from policy
making because government is so complex that citizens and elected representa-
tives cannot govern alone.
Instead, running government like a business means that public managers
increasingly regard the public as customers to be served rather than as citizens
who govern themselves through collective discourse processes. They keep the
public at a distance by conducting surveys and focus groups to identify existing
opinions rather than engaging citizens face-to-face in exchanges of information,
ideas, and values that result in informed governance. As elected officials with-
draw from direct and frequent involvement in administration, the balance of
control shifts toward professionals (Cope, 1997). With citizens excluded from
collective governance and elected officials withdrawn from the daily world of
policy implementation, the question becomes, “Who then is accountable?”
(Peters & Pierre, 1998, p. 228).
An important task before public administration theorists is to describe the
impact of governing and managing by market theory and practice on public serv-
ice at all levels of government and to explore how theorists and practitioners can
respond. Is a complete transformation of the public sector, mimicking the pri-
vate sector, the answer in the face of pervasive public preference for use of
market-like management practices and the apparent reduction of many
processes and interactions to cost-benefit calculations? Is this really a problem,

or are we approaching the old ideal of pure businesslike efficiency by walling off
“unrelated” matters of politics and preferences from public management,
squeezing out of professional practice substantive consideration of whether
what we do efficiently, instrumentally, is the right thing to do?
Furthermore, in this market-like environment, is it possible to identify
aspects of public service that are in some way fundamental to our notions of a
good political culture, aspects that can coexist with market concepts of structure
and function? At some point, theorists, and more so practitioners, may find it
makes sense to worry less about the apparently unstoppable expansion of the
market in the public sector and search for constructive ways to respond to it. For
practitioners, one way to do this is to simply comply, mastering the expected
economic techniques and carrying out policies as given without taking part in
their formulation or questioning them. This response fits well with the tradi-
tional split between politics and administration, emulating the model of the neu-
tral bureaucrat. For the academician, this approach means confining research to
technical matters of management, such as pay-for-performance plans, budget-
ing systems, or information technology, thus avoiding critical analysis of the
effects of market concepts on the public sphere.
A second way to respond to the expansion of market concepts in the public
sector would be to protest vigorously in hopes that someone, someday, will lis-
ten, or at least that if the pendulum swings in the other direction in the future, we
will be well positioned to say “we told you so.” This could be a risky strategy for
practitioners in the work world and it could position academicians as useful crit-
ics of current practice or place them so far outside the mainstream as to be
ignored. A third path in responding to the current situation would be to hope for
moderation of the impacts of market concepts in the future, but for today, to seek
reasonable ways to adapt public service values to the dominant economic para-
digm. This is the path outlined in the final section of the article.
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT
We can gain a broader perspective by considering the nature of the society

that surrounds public administration, the society that creates, supports, and
demands services from the public/governmental sector. A description of the
nature of society may seem somewhat removed from daily administrative
affairs, but of necessity public administration is a reflection of societal values. It
is impractical, maybe irresponsible, to operate inside public organizations as if
the demands of society do not matter. If we do, sooner or later the external envi-
ronment will catch up to us, making painful demands for accountability and
change that might have been foreseen and dealt with in less traumatic ways.
We have known for some time that the modern market economy would have
serious impacts on society and in particular on democracy. In 1906, Max Weber
asserted that
it is utterly ridiculous to see any connection between the high capitalism of

today—as it is now being imported into Russia and as it exists in America—with
democracy or freedom in any sense of these words. . . . The question is: how are
freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of
highly developed capitalism? (in Gerth & Mills, 1958, p. 71)
In 1931, John Dewey expressed concern for the future of democratic

governance:
The dominant issue is whether the people of the United States are to control our
government, federal, state, and municipal, and to use it in behalf of the peace and
welfare of society or whether control is to go on passing into the hands of small
powerful economic groups who use all the machinery of administration and legis-
lation to serve their own ends. (in Campbell, 1996, pp. 178-179)
Ramos (1981/1984) took for granted the “intrusion of the market system upon
human existence,” with its accompanying emphasis on instrumental rationality
that advances the goals of the market, rather than substantive rationality that
offers the individual an opportunity to achieve “truly self-gratifying interper-
sonal relationships” through reason, the activity of the human psyche (p. 23).
Scott and Hart (1979) documented the transition from a society based on the
value of the individual in the preindustrial era to one of organizational values in
the 20th century. Now, in an age in which we are replaceable parts of large sys-
tems, we think with nostalgic fondness of a time when each person was an inte-
gral part of a local community. We spend part of our leisure time watching mov-
ies or television shows that glorify the heroic loner, but most of us in real life
fulfill our destiny as small productive parts of larger systems.
In the United States, the nation’s founders created a governmental structure
that allowed limited popular participation in national political life while empha-
sizing order and stability. In so doing, they established a semidemocratic form in
which “the ‘people’ was no longer being defined, like the Athenian demos, as an
active citizen community but as a disaggregated collection of private individu-
als whose public aspect was represented by a distant central state” (Wood,
1996, p. 219). The focus was on individual rights and protection from the power
of government, as contrasted with the classical republican ideal of citizen self-
governance.
With the rise of capitalism in the 19th century, it became possible to combine
democracy and capitalism by clearly separating the economic and political
spheres. Thus, citizens maintained their formal public-sector liberal equality in
relation to rights, voting, and the law, whereas private-sector inequalities of
wealth and power generated by capitalism were largely off-limits to collective,
public action. These were the conditions of creation of modern liberal democ-
racy (Adams, Bowerman, Dolbeare, & Stivers, 1990; Wood, 1996, p. 234), a
“Lockean accommodation” that “reconciled representative government with
capitalism by disenfranchising the group most likely to contest the hegemony of
wealth—the working class itself” (Bowles & Gintis, 1986, p. 42). It is
semidemocratic in that the mass of people participate in a limited and marginal
way in collective decision making. In the balance between the public and eco-
nomic spheres, the public sector is allowed to trim off the rough edges of eco-
nomic excess in relation to treatment of workers, consumers, and the physical
environment, in exchange for keeping public-sector interference with the ine-
qualities of the economic sector to a minimum. Thus, as the market has “insinu-
ated itself into the domains of sentiment, life-style and psyche,” it has “bound
the state with subtle threads of economic dependency” (Bowles & Gintis, 1986,
p. 34).
There do not at present seem to be any viable alternatives to this semidemo-
cratic capitalist model (Dryzek, 1996). On a global level, there were competing
models for much of the 20th century, but now those models have largely van-
ished. There are a few socialist enclaves remaining, and a number of relatively
undeveloped countries with authoritarian regimes, now being pressured by the
public and private institutions of developed nations to change their economic
systems to conform with the semidemocratic capitalist model. Over time, it may
be discovered that this model is not optimal for all nations, that it works best for
mature, stable societies with institutions that can support it. It may not work well
for a range of nations with cultural and political histories very different from
those of developed Western societies, nations in which the semidemocratic capi-
talist model can lead to hardship and social unrest (Kaplan, 1997).
Today, even the possibility of alternative systems seems to be disappearing,
and the market metaphor is dominant. We are apparently in the midst of post-
modern conditions characterized by thick interpretations of reality at the micro,
local level where people can interact directly and form coherent mutual interpreta-
tions of values and identity, and thin reality at the macro level of broad classes of
people, regions, and nations. This results in a profusion of difference, an “asser-
tion of the random nonpattern and the unassimilable anomaly” (Fox & Miller,
1995, p. 45) that shifts and changes constantly. In such an environment, post-
modernists believe it is difficult if not impossible to identify grand themes of
common belief or interest across large groups of people or geographic areas.
In the midst of this apparent fragmentation of meaning, the daily mechanics
and values of the market permeate social, political, and economic life. Families
are pressed by economic circumstances to alter their expectations about work,
retirement, child rearing, and care of the elderly. Workers are forced to abandon
the certainties of lifetime employment, instead constantly keeping an eye on the
job market and the best opportunities to increase earning power. Private, public,
and nonprofit organizations must constantly adapt to their rapidly changing
environments. In the public sphere, it becomes harder and harder to generate
large-scale communities of shared interest through direct discourse and per-

sonal action, even at a time when people yearn for a return to a sense of commu-
nity and personal efficacy (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985;
Box, 1998; Eberly, 1994). So, we live in postmodern times characterized by
large-scale fragmentation of values and intensification of interest in local
action, yet we are surrounded by the seemingly universal, global phenomenon of
market mechanisms. Within this universal phenomenon, there appears to be
general agreement that people are competitive self-maximizers out to lobby leg-
islatures for their benefit at the expense of others, get the largest quantity of con-
sumer goods their resources will command, climb over the backs of colleagues
for career advancement, compete at the community level to draw the best com-
panies to their town at the expense of other towns, and so on. Furthermore, this
view seems to reflect not only a description of what we are but also a normative
vision of what we should be, in a “celebration of wealth that now threatens to
drown all competing values” (Lasch, 1996, p. 22). Times change, and if this
competitive, consumerist life pattern affects the world’s physical environment
and social stratification in ways that clearly threaten individuals, the pendulum
of public opinion and political action may shift, as it did during parts of the
1960s and 1970s. But for now, “more is more” instead of “less is more,” and the
market is our guide.
In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the language and methods
of the market have made significant inroads into public-sector thought and prac-
tice over the past two decades. However, American public administration has
not been a pure entity removed from the influence of the market during any
period in its development. At all levels of government throughout the nation’s
history, there has been evidence of market-like behavior, such as 19th-century
spoils politics that affected policy implementation at the national level and the
local-level graft and machine politics that inspired urban reformers to take
action. The progressive-era reaction to these perceived abuses was to separate
politics and administration at least to the extent that administration would be
more businesslike and scientific. Ironically, this meant that reformers wanted to
use the management methods of the market to reduce the extent of market-like
behavior in the public sector.
In the 20th century, with the rise of the administrative state, public profes-
sionals became more prominent in the formulation as well as implementation of
public policy. As the overall scope of government expanded dramatically, the
internal management of government retained an expectation of efficiency in the
midst of a sense of broader public purpose. There were repeated examinations of
management of the national government that advocated application of scien-
tific, businesslike methods to improve efficiency (Arnold, 1995). At the local
level, the council-manager plan was built on a corporate structural model with
the expectation that it would produce efficiency and effectiveness.
Beginning in the 1950s, some economists turned their attention to the public
sector, applying their assumptions about individual and collective behavior to
the public sphere. By focusing on the individual as the unit of analysis, assuming
that individuals seek to maximize their personal preferences in the “political
market” as they do in the private sector, and treating the behavior of citizens,
elected officials, political appointees, and public professionals as examples of
self-seeking regard for their own interests, the public choice scholars discovered
a public world very different from that of public administration scholars (John-
son, 1991). Where traditional theorists found people searching for a better soci-
ety and the public interest, economic theorists found the public sector operating
like an alternative form of market. In this view, traditional bureaucratic, hierar-
chical government is not a means to social betterment, but a mechanism that dis-
torts private economic behavior, reduces individual freedom, and makes the
economy less efficient. The way to reduce these negative effects, according to
economists, is to decentralize government, make it smaller, and introduce
market-like concepts such as fees and user charges, vouchers, and systems to moni-
tor employee performance, such as merit pay plans (Jennings, 1991, pp. 115-116;
Ostrom, 1973/1991).
At the conceptual level of the size and scope of government, the economic
view is that, when it will be to their benefit, individuals, groups, politicians, and
bureaucrats seek to maximize their gains in the public market by competing with
others for the benefits offered by collective action (Downs, 1957; Niskanen,
1971; Olson, 1965). Corporations seek to make it harder for potential competi-
tors to enter the market, associations seek tax breaks others cannot have, politi-
cians fight for the power and money of office, and public-sector bureaucrats
want their agencies to grow so that their status and freedom to act are increased.
Governmental action coerces individuals in society into behaving in a manner
consistent with majority will, whether or not they agree with it, and those who
stand to benefit the most from governmental action will spend the time and
resources to influence public policy decisions. A basic assumption of econom-
ics is that free and uncoerced individual choice should be maximized and that,
where a clear need for collective action in the public interest is lacking, citizens
should be allowed to act alone or in voluntary cooperation without governmen-
tal coercion (Schmidtz, 1991, chap. 7). But government grows larger and more
powerful as people use it to gain advantage over one another. This rent-seeking
behavior joins the economic inefficiency of government-as-monopoly-
provider-of-services as an argument for smaller and more limited government.
At the conceptual level of public agencies and employees, economic rational-
ity has had a significant impact on scholarly thinking about behavior in organi-
zations. Niskanen’s argument that public bureaucrats will seek to increase the
size of their agency’s budgets (1971; or as modified in 1991, the size of the dis-
cretionary budget) was an effort to reconceptualize the behavior of public
employees, moving away from models of control by legislatures or a sense of
duty to the public interest, to a model of the public professional as a self-
interested maximizer of competitive position in the bureaucratic world.
Niskanen’s ultimate purpose was to shift attention from the attributes of
bureaucrats to the characteristics of public agencies, especially the structural fea-

tures that provide incentives for people to behave in certain ways (Niskanen, 1991,
p. 28).
In the past few decades, economically oriented examination of public organi-
zations has been a growth industry, adopting a variety of complex and interest-
ing approaches. Summarizing this work in 1984 in an article on “The New Eco-
nomics of Organization,” Moe noted that it is “perhaps best characterized by
three elements: a contractual perspective on organizational relationships, a
focus on hierarchical control, and formal analysis via principal-agent models”
(p. 739). Among approaches to organizations that fall within the new economics
rubric, principal-agent theory is especially applicable in the public sector, where
the relationships between citizens (principals) and politicians (their agents) and
between politicians (principals in this case) and bureaucrats (their agents) are a
constant source of fascination. Agency theory deals with questions that arise
because “the desires or goals of the principal and agent conflict and it is difficult
or expensive for the principal to verify what the agent is actually doing” (Eisen-
hardt, 1989, p. 58). It is assumed that agents will naturally do less work than
principals want done or fail to do work in the way principals want it done. This is
the problem of shirking, and principals meet it by seeking information on the
activities of agents; this monitoring is time-consuming and costly. Thus, it
behooves the principal (e.g., boss, superior, capitalist, or politician) to seek a
wage rate that will motivate agents (employees, subordinates) and a level of
monitoring that is not too costly but convinces agents that the risk of being
caught shirking is substantial (Bowles & Gintis, 1986, pp. 77-78).
There are important implications of this line of thought for behavior in public
organizations. The economics-based management tools being applied in the
public sector are grounded in the economist’s assumptions that employees will
shirk and that monitoring is essential (though the assumption of economically
rational behavior has been under attack for some time; see Anderson & Craw-
ford, 1998). The focus is on explicitly specifying performance, through mecha-
nisms such as clearly articulated contracts and/or pay-for-performance systems.
In New Zealand, for example, many public agencies have been changed so that
“top managers are hired by contract, rewarded according to their performance,
and can be sacked if their work does not measure up” (Kettl, 1997, p. 448).
Although this is more extreme than typical implementation of principal-agent
concepts in the United States, such thinking can be found in the emphasis on
various techniques to measure and reward performance and outcomes, as well as
movement away from rigid civil-service systems. Although the elegantly simple
structure of principal-agent theory is becoming more cumbersome and problem-
atic with the accumulation of empirical data on its application (Waterman &
Meier, 1998), it remains a powerful tool in the hands of contemporary govern-
mental reformers.
It was in the 1980s, amid the antigovernment ideology of the Reagan admini-
stration and a wave of public sentiment for shrinking the public sector, that
market-like concepts broke through the weak wall of separation between the val-
ues of the market and the values of public management. Trickle-down, supply-
side economics and public choice economics pointed the way to prosperity
through smaller government, and it was thought that bureaucratic waste could be
eliminated through contracting out and becoming entrepreneurial, and soon the
entire public sector would, supposedly, be as efficient as the private sector was
assumed to be. The negative aspects of treating public purposes as if they were
private became apparent through events such as the savings-and-loan crisis at
the national level and reevaluation of the tenets of “reinvention” at the local level
(Gurwitt, 1994), but the transformational impact of this period cannot be denied.
This is reflected in the writing of a deputy project director for the Clinton admin-
istration’s new-public-management-inspired National Performance Review.
Although noting that “there is no single intellectual source for the reinventing
government movement,” he says that it “evolved during the past 10 to 15
years . . . based, in part, on the pioneering intellectual work of public choice
theoreticians such as Mancur Olson, E.S. Savas, Gordon Tullock, and William
Niskanen” (Kamensky, 1996, pp. 248).
THE SIZE AND SCOPE OF GOVERNMENT
As Weintraub (1997) has pointed out, there are several meanings of the dis-
tinction between public and private, including the following: the liberal-
economistic model, based on neoclassical economics, which regards the public-
private distinction the same as that between state administration and the market
economy; the civic perspective, which views the public realm as separate from
both the market and the administrative state; and other perspectives, including
feminism, that examine distinctions between public and private as involving the
spheres of sociability and family and household (pp. 16-17). Here, we take a
viewpoint looking outward from inside the administrative state to examine
penetration of the market metaphor into public administration, so we are con-
cerned with the liberal-economistic model that is “dominant in most ‘public pol-
icy’ analysis” (p. 16).
Given the development of the political environment described above, it is not
surprising that Americans have always been searching for an acceptable balance
between what is private and what is public. In the early to mid-19th century,
there were debates over the national government’s role in banking and funding
internal improvements such as telegraph transmission and canals for water
transportation. For the most part, the trend was toward resisting expansion of the
national role amid prevailing public opinion hostile to action by the national
government (White, 1954, pp. 437-481). Efforts to expand the role of govern-
ment were more successful in the late 19th century and into the 20th century, as
the regulatory and welfare state was built in response to the changing character
of national economic life. Then, beginning with the Reagan administration in
the 1980s, the growth of the national government was again brought into ques-
tion. At the local level, the scope of governmental activity grew steadily, accel-
erating after World War II as the population expanded and suburbia was built.
Along with questioning the size and scope of government in the 1980s, there
was a revival of interest in localism and limited government. If it seems to the
individual that the national or state government is too distant, too big, and so
dominated by entrenched interest groups that he or she cannot have much effect
on public policy, it is natural to turn attention toward a locus of action small
enough to offer the possibility of quick and satisfying results. As president, Ron-
ald Reagan encouraged this sentiment as he sought to dismantle the welfare state
and return its functions to states, localities, and private and nonprofit sector
organizations. The communitarian movement emphasized nongovernmental
action and citizen duties as well as rights. These ideas were given additional
thrust by the withdrawal of the national government from many domestic initia-
tives and the phenomenon of tight resources at all levels of government.
In the midst of the 1980s milieu of negativity toward government, with its
bureaucrat bashing and belief that government is the problem rather than the
solution, economic thinking about the role of government in society blossomed
and became part of the ordinary vocabulary of normative debate. By the 1990s,
the idea that government needed to be smaller and more efficient had become
accepted as common wisdom (though the reality was different at the state and
local levels, as government continued to expand; see Walters, 1998). Of those
people who spend time thinking about the size and scope of government and its
role in society, many have come to hold the view that government at all levels is
too big and it would be wise to spin off functions from the national government
to the states and localities, or from government to the private and nonprofit
sectors.
The economist’s conceptual scheme for determining what is public and what
is private has become standard fare for students of public affairs and underlies much
of the public discourse about the role of government (Mikesell, 1995, pp. 1-6).
Thus, we distinguish between public goods, such as national defense, and pri-
vate goods, such as household appliances or a hamburger. Public goods would
not ordinarily be offered by the private sector acting on the incentive of making a
profit because people cannot be excluded from using it and so have no incentive
to pay for it (the market failure to provide a good). If it is provided at all, it is
available to everyone, and one person’s use of a public good does not exhaust its
usefulness to others (because I experience the benefits of being defended from
foreign aggression does not mean that you cannot experience them, too).
Because people could experience the benefits of public goods without paying
for them (the free rider problem), government coercively forces members of the
public to pay taxes or face financial penalties or imprisonment.
In the real world, things are not so simple, so there are modifications and
exceptions to the concept of pure public goods and pure private goods. Toll
goods are services that many people use but from which people may be excluded
(such as swimming pools open for public use or expressways that charge fees),
and common-pool resources are goods that can be exhausted as many people use
them but for which exclusion is difficult (notably natural resources such as fish-
eries). The distinctions between types of goods are often fuzzy, and public-
sector decision makers use criteria of public demand and political action to
choose which services to offer rather than ideal conceptualizations of types of
goods. Thus, government becomes involved in providing a variety of services
that might appear to belong in the private or nonprofit sector. In addition, gov-
ernment regulates the activities of private actors as they work with toll,
common-pool, or private goods, attempting to control negative effects (exter-
nalities) of private economic activity on people or the environment.
To add to the complexity, a distinction is made between the provision of pub-
lic services and their production. Provision is the fundamental question of
whether or not government will cause a service, or good, to be offered. It is a pol-
icy question to be decided by the people or their representatives. If the answer is
negative (“No, we don’t want to provide garbage pickup service”), then either
private or nonprofit organizations will provide the service or no one will. If,
using the example of garbage pickup, no one provides the service (a market fail-
ure), there will likely be a discussion of the public health implications and a
revisiting of the negative provision decision. Production is a separate issue. If
the provision decision is positive, then the question remains how to actually
deliver the service, how to produce it. Osborne and Gaebler argued in their book
Reinventing Government (1993) that government often does a better job of gov-
ernance, or steering (making policy decisions) than of delivering services, or
rowing (see chap. 1). Osborne and Gaebler included in the steering-rowing dis-
tinction governmental decision making about contracting out services and a
governmental role in serving as catalyst for private and nonprofit initiatives such
as downtown renewal or building sports facilities.
In an appendix to their book, Osborne and Gaebler built on the work of Savas
(1987) to offer decision-making criteria for choosing public, private, or non-
profit action, such as stability, regulation, and enforcement of equity (public-
sector strong points), expertise and willingness to take risks (private-sector
attributes), and compassion and promotion of community (nonprofit-sector
attributes). Vincent Ostrom (1973/1991; 1977; 1991/1994) has written exten-
sively about institutional structures, intergovernmental arrangements, and
building institutional capacity that helps people to govern themselves. Using a
combination of public choice theory and a historical analysis of American
government, Ostrom emphasizes the benefits of a multifaceted, polycentric sys-

tem of governmental organizations and their private and nonprofit partners,
organized to fit the services they offer so that the result is the best possible blend
of efficiency with responsiveness to the public (e.g., community police patrol
may be more efficiently and effectively organized on a small local scale,
whereas police communication systems, detention facilities, and crime labora-
tories may be handled better through large-scale organization [1977, pp. 1518-
1520]). These ideas appear to be helpful, although the circumstances surround-
ing specific decisions are often complex and uncertain, making application of
decision-making criteria difficult.
In the end, it appears that determinations about which goods are provided by
the public sector are made according to the rule, “whatever people want and will
pay for,” and production arrangements are a matter of trial and error according to
political preferences. At the national level, our attitudes about the scope and size
of government change periodically as we face new challenges and social and
economic conditions. In response to evidence of widespread poverty, hunger,
and injustice, we mount a campaign to redistribute incomes, taxing the middle
class and wealthy to help the poor. In good economic times, politicians find
ways to give tax breaks and programmatic “goodies” to the middle class to
secure their votes in the next election.
At the local level, the choices made about which services to offer vary signifi-
cantly from community to community. Some places confine themselves to pro-
viding the basics of public safety, streets, and sewer and water. Others provide a
wide variety of services, for example, public pools, bicycle trails, recreation
programs, public hospitals, downtown redevelopment programs, public-private
partnerships to encourage economic development, and so on. In a community in
which the author of this article lived for 8 years, the city utilities department dis-
cussed offering repair of home appliances to residential customers to make the
city more competitive when private-sector firms enter the deregulating market
for electric service. As one might imagine, people in the appliance repair busi-
ness were not pleased with this potential entrepreneurial endeavor, viewing it as
public expansion into an area thought of by most as a private-sector activity.
The complexities of intergovernmental relations, deciding whether services
should be offered by small local units of government, larger ones, or regional
agencies, which services will be provided by government and which will be pro-
duced by government or by the nonprofit or private sectors, and so on, are mat-
ters often resolved incrementally. To some extent the theory of public goods may
influence such decisions, but likely it serves in large part to describe and critique
what has taken place after the fact. For some time, there has been disagreement
in the public administration community about the size and scope of government
and the application of market thinking, with its elements of maximum individual
choice, decentralization, and privatization. These issues are unlikely to be
resolved anytime soon, if ever (see, e.g., Golembiewski, 1997; Kettl, 1997;
Lyons & Lowery, 1989; Phares, 1989; Ross & Levine, 1996, chap. 11; Stillman,
1991, pp. 176-185; Waldo, 1981, p. 97).
MARKET VALUES AND THE NATURE

OF PUBLIC SERVICE
Given the importation of private-sector management techniques into the pub-

lic sector in the past two decades, many public administrators are expected to be
entrepreneurial, offer great customer service, and practice the latest manage-
ment techniques inside the agency (total quality management, pay for perform-
ance, and so on). On the surface, it appears that such techniques would make the
public service much more efficient, with results that would please citizens (they
get better service), elected officials (they get credit for public agency effi-
ciency), and career public-service practitioners (they get more approval and
respect from citizens and elected people). And indeed, anecdotal evidence as
well as scholarly research indicates that market-based reforms have produced
some desired changes in the way government operates in the United States, as
well as significant changes in several other nations (Kettl, 1997).
There are, however, potential problems with making the public service more
businesslike because there is a difference in the operating norms of private- and
public-sector organizations. Terry (1993) described entrepreneurial values as
including “autonomy, a personal vision of the future, secrecy, and risk-taking”
(p. 393), along with “domination and coercion, a preference for revolutionary
change (regardless of the circumstances), and a disrespect for tradition” (p. 394).
According to Terry, these values are at odds with values of “democratic politics
and administration,” such as “accountability, citizen participation, open policy-
making processes, and ‘stewardship’ behavior” (p. 393). In a response to Terry,
Bellone and Goerl (1993) espoused “civic-regarding entrepreneurship,” which
offers a community-minded model of administration that is accountable to the
public. Terry, however, is not sure entrepreneurship can easily be combined with
public service. His overriding concern is that “public entrepreneurs of the neo-
managerialist persuasion are oblivious to other values highly prized in the U.S.
constitutional democracy. Values such as fairness, justice, representation, or
participation are not on the radar screen” (Terry, 1998, p. 198).
The contemporary emphasis on entrepreneurship makes this debate appear
new. However, it is to some extent a repackaging of the old politics-
administration question that has been in play since the late 19th century and was
highlighted by the Friedrich-Finer argument in the early 1940s over the role of
the administrator as relatively independent, expert actor, or tightly constrained
agent of political officials (for a description of this argument, see McSwite,
1997, pp. 29-52). The repackaging is occasioned by renewed pressure to manage
like a business as economic concepts permeate the thinking of policy makers and
implementers. Although administrators are pushed to use entrepreneurial and
scientific techniques to please the “customer’s” assumed desire for businesslike
government, they paradoxically become less accountable to the public, whose
members lose some control over administration. For example, administrators
may use expenditure-control budgets, which allow flexibility to spend as the
professional sees fit, and to save money to carry over for discretionary spending
later to avoid direct budgetary control by politicians. The assumptions are that
this flexibility will make for more nimble response to changing conditions, give
managers an incentive to be frugal, and remove political motivations from what
ought to be expert decisions. Using Bellone and Goerl’s reasoning, the good
public administrator will, in exercising this greater degree of discretionary
space, take into account the wishes of citizens in making choices. This logic
reopens the question of representative democracy and agency; that is, do public
administrators answer to the public, or to their elected representatives (Box,
1998; Fox & Miller, 1995; Kelly, 1998)?
The argument against such flexibility in budgeting is that clear and detailed
line-item budgets were created to avoid problems of financial abuse and to
ensure that money is spent as citizens or their elected representatives decide it
should be spent. Saving up money means that it has not been spent as intended by
representatives but instead will be spent as nonelected administrators
decide—thus, a question of accountability. Supposedly scientific techniques
administered by experts, such as cost-benefit analysis, reengineering, and qual-
ity control, may lead to more precise and economically efficient service deliv-
ery, but they may also crowd out competing citizen preferences for public policy
and service delivery, preferences that can be shown by experts to be inefficient
or impractical. This sort of result is often seen in disputes over such relatively
minor issues as whether to preserve a historic building or remove esthetically
pleasing landscaped medians in major streets to make traffic flow smoothly.
In these and similar instances, there is a conflict between the idea of public
management as efficient, businesslike, and scientific, and public management
as responsive to these and to other public values as well. Jennings (1991) offered
three approaches to public administration that capture the essence of this con-
flict. The bureaucratic approach “takes efficiency and equal treatment of citi-
zens as its primary values,” the pluralism approach “emphasizes responsiveness
to multiple interests,” and the market approach “takes efficiency as its prime
value,” differing from the bureaucratic approach in emphasizing diversity of
product and maximum consumer choice (p. 122). It may be argued that public
administration theorists have in the past tended to prefer one of the first two
approaches. Those who favor greater status and discretion for public administra-
tors lean toward the bureaucratic approach, and those who favor greater citizen
discourse and self-governance lean toward the pluralist approach. But today,
most agree that some measure of market-like matching of public services to con-
sumer preferences, along with efficient and technically competent management,
is inevitable if not desirable. The question is how much, in what ways, and
whether there are aspects of public service that should not be governed or man-
aged from a market perspective.
The problem in seeking a reasonable balance between approaches in the face
of demands to run government like a business is that operating with private-
sector entrepreneurial techniques in the public sphere can subvert values of
openness, fairness, and public propriety. In such cases, the public-service practi-
tioner may take on the appearance of an independent actor separated from the
public, concerned less about the public interest (however defined) and more
about making money and maximizing individual power and freedom to act with-
out review. This decreased accountability carries the possibility of unexpected
program outcomes, uneven treatment of citizens, and behaviors that have not
generally been thought of as consistent with public service. Again, using the
example of city utilities in a community in which the author lived, this time in
relation to the question of openness, the utilities department attempted to deny
public access to many of its documents on the premise that it must operate
secretly to level the playing field with its private-sector counterparts. In relation
to fairness and a sense of public propriety, the local publicly owned hospital in
the same community is semiautonomous, competes aggressively and success-
fully for market share with the other hospital in town, advertises its high-tech
services widely, makes a sizable surplus, and pays its top executive approxi-
mately $300,000 per year, including bonuses based on how much the hospital
makes. To some people these may not seem like appropriate behaviors for the
public sector.
Movement toward a market model thus may result in loss of citizen self-
determination in the creation of public policy and the operation of public organi-
zations. Today, most people recognize that a general return to the participatory
democracy of an earlier time and simpler society is impossible. However, in this
post-progressive era, many are working to rebuild citizen capacity for self-
governance through discourse and active citizenship (Barber, 1984; Box, 1998;
Eberly, 1994; King & Stivers, 1998a). Not everyone will take part in such
efforts, but, as Fox and Miller (1995) put it, having “some-talk” is better than
having “few-talk” (pp. 129-159). The goal is to move beyond the typical model
of citizen participation that is “not designed primarily for citizens but for agen-
cies” (Timney, 1998, p. 98), in which administrators use citizen involvement
processes for “informing, consultation, and placation” (Timney, 1998, p. 97)
rather than enabling people to govern themselves.
Market-driven new managerialism can run counter to self-governance, as it is
structured around the idea of happy consumers rather than involved citizens.
This is a problem because government is not a business from which customers
can voluntarily decide whether to purchase a product. It is, rather, a collective
effort that includes every person within a defined geographic area (city, county,
district, state, nation), and membership is involuntary unless a resident moves
out of the jurisdiction. Mandatory membership carries with it a sense of the right
to be involved if one so wishes in the process of deliberating and deciding on

creation and implementation of public policy. As Barrett and Greene (1998)
wrote, “Governments that buy too heavily into the idea that customers are a
higher form of life than citizens risk losing the participation of taxpayers as part-
ners” (p. 62).
Customers, on the other hand, are people to be persuaded and sold an image, a
product, or a service rather than people who deliberate and decide. Schachter
(1997, pp. 57-58) pointed out that only some public agencies can have custom-
ers in the manner of private-sector organizations. Many public agencies cannot
easily identify their customers because the public they deal with is divided into a
variety of individuals and groups with conflicting goals. Many others are regula-
tory or stewardship agencies for which the immediate client may not be the true
beneficiary of the service. An example of the former would be a school district,
for which the customers could be students, parents, or all adults in the commu-
nity. Examples of the latter could include a restaurant regulated by the local
health department (Is the department’s customer the restaurant owner or the peo-
ple who eat at the restaurant?), or the forest service (Is the customer the wood
products industry or current and future generations who would use the forests?).
These examples illustrate the fundamental difference between the market and
the citizenship models of governance. The model of management formed
around the market metaphor may lead to channeling resources into creating an
image through public relations, surveying citizen opinion, and responding to
perceived individual service preferences, rather than bringing citizens together
to make their own decisions. This requires keeping the public at arm’s length
while operating in an entrepreneurial manner behind a facade that gives the
appearance of involving citizens and making decisions in the general public
interest.
CONCLUSIONS: PRACTICING PUBLIC SERVICE

IN THE MARKET ENVIRONMENT
Few would argue that government should be inefficient on purpose or inat-

tentive to the needs and desires of its clients. In this sense, reinvention, privatiza-
tion, entrepreneurism, customer service, and other such techniques are good
things, bringing a breath of fresh air, challenge, and constructive change to the
public sector. But market-like techniques may become problematic when they
overwhelm values traditionally associated with the public sector and with public
service. The economic assumptions of individual self-maximization, the public
interest as the aggregate of private interests, and the public sector as just another
form of market are powerful, focused, elegantly simple tools of analysis. Like
other powerful and narrow theoretical constructs, they draw appropriate atten-
tion to matters of importance, but they also insist on their way of knowing the
world while excluding other valuable theoretical orientations.
James March (1992) argued that in the past few decades economic theorists
have softened the pure application of their ideas to the public sector, moving
from methodological individualism to recognition of the fabric of institutional
and structural relationships that make up a community. They now take into
account, along with their original assumptions, “a rich, behavioral interpreta-
tion attentive to limited rationality, conflict, ambiguity, history, institutions, and
multiple equilibria” (p. 228). He also noted that this softer, more subtle applica-
tion of economic concepts has not yet penetrated into the world of applied theory
because “the news of the transformation of rational theory spreads rather slowly
from the inner temples of microeconomics to the rationalizing missionaries in
the rest of an economizing society and social science” (p. 229). As this news
spreads, the current reforms will fade and reformers will move on to new ideas,
but like earlier reforms, they are likely to leave a legacy. The legacy of economis-
tic theory in the public sector may include greater attention to “performance-
motivated administration” and the integration of economic concepts into the tra-
ditional intellectual matrix of public service (Lynn, 1998, p. 232).
Turning toward application of these ideas to the size and scope of govern-
ment, the historical American attitude toward the public sector has been that it
should not compete with the private sector but should provide services that the
private sector will not. However, with time, the clarity of the public-private dis-
tinction has faded as people ask government to do more and citizens grow accus-
tomed to things as they are. In the past two decades, this combination of a prefer-
ence for limited governmental scope with incremental accumulation of services
in violation of that preference has been complicated by expansion of economics-
based theory and practice. The public-choice side of the running government
like a business metaphor suggests shrinking government by contracting out
services or returning them to the private sector on the premise that the private
sector is more efficient (in the case of contracting) or the assertion that the public
sector should simply be smaller (in the case of true privatization). Meanwhile,
the entrepreneurial side of the metaphor suggests that government may retain its
traditional services and operate them like a business, plus operating services
ordinarily thought of as private in order to make money. One way government
officials are able to accommodate these diverse demands without making gov-
ernment smaller is to make it appear to be morphing into a publicly owned busi-
ness by charging user fees, contracting parts of its services, or adopting the lan-
guage and practice of the private sector by, for example, calling certain services
companies or businesses and using a variety of private-sector internal manage-
ment techniques.
In the area of application of market concepts to the conduct of public service,
the potential impacts are significant. The prevailing American attitude about the
nature of public service has been to expect market-like efficiency and business-
like operation but in combination with public service values such as account-
ability, fair and equal treatment, democratic self-governance, social justice, pro-
tection of the physical environment, and others. Schachter (1997) pointed out
that progressive-era reformers, although striving for a more efficient govern-

ment, also advocated informing citizens so they could be more active in govern-
ing. Today’s expansion of economic thinking and the potential separation of
expert service provider (public service professional) from customer (citizen)
may be one of the most serious threats to public service values Americans have
experienced.
This leaves contemporary academicians and practitioners with the task of
defining preferred normative balances of public and private and of market-like
management and public service. We can identify four broad areas in which eco-
nomic thinking prompts reexamination of substantive assumptions about the
public-private relationship and public service. As we do so, we recognize that
these assumptions about public institutions are unique understandings that
incorporate our history, institutional development, interpersonal interactions,
and the surrounding political, social, and economic environment. They are
unique because they vary and change by place, time, and human action; their
“structural properties” exist as “practices and memory traces orienting the con-
duct of knowledgeable human agents” (Giddens, 1984, p. 17) rather than as
fixed and fully understood phenomena. Taken together, the narrative of these
four areas outlines a framework for discourse about the nature of the American
public sector and public service. This framework cannot provide clear normative
answers to the challenge of the economistic environment, but it can point toward
ways of preserving a public-regarding essence of citizenship and public service
while responding constructively to the contemporary economic-political
environment.
Services the public sector should provide. In every community, region, state,
and at the national level, there are at a given time services that a majority of citi-
zens believe should be provided by the public. This belief may not be based on
extensive knowledge and could change if people were to have more information
(this is the problem of improving the quality of public judgment; see
Yankelovich, 1991), but it is possible to identify attitudes about what services
should be public. There are likely a range of reasons that people would give for
wanting to have certain services provided by the public sector rather than by the
private sector or not at all, but there may be a primary characteristic of public
services that most Americans would agree forms a sound decision rule for deter-
mining what is public and what is private.
We may hypothesize that, asked to consider a particular service that they
think should be publicly provided, people would generally agree that they want
certainty that the public has the ability to maintain or change the service in keep-
ing with what the majority thinks to be in the public interest (however defined; in
this case, it can be assumed to be the long-term interests of the greatest number,
when the public is provided adequate information to make a determination). The
standard example of national defense is one on which strong majority agreement
can be found and other examples would draw varying responses according to
place, time, and the sampled population.
The decision rule of ability to maintain or change a service in accord with a
majority view of the public interest is different from the market-driven service
rule that uses individual preferences as the basis for governmental response. It
focuses not only on efficiency or businesslike operation but also on citizen
beliefs about the public interest, the good community, whatever it is that citizens
think is best for themselves and others, acting collectively. How to inform and
involve citizens in making such decisions may be unclear, but it is clear that this
is a decision milieu driven by different values than those of the market. It is also a
process that includes collective public deliberation and assistance from public-
service professionals.
Services the public sector should produce. Within the category of services
that people believe should be provided by the public, there are services involv-
ing discretion and accountability such that the public is uncomfortable with an
arm’s length contractual relationship and the possibility of the profit motive
rather than public interest determining outcomes. Examples could include
police patrol and crime investigation, protective services for children, land-use
regulation, and some human resources functions.
These services can be contrasted with a range of things that do not involve the
same level of discretion and accountability and are good candidates to be con-
tracted out or fully privatized for reasons of cost efficiency, purchase of special-
ized expertise that would cost too much to maintain on staff, or greater flexibil-
ity in staffing levels. Examples could include operating a police impoundment
facility for seized vehicles, conducting psychological evaluations of defendants
awaiting trial, and constructing valid test instruments for jobs that draw large
numbers of applicants.
Democratic governance. There are processes of governance that most

Americans expect will be maintained as purely public, rather than being con-
tracted, privatized, or operated by public employees in a closed, unilateral,
market-like manner. Though people like good customer service when they need
to pay their water bill or have a street repaired, they want to know that they have
the option, whether exercised or not, to take part in determining policy and
assessing implementation. This goes beyond Osborne and Gaebler’s idea of
steering rather than rowing, as the issue is not just what government does (steer-
ing, or making decisions, versus rowing, or carrying them out) but who has the
right and ability to make policy and implementation decisions. This is at the
heart of citizenship and self-governance.
Thus, although most would agree that government should use efficient busi-
ness methods in technical, operational areas, this does not mean that business
principles of efficiency, scientific management, or closed and centralized deci-
sion making should dominate the creation or evaluation of public policy, or
exclude citizens from self-governance. To accept a broader view of governance

is to assert that government is not ultimately guided by a market model of com-
petition and efficiency but by a citizenship model of governance. This broader
view places businesslike management techniques in an instrumental position
subordinate to the larger sphere of governance. It draws citizens, elected offi-
cials, and public service professionals together in the joint project of creating
and implementing public policy.
The role of the practitioner. It might be assumed, in the manner of the old
politics-administration dichotomy or the current policy-management split of
the market metaphor, that public-service practitioners should not play an active
part in shaping issues, debates, and decisions on the questions of what is public
or private or whether public policy and services should be approached using the
market or the citizenship models. However, there is little doubt today that practi-
tioners are an important part of policy formulation and implementation, provid-
ing information needed by citizens and elected officials to frame policy deci-
sions and generating proposals that often form the basis for public action.
Thus, practitioners fill multiple roles in addition to the traditional bureau-
cratic role, serving as expert advisers and as facilitators of citizen discourse. The
open question is how this is to be done in a society that expects nonelected public
servants to maintain a position clearly subordinate to elected officials and citi-
zens. This question involves issues of legitimacy and leadership. Is it possible to
be an important actor in the creation and implementation of public policy with-
out straying outside the legislative mandate or becoming dominating, self-
serving, and causing restriction of public access and freedom to act?
Public practitioners are, because of proximity and knowledge, deeply
involved in the broad issue of the extent to which the market metaphor should
guide public governance. They exercise influence in discussions about what
services should be public, how they should be operated, and whether the public
practitioner serves customers or citizens. Though there will always be concern
about the legitimacy of this role, many practitioners are in a position to shape the
public sector by offering their knowledge to peers, citizens, and elected repre-
sentatives trying to meet the challenge of governing in an economics-driven
political culture. In doing so, they can serve the interests of public service and
democratic will formation by keeping in mind the shifting and dynamic nature
of the relationship of the market to the public sector and the importance of their
actions in shaping the future.
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Richard C. Box is an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration, University

of Nebraska–Omaha. He served for 13 years as a land-use planner, department head, and city
manager in local governments in Oregon and California before completing his doctorate at the
University of Southern California. His research focuses on democracy and the theory and prac-
tice of community governance.

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Box / RUNNING

ARPA / March 1999

Increasingly, public administration practitioners and academicians are

governance but wait passively to respond to an “agenda set by others”

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION’S RESPONSE

in society. A substantial public sector is to be maintained, but its purposes and

processes and interactions to cost-benefit calculations? Is this really a problem,

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT

We can gain a broader perspective by considering the nature of the society

it is utterly ridiculous to see any connection between the high capitalism of

In 1931, John Dewey expressed concern for the future of democratic

large-scale communities of shared interest through direct discourse and per-

bureaucrats to the characteristics of public agencies, especially the structural fea-

THE SIZE AND SCOPE OF GOVERNMENT

government, Ostrom emphasizes the benefits of a multifaceted, polycentric sys-

MARKET VALUES AND THE NATURE

Given the importation of private-sector management techniques into the pub-

to be involved if one so wishes in the process of deliberating and deciding on

CONCLUSIONS: PRACTICING PUBLIC SERVICE

Few would argue that government should be inefficient on purpose or inat-

that progressive-era reformers, although striving for a more efficient govern-

Democratic governance. There are processes of governance that most

exclude citizens from self-governance. To accept a broader view of governance

Richard C. Box is an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration, University

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