02 Public Management A Concise History of The Field PDF
02 Public Management A Concise History of The Field PDF
02 Public Management A Concise History of The Field PDF
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PUBLIC
M A NAG E M E N T
A CONCISE HISTORY OF
THE FIELD
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2.1 Introduction
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A history of the Weld of public management arguably might begin with any of the
following statements:
. The contemporary study of public management has its origins in the 1970s: in
America, in the curriculums and research of the new public policy schools (Perry
and Kraemer 1983; Rainey 1990); in Europe, in eYciency-driven managerial
reforms originating in Great Britain and New Zealand (Aucoin 1990; Pollitt
1990).
. The Weld of public management has its roots in the scientiWc study of the modern
administrative state in America beginning in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (Mosher 1975; Waldo 1955, 1980; Minogue, Polidano, and
Hulme 1998).
. The origins of the Weld of public management are to be found in the systematic
study and practice of cameralism and Staatswissenschaften beginning in
28 laurence e. lynn, jr.
Creel Wnds further support for his claim not in Confucianism, which had little to
say about statecraft, but in the career of Shen Pu-hai (d. 337 bc), who was
chancellor of a small state in north-central China. A book attributed to his
authorship was widely read and inXuential as late as the reign of Emperor Hsüan
(74–48 bc). Not a Confucian, Shen Pu-hai ‘‘is concerned, with almost mathemat-
ical rigor, to describe the way in which a ruler can maintain his position and cause
his state to prosper by means of administrative technique and applied psychology’’
(Creel 1964: 160).
Chinese inXuence on the subsequent history of public administration and
management is proverbial, and not just because examinations for entry into public
service originated there. Creel and other scholars Wnd Chinese inXuence speciWcally
30 laurence e. lynn, jr.
in the regimes of the Kingdom of Lower Italy and Sicily, where Frederick II’s
statutes promulgated at MelW in 1231 have been characterized by Ernst Kantorowicz
as ‘‘the birth certiWcate of modern bureaucracy’’ (quoted by Creel 1974: 58). As late
as the seventeenth century, there may have been knowledge of the doctrines of Shen
Pu-hai, according to Creel, and Shen’s book was extant as late as the early
eighteenth century. Whatever their provenance, reforms recognizable to modern
students of public administration and management were adopted in several medi-
eval regimes (Rosenberg 1958). Of particular interest is the emergence of a concept
of ‘‘public trust’’ in numerous cities, ‘‘established as legal associations under a
corporate authority and vested with varying rights of self-government’’ that ‘‘ad-
umbrated some of the modern ideas of public need and public service’’ (Rosenberg
1958: 6, 8).
What we know of the history of organized administration across time and
civilizations, therefore, suggests that common forms of self-awareness and codiW-
cation concerning the structures, practices, and values of public administration
and management accompanied the emergence of organized societies (Waldo 1984).
Broadly construed, public administration and management has been a concomi-
tant of the earliest quests for order, security, wealth, and civilization. Such a view is
controversial, however.
rather than local particularity, and formalism and professionalism rather than
traditionalism (Hood and Jackson 1991). The best interests of the prince and the
people lay in economic development which, in turn required active management
by administrators who were trained, examined, evaluated, and held loyal to a
strongly led state. Its central tenets are suYciently modern that Hood and Jackson
refer to the late twentieth-century New Public Management as a ‘‘new cameralism’’
(Hood and Jackson 1991: 182).
Cameralists were often successful practitioners. Schumpeter (1954: 143–208)
described them as ‘‘Consultant Administrators’’. In contrast to modern deductive
science, ‘‘[t]he cameralists proceeded much more by the statement and elaboration
of practical maxims than through the construction and logical manipulation of
analytical models’’ (Wagner 2003: 7). Administrators participated at a high level in
literary discussions of cameralistic topics and produced a ‘‘massive German litera-
ture’’ that addressed general problems and issues of public management (Morstein
Marx 1935; Tribe 1984: 273).
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, intellectual and political developments
began that were to culminate in fundamental structural change—national sover-
eignty, Rechtsstaat, the Code Napoleon, the bureaucracies that were to be idealized
by Max Weber, and law as the basis for training oYcials—and to undermine the
pre-eminence of Staatswissenschaften as the intellectual foundation for public
administration and management. Royal servants became state servants (for ex-
ample, in Prussia’s Legal Code of 1794), servants became oYcials, government by
oYcials became known as bureaucracy, and bureaucracy became both powerful
and controversial.
embraced the idea of law as right reason as early as the seventeenth century. The
motive for abandoning Staatswisschaften on the Continent was widespread dissat-
isfaction with what was coming to be known as ‘‘bureaucracy,’’ a pejorative term
coined by a Frenchman in the eighteenth century (although the term was correctly
used by Mill and others to mean ‘‘rule by oYcials’’). The historical irony, now no
less than then (Morone 1990), is that reforms to ensure democratic accountability
actually tended to strengthen bureaucratic institutions.
The French bourgeoisie, for example, Wnally rebelled against the taxation needed
to support their kings’ propensities to wage war. ‘‘A new conception of the state
now appeared in the doctrine of ‘national sovereignty’ ’’ (Barker 1944: 13). Far from
displacing the role of administrators, however, ‘‘France retained the administrative
machine of the past, but gave it a new motive power’’ (ibid.). L’état was now the
collective people, not the person of the king. Napoleon was, as Barker puts it, the
successor to both Louis XIV and Colbert, and organized a new administration
around a Conseil d’État and the system of Préfets nominated and controlled by
the central government. The result was that ‘‘the Revolution left its new theory
of democracy curiously united with the old practice of bureaucracy’’ (Barker 1944:
13–14). State administration under the Code Napoléon ‘‘was to learn to govern
France without ever losing continuity through successive periods of revolution’’
(Merkle 1980: 144).
Following its defeat by Napoleon at Jena in 1806, the Prussian state, too, was
quickly revolutionized. Freiherr vom Stein, head of the Prussian civil service, had
already transferred oYcial allegiance from the person of the king to the head of
state. But prior to 1806, administrative theory was dominated by the idea of the
collegium, collective responsibility for advising the ruler. Following Napoleonic
logic, after 1806 and the advent of a representative parliament, the collegium was
replaced by the Buro- or Einheitssystem, in which, in the interests of eYciency,
responsibility was clearly vested in an individual at each level of authority up to a
minister. Moreover, the term Rechtsstaat entered the discourse: law as the founda-
tion for public administration. Professors of the sciences of the state ‘‘generally held
liberal views, such as beliefs in the rule of law, a limited degree of popular
representation, a free press, and a vital public opinion’’ (Lindenfeld 1997: 91).
Under Rechtsstaat, these academics believed, a strong, positive government could
be reconciled with individual and social autonomy.
In practice, however, the emphasis was placed on law, not on Staatswissenschaf-
ten. ‘‘[T]he rising emphasis upon law as the necessary form of all governmental
action . . . engendered a considerable shift in the concept of what was necessary for
the training of governmental oYcials’’ (Friedrich 1939, 133): law, not the adminis-
trative sciences. Despite an emancipated peasantry and a liberated townsfolk in a
new system of municipal administration, Prussian absolutism endured, as did the
power of the administrative class, university-trained and oYce-experienced. Over
time, the Prussian bureaucracy was to become iconic. The sciences of the state,
34 laurence e. lynn, jr.
though not bureaucracy itself, were also undermined by the growing inXuence of
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the emergence of the Weld of economic
analysis, which shifted the focus of thinking away from the state as the engine of
wealth creation toward individuals and entrepreneurs operating in free markets.
Thus law—legal reasoning—along with economics eclipsed completely the older
administrative sciences in intellectual discourse.
During a century marked by revolutions in the name of popular sovereignty,
therefore, the dominant institution of public administration and management
became bureaucracy. The dominant idea became the ideological separation of
policy and management, the latter governed by Rechtsstaat. Issues relating to
management of hierarchies (what are now called ‘‘techniques of management’’)
came to the fore: the content of the education and training of oYcials at diVerent
levels; the use of entrance examinations and apprenticeships; the use of perform-
ance standards and evaluations; discipline; reassignment; promotion; salary struc-
tures; retirement beneWts; status and rights of workers in state enterprises; and
retention of personnel (Anderson and Anderson 1967).
This bureaucratic ‘‘paradigm’’ engendered widespread popular and professional
criticism. Balzac’s best-selling novel Les Employés imprinted contempt for bureau-
cracy on popular consciousness. Von Mohl’s deWnitive analyses tended to fuse the
term bureaucracy with a system of state administration that was inherently unre-
sponsive to public concerns (Albrow 1970). For Frederick Le Play, bureaucracy
‘‘meant the dissemination of authority among minor oYcials, absorbed in details,
intent upon complicating business, and suppressing initiative in others’’ (Albrow
1970: 30). Hintze cited the weaknesses of bureaucracy as ‘‘corruption and laziness,
excessive ambition, servility toward superiors, brutality toward inferiors, conceit-
edness, and narrowmindedness’’ (Anderson and Anderson 1967: 183). Said Austrian
scholar Josef Redlich, ‘‘[t]he combination of parliament and a traditionally au-
thoritarian bureaucracy evoked the worst qualities of each body’’ (quoted by
Anderson and Anderson 1967: 184). By the end of the nineteenth century, the
idea that bureaucracy and democracy are incompatible had become popular with
the critics of ‘‘imperial bureaucracy’’ (Friedrich and Cole 1932), an idea that has
been given new life in postmodern democratic theory.
Rechtsstaat, too, had come under criticism. Earlier in the century, tension
became apparent between the idea of a Rechtsstaat and the idea of a eudaemonic
welfare state responsible for the well-being of its inhabitants and concerned with
protecting civilians against the state (Raadschelders and Rutgers 1999). Later, Stein
argued that Rechtsstaat ‘‘left no room for a proper conceptualization of adminis-
tration’’ (Lindenfeld 1997, 201). In Stein’s view, according to Lindenfeld (1997: 201),
‘‘administration was the wave of the future,’’ a view that found its way to the heart
of Goodnow’s seminal American treatises. Later, Schmoller attempted a revival of
the sciences of the state in the form of social science, and despite the opposition of
a concise history of the field 35
many law professors, a doctorate in the sciences of the state was established in 1880
(Lindenfeld 1997).
The dominant intellectual ‘‘memory’’ of the era, however, is Max Weber’s
positive analysis of bureaucracy. The power of Weber’s work has obscured the
intellectual ferment that preceded it. Rechtsstaat, moreover, had become deeply
entrenched and has endured to the present.
[governing] a task for intelligent amateurs’’ (Barker 1944: 29, quoting Pollard in
Acton et al. 1902–12: 10. 353). Government in England, moreover, was parliamen-
tary and local. ‘‘[T]he theory of the English State [after 1660 and 1688] is a theory
not of the administrative absolutism of a king, but of the legislative omnipotence of
a parliament’’ (Barker 1944: 31) and the power of justices of the peace and
municipal councils. Whereas the French, for example, hoped to overcome ‘‘the
intractable nature of the human material’’ by imposing order, the British preferred
to rely on liberty and free choice to produce rational action (Merkle 1980: 210).
A series of developments in the nineteenth century gradually brought elements of
bureaucracy into English public administration and management. Various reforms
established common patterns of education for oYcials modeled on classical instruc-
tion; ‘‘practical technology and organization were considered beneath the attention
of a gentleman’’ (Merkle 1980: 209). In 1853, open competition for appointment to
the civil service in India was adopted (and became the rule in British government in
1870). Two years later, following the Northcote–Trevelyan report (‘‘a classic case of
argument from ‘common knowledge’ in order to draw (apparently) obvious con-
clusions,’’ Hood and Jackson 1991: 141), Gladstone overrode Parliamentary objections
to engineer the Order in Council of 1855, which created a civil service commission
and required a minimum of competence among public oYcers’’ (White 1935: 1). The
result was creation of a civil service which has become a model, and in many respects
a caricature (as was the Prussian bureaucracy), of such an institution.
None of these developments belied English acquiescence in bureaucratic gov-
ernment, however. English intellectuals compared the bureaucratized Continent
with ‘‘free England’’ (Dunsire 1973). In his Principles of Political Economy, John
Stuart Mill ‘‘set himself against ‘concentrating in a dominant bureaucracy all the
skill and experience in the management of large interests, and all the power of
organized action, existing in the community’ ’’ (quoted by Albrow 1970: 22).
Herbert Spencer warned that ‘‘[a]n employed bureaucracy regularly [becomes] a
governing bureaucracy, inXexible, fond of power, but enslaved by routine’’ (quoted
by Albrow 1970: 25). French and German critics of the rigid Prussian system envied
English self-government. Nonetheless professionalism in public service has had its
eVects. Ramsey Muir could argue by 1910 that bureaucracy was becoming a reality
in England (Albrow 1970: 26).
The English civil service has enjoyed high prestige for integrity, capacity, and
intelligence (White 1935). It has also been viewed as having frozen ‘‘gentlemanliness’’
into ‘‘a type of neo-mandarinism which saw government of every type the Wt province
of the generalist and the classicist’’ (Merkle 1980: 209). Even though amateurism gave
way to professionalism, ‘‘not only had England avoided bureaucracy, it had also
avoided schools for public servants; and with them, administrative science text-
books’’ because there was no incentive to produce them (Dunsire 1973: 57). While
creating the capacity for self-government and engaging in the study of administrative
law, England remained unengaged with the study of administrative science.
a concise history of the field 37
Dunsire notes that the term science meant ‘‘something more than the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century writers on ‘administrative science’ (or indeed ‘economic
science’ or ‘political science’) had meant by the word—something like ‘disciplined
study’ ’’ (1973: 93).
In 1937, the Report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Manage-
ment (the Brownlow Report), became ‘‘a landmark statement of ‘managerialism’ in
public administration and is closely associated with the alliance between Progres-
sivism and the scientiWc management movement’’ (Hood and Jackson 1991: 135;
Dunsire 1973; Merkle 1980). The Brownlow Report (PCAM 1937) brought scientiWc
40 laurence e. lynn, jr.
in sociology, economics and political science competed for ‘‘the soul of public
administration.’’ The stakes in this competition rose, moreover, as the agenda of
the maturing welfare state presented perplexing new intellectual and practical
challenges to public managers.
As Aberbach, Putnam and Rockman have emphasized, communication is a key
managerial aspect of American exceptionalism (although there are others, includ-
ing the tolerance of enormous variation across states and municipalities and the
Xuidity of the legal framework: Peters 1997). ‘‘[T]he American separation of powers
means that face-to-face encounters . . . are actually more frequent in Washington
than in European capitals. . . . Institutions and history have pushed American
bureaucrats toward more traditionally political roles as advocates, policy entrepre-
neurs and even partisans, and have led congressmen to adopt a more technical
role’’ (Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981: 243). It was this activist aspect of
American public management that provided the pretext for a new phase in the
history of the Weld: the ‘‘discovery’’ of public management by the newly formed
public policy schools beginning in the 1970s.
However much one might acknowledge the intellectual depth and historical
continuity of the Weld of public administration and management from 1660 to
1970, something ‘‘new’’ did come into the picture in the 1970s in both America and
Europe. Economic crises, Wscal scarcity, and weariness with the liberal governance
of preceding decades gave impetus to more conservative political agendas wherein
public-management-cum-private-management was viewed as a means, if not a
panacea, for a more frugal, eYcient government.
was to coin a term that became a banner for the globalization of public manage-
ment: New Public Management (NPM). That term was meant to characterize a neo-
Taylorite, neo-cameralist approach to managerial reform, originating with the
Thatcher regime in Great Britain and with managerialist reforms in New Zealand
and Australia. In a popular interpretation, NPM began propagating itself globally
both because of the inherent appeal of the ideas and because of the support of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations,
the United Nations Development Program, and other international and regional
forums. That is, NPM referred to a simulacrum of the allocation of resources by
competitive markets that suited neo-conservative times: managerial, customer-
oriented, performance-driven (Pollitt 1990, Hood and Jackson 1991, Kickert 1997).
A compact view of NPM is König’s: ‘‘a popularised mixture of management
theories, business motivation psychology and neo-liberal economy’’ (1997: 219).
Impressed by the apparently global nature of public management reform and by
the family resemblance of its motivations and strategies, academics began creating
new international forums for professional discourse on the subject in the 1990s. As
König (1997: 226) noted, ‘‘management has become the . . . lingua franca in an
increasingly internationalised administrative world. It signals that public admin-
istration implies planning and coordination, staV recruitment and development,
personnel management and control, organisation, and so on, and that allowances
must be made in all these respects for the scarcity of resources.’’
Motivations to create and participate in these forums (which, though inter-
national, have drawn less interest from the French- and Spanish-speaking worlds,
Asia, and the less developed countries), have varied. Some promoted New Public
Management as an ideology and sought an audience for positive assessments,
however premature. Others were impressed with the apparent convergence of
management institutions, practices, and values, even seeing a global consensus
that the private sector could out-perform traditional institutions (Minogue, Poli-
dano, and Hulme 1998). König insisted, for example, that the challenge of NPM to
Continental Europeans ‘‘goes beyond the claim to an internal rationalization of the
public administration by means of good management’’ (1997: 213) and posits a
slenderized state with well functioning competitive markets. Others sought to
promote a wider understanding of national institutions in responding to the
managerial challenges of globalization, seeing divergence and the possibility of
new theoretical insights to processes of managerial reform (Pollitt 2002). Academ-
ics sought a dialogue among scholars with the more modest ambition of encour-
aging both theory building and lesson drawing among jurisdictions confronting
similar challenges (Lynn 1997, 2001a).
Whatever the speciWc motivations, the idea that there existed entering the
twenty-Wrst century a Weld of public administration and management that trans-
cended national political boundaries was beginning to take hold among prominent
scholars, a milestone in the Weld’s history.
a concise history of the field 45
its market testing, compulsory competitive tendering, and so on, has turned out to
be the most uncompromising’’ (1997: 219) is arresting. From a German or French
perspective, a state that malleable could not provide the continuity that settled
institutions have provided (König 1997). For Americans, who, lacking integrative
institutions (Page 1992), have always had to settle for incrementalism on matters of
managerial reform, such malleability can only be envied.
The explanation for such diVerences lies not in craft or structure but in consti-
tutions, in national institutional arrangements that establish and regulate the
balance between managerial capacity and external control. The British ‘‘fusion of
[executive and legislative] powers in a cabinet permits them to maintain eVective
control over an intrinsically powerful mandarinate’’ (Riggs 1997b: 274; Stillman
2000). In Germany, in contrast, the inclusion of ‘‘traditional principles of civil
service’’ in the Federal Constitution was, Jann (1997) argues, a kind of constitu-
tional guarantee of Weberian principles of administration, and only the sudden
belated popularity of the ‘‘New Steering Model’’ at the local level threatened
Weberian continuity by seeking to diminish the diVerence between public and
private sectors. America’s separation of powers accounts for its exceptional ap-
proach to public administration and management.
The fact that public management reform remains primarily a national (and
constitutional) matter (König 1997; Rohr 2002) despite the globalization of re-
sources, technology, and ideas is of less signiWcance to the Weld, however, than that
these issues can be intelligibly studied and debated by academic and practicing
professionals of widely diVerent national experiences. While their orientations to
disciplines, theories, methods, and national agendas will diVer (Stillman 2000),
these professionals have in common a grasp of larger issues that transcend the
descriptive particulars of national regimes or tenets of disciplinary training. Na-
tional diVerences may be inimical to reaching that elusive consensus on the
universal principles of public administration and management, but such diVer-
ences are the lifeblood of scientiWc inquiry and thus well serve the goal of building
the theories and empirical understanding that, as they have from ancient times,
sustain a professional Weld on a global scale.
References
Aberbach, J. D., Putnam, R. D., and Rockman, B. A. (1981), Bureaucrats and Politicians in
Western Democracies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Acton, J. E. E. D., Ward, A. W., Prothero, G. W., Leathes, S. M., and Benians, E. A.
(1910–12), Cambridge Modern History, New York: Macmillan.
Albrow, M. (1970), Bureaucracy, New York: Praeger Publishers.
Anderson, E. N., and Anderson, P. R. (1967), Political Institutions and Social Change in
Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press.
a concise history of the field 47