98 5: Th eories of Public Management
by administrators is at the forefront of concerns in public agencies. Reinforced
by changing public attitudes, the reinventing government movement and civil
rights laws, the new public administration has triumphed aft er a quarter century.
Now it is unthinkable (as well as illegal), for example, to deny someone welfare
benefi ts because of their race or a job opportunity because of their sex. Social
equity today does not have to be so much fought for by young radicals as admin-
istrated by managers of all ages. (1997, 451)From the 1950s through the 1970s, with the exception of a continuing interest
in budgeting and personnel staff functions, the arguments of the New Public Ad-
ministration, and a brief interest in “management by objective,” academic public
administration had little to say regarding management in the practice of public
administration. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the subject of management returned
to public administration with a vengeance, in theory and in practice.
It being understood that the most rigorous applications of management the-
ory in public administration are found in operations research and public works,
and that these applications are best described as decision-theoretic, we now turn
to modern theories of public management. Unlike decision theory, these theories
are not primarily problem solving, but are instead descriptive of management
behavior or function as prescriptive guides for management improvement in the
ongoing routine work of organizations.
It is common in public administration theory to combine the subjects of man-
agement and organization and to treat them either as linked or as the same thing.
Th is custom has led to some conceptual and theoretical confusion. For example,
decentralization is oft en described as a management phenomenon, although it
is generally agreed that many, if not most, aspects of centralization and decen-
tralization are organizational or structural phenomena. To reduce this confusion
and to sharpen the theoretical point, we have unbundled management and orga-
nization theory and treat them separately. Public management is taken to mean
the formal and informal processes of guiding human interaction toward public
organizational objectives. Th e units of analysis are processes of interaction be-
tween managers and workers and the eff ects of management behavior on workers
and work outcomes. Th e purpose of this chapter is to describe and evaluate the-
ory, either empirically or deductively derived, that accounts for or explains public
management behavior.
Th eories of public organization, by contrast, have to do with the design and
evolution of the structural arrangements for the conduct of public administra-
tion and with descriptions or theories of the behavior of organizations as the
unit of analysis. Although separating management and organization for concep-
tual and theoretical refi nement has its advantages, we do not contend here that
management and organization are distinct in an empirical sense. Th ey are not.
Management almost always occurs in the context of organization, and organiza-
tion is seldom eff ective without management. Th erefore, in the closing chapter,