Summary 127
granting greater discretion to managers, increasing citizen or customer choices,
deregulating, organizing so that there is competition, and determining eff ective-
ness according to outcome measurement. In applying these doctrines, the public
manager must be a leader and an entrepreneur and must practice governance.
But this leader/entrepreneur is still a bureaucrat. Th e irony is, therefore, that,
although the New Public Management would banish bureaucracy, in fact it re-
places bad bureaucracy with good bureaucracy by calling the latter something
else!
Hood and Jackson, as well as Majone, suggest that the theory of New Public
Management is best understood not as positivist social science but as the logic
of rhetoric. Th is logic views the organization, the agency, or the government
bureau as a “cognitive paradigm” of shared meanings and agreed-upon under-
standings. Organizations are moved or changed by adjustments in meanings and
understandings, usually brought about by changing patterns of rhetoric. In man-
agement theory, the New Public Management doctrines are the contemporary
“winning arguments” concerning how to manage government agencies. Th ese
winning arguments have more to do with received wisdom, with shift ing met-
aphors, and with presentation and packaging than with objective, scientifi cally
verifi able evidence.
Finally, in the contemporary theory of management in public administration,
three particularly important concepts/metaphors dominate: leadership, contract-
ing out, and governance. Th e modern emphasis is upon strong, heroic, muscular
leaders rather than neutrally competent technocrats. But assertive administra-
tive leadership in a political world always presented dangers, both to the logic
of democratic self-government and to long-run bureaucratic eff ectiveness. Th e
modern emphasis is on contracting rather than on direct government service. But
contracts are oft en ill managed, and serious questions of accountability persist.
Governance is the modern theory of network management and has a consider-
able empirical warrant.
Th e theory of management that was part of the inception of public adminis-
tration made important contributions to improving the eff ectiveness and honesty
of government in the United States. Only time will tell if contemporary manage-
ment theory will have as lasting and profound an eff ect.
Summary
Th e fi eld of public management, as we understand it today, was started by the
application of Taylor’s scientifi c management principles to the public sector and
was carried forward by Gulick and his mnemonic POSDCORB. Taylor’s Prin-
ciples of Scientifi c Management were replaced by the human relations school of
management, with McGregor’s Th eory X and Th eory Y, but in the fi eld of public
administration, little attention was paid to management for nearly thirty years
between the late 1950s and mid-1980s.