258 10: Conclusion: A Bright Future for Th eory?
came from such people as Luther Gulick (1937), Henri Fayol (1949), and Chester
Barnard (1938).
These principles were exposed as proverbs by Simon (1947/1997), who
stripped scientifi c management of its claim to “science.” Although Simon de-
molished the principles approach, he shared its basic objective—to lay the foun-
dations for a science of administration within a positivist framework. Simon’s
devastating critique not only discredited the principles approach but also led to
a general loss of interest in public management theory. Following the positivist
grail, public administration scholarship in the 1950s followed Simon’s lead into
rational choice and decision theory. Th is left the public management fi eld open
to colonization by sociologists, who took full advantage of the opportunity by
constructing various creative intellectual frameworks for studying management,
many of them centered on group theory.
Ironically, Simon’s positivist agenda has suff ered a fate somewhat similar to
Taylor’s scientifi c management movement. Neither Taylor’s agenda nor Simon’s
has mustered a convincing record to support a claim to theory in the positivist
sense—the universal axioms necessary for a true science of administration still
seem beyond our grasp. Th e principles approach has been remarkably resilient
and useful in fulfi lling the second and third purposes of theory listed earlier in
the chapter. Fayol, Gulick, or McGregor may not have distilled universal axioms
of management, but their frameworks proved to be practical in the applied sense.
In variants too numerous to cite comprehensively, the principles approach shows
up as a useful heuristic for formulating management objectives and providing a
guide for action. Such frameworks are not theories in the strict sense—as Table
10.1 indicates, public management theory has a mixed record when it comes to
descriptive capacities, but is relatively weak when considered as anything other
than a systematic guide to action.
Th is contribution, however, should not be underestimated. Public manage-
ment theory is where scholarly work in public administration has arguably found
its greatest applied impact. And if anything, since the early 1990s the princi-
ples approach seems to have entered something of a new golden age. Much of
this newfound attention is associated with the rise of New Public Management
(NPM). NPM recycles the principles project—most famously in David Osborne
and Ted Gaebler’s (1992) “ten arrows in the quiver” of public management—
while repackaging it in a broadly appealing political philosophy. Th ese normative
elements do raise some concerns; NPM is closely associated with conservative
political ideology and tends to equate corporate values with democratic values.
Yet regardless of its deep historical roots or its contemporary ideological appeal,
NPM has some clear drawbacks as a comprehensive conceptual framework for
public administration, not the least of these is NPM’s shaky empirical warrant.
Th e work of Kenneth Meier and Laurence O’Toole (2009), for example, indicates
that the key assumptions of NPM, at least in some cases, lack empirical support—
most notably, the notion of contracting out for effi ciency and a change-oriented