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5

Th eories of Public Management

Introduction: Developments in Public Management Th eory

Although changing tastes have had some infl uence on all fi elds of theory and ap-
plication, no approach to public administration has been more subject to the fads
of the day than management. Th e birth of the modern fi eld coincided with the
popularity of the scientifi c management of Frederick W. Taylor, the application
of time-and-motion studies to public activities, and the relentless search for the
one best way. Like the “Total Quality Management” of the 1980s and today’s logic
of continuous improvement, scientifi c management was borrowed from business
administration early in the twentieth century and applied to public administra-
tion and government.
Th rough time, in government much of what was understood to be scientifi c
management separated itself from the more general subject of management, par-
ticularly the management of the staff functions, budgeting, and personnel, and
became the taproot of the modern fi eld of operations research. Half engineering
and half business administration, operations research is a highly successful ap-
plication of mathematics and computing power to classic business management
issues, such as scheduling, pricing, quality control, effi ciency in production pro-
cesses, and the delivery, warehousing, and inventory of products. Operations
research is equally important in the public sector, particularly in public organi-
zations for which such techniques are useful: the planning and development of
weapons systems; highway and transportation systems; water and waste man-
agement systems; nuclear-power-generating systems; air traffi c control systems;
and large-scale data management tasks, such as the tax returns and records of
the Internal Revenue Service and the management of the Social Security, Medi-
care, and Medicaid systems.
In contemporary theory, the applications of operations research theory is most
oft en found in settings described as tightly coupled systems in which machines,
equipment, or technology is coupled with human management. Th e theoretical