146 6: Postmodern Th eory
Germany. Postmodernists are correct in their assertion that technology can
blur moral and ethical lines. Th ere could be no better modern example than the
current debate over the use and possible misuse of our knowledge of the human
genome.
It is fortunate that as a fi eld there has been a long series of literature on matters
of public ethics and morality. Just because new technology might enable public
administrators to do things has never meant that public administration should do
them. Public administration, when compared to other applied, interdisciplinary
fi elds, such as planning, social work, business administration, or law, has always
made a comparatively strong emphasis on values and ethics.
Enterprise
Few things are more predictable than the standard government reform calling for
the public sector to be more businesslike (Light 1999). And no one made more
sense of it than Gulick, who, having seen almost every twentieth-century reform,
wrote this:
”Businesslike” is the next metaphor designed to take in the unsophisticated. Th e
business universe at this point is designed to generate profi ts and power for the
owners and top managers of economic enterprises on the basis of a very short
time span. Since the nation state aims at a span of centuries and drives not for
economic profi ts for the owners of capital but at the life, liberty and happiness
of all its people, the fundamental drive should be not to be “businesslike” but to
make business a little more “government like.” It is desirable to be effi cient in the
honest business sense but not at the cost of the welfare of the people. (1984, 34)Over the years, the rhetoric has changed. Th e 1990s reinventing government
initiative at all levels of government called for public administrators to be entre-
preneurs and to break through bureaucracy by guiding the public sector in the
direction of being more customer oriented, an idea taken directly from the en-
terprise textbook (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). Reinventors would also improve
public administration by applying such market concepts as agency competition,
earning through special fees rather than generalized taxation, and the privatiza-
tion of public services. Initiatives to apply the logic of enterprise to public admin-
istration did not, however, go unchallenged (Kettl 1988; Goodsell 1983). Indeed,
from the beginning of the fi eld there has been a consistent literature pointing out
the diff erence between government and enterprise and questioning the applica-
tion of business principles to public administration (Martin 1965; Marx 1946).
Certainly the concerns of postmodernists about applying business concepts to
the public sector, and particularly the assumption that the motivations of pub-
lic offi cials can be understood only as rational self-interest, are warranted; there
has, however, been an extensive critique of these ideas in the pages of the Public