THE REFORM OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: AN OVERVIEW

Abstract

A major process of reforming public management has been occurring in the liberal democratic state jurisdictions over the last 15 years or so. It is not over yet, but it is possible now to map more clearly the features of what we after others (see e.g. Hood 1991) can call the new public management. Several points need to be made at the outset. Firstly, as Barzelay (1992) argues, we are in the throes of a paradigm change in respect of how public management is to be conceived and done. I have previously made the same point in referring to significant change in Australian public bureaucratic cultures in the 1980s: “It is not too much to regard this change as a cultural revolution” (Yeatman 1990, p. 13). Secondly, the term public management is a metaphor which reconceives the business of public administration. It suggests that the work of the public sector has more to do with the creative and pro-active agency of management than it has to do with the technical routines of administering rule. Thirdly, a point I shall be emphasising here, the new public management covers more than one direction of reform or change in the nature of public administration. I will contrast two very different directions of reform or change: after Barzelay, what I shall call the “post-bureaucratic’’ model; and the economic rationalist model. It will become clear that the post-bureaucratic model is where the real paradigm change lies. In so saying, we cannot dismiss the influence of the economic rationalist model on the post-bureaucratic model. This influence has worked to produce a competitively oriented approach to cost or, more accurately, price, which in turn has produced a more sophisticated and responsible orientation to resource deployment in the public sector. Fourthly, I am positioned as one of the critics of “managerialism” in the Australian jurisdictional context. While I had always hoped that my criticism was not that of a rejectionist - a rejection root and branch of all that has come to be known as managerialist - I have become much more acculturated within and thus accep- ting of managerialism over the last five years. To be sure, my growing involvement in academic management roles may account in part for this. However, I can now say with the advantage of hindsight that I was always intrigued by and attracted to the post-bureaucratic features of the new public management. It was with some degree of self-irony that I (Yeatman 1990, p.26) identified the people and process emphasis of the new public management with the contem- porary “culture of self-awareness, personal growth and individual autonomy”, a culture which distinguishes the baby boomer generation from the preceding one and which characterises all the baby boomer social movements: the consumer, environmentalist, postcolonial and women’s movements. An appropriation of my criticisms to rejectionist approaches to the new public management has embarrassed me over the last several years, an embarrassment the more severe because I have come to recognise how much I have learned from what we can now call the post-bureaucratic paradigm. I want to organise the remainder of this paper into the following sections: one, an historical contextualising of the new public management - namely, in broad terms why it has come about, and what its historical precedents are; and, two, an analysis of the post- bureaucratic model of public management where I set this model off against its competitor - the economic rationalist model of public management. I will then conclude my paper.