公共管理导论(第五版)(公共管理英文版系列)

Public management as a field of studyIn addition to being an area of practice, public management is a field of academic discourse, as are public administration, public policy and other related disciplines. A longstanding problem is that there are several sub-groups with their own particular points of view. It is notable how little contact public administration, pub-lic policy and public management academics have with each other (Lynn, 1996; Kettl, 2002). Despite these approaches being innately related to each other and to politics and political science, there are often quite distinct academic followers of each approach, with their own conferences and journals. There are differing views on their relative primacy. Although explained more fully in later chapters, some discussion of terms is warranted here.Public and private managementOne of the criticisms of managerial reform has been over its deriv-ing theories and techniques from the private sector. This criticism is neither novel nor significant. Historically, the private and public sec-tors have borrowed from each other; from the emulation of military models of bureaucracy by the private sector, to explicit copying by governments of the ways of organizing private railway companies in the nineteenth century. Still, there are several reasons why the two sectors are not alike and can never be so, as set out in Box 1.1.There are major differences between the private and the pub-lic sectors (see also Boyne, 2002). The question is whether these differences between them are, first, enough to need a specific form of management; and, second, to require the use of the traditional administrative model rather than any kind of managerial model. On the first point, it must be argued that the public sector is suf-ficiently different to need its own form of management. Allison (1982) also observes that ‘public and private management are at least as different as they are similar, and ... the differences are more important than the similarities’ (p. 29). Boyne (2002) argues that management techniques ‘cannot be exported successfully from one sector to another because of differences in organizational environ