The peculiar tasks of public management toward conceptual discrimination.
- 1995
- p.171-83
- Jun
Recent contributions to AJPA have suggested new conceptual directions for public management in response to the stand-off between managerialists and their critics. In emphasising the inherent political dimensions of public management, this article seeks to build on these contributions. It does so by combining some of the insights of previous contributions with a simple matrix devised originally by American scholar James Q Wilson. The central proposition is that attempts to sender public management more like private management have been top far-reaching and do not adequately appreciate the intractable difficulties that stem from the types of task that are peculiar to public organisations. It is suggested that there should be less reliance on dubious metaphors borrowed from the business domain. Instead, a greater degree of theoretical eclecticism and conceptual discrimination should be used in understanding and developing public management