Entrepreneurs or Conservators?

Abstract

There remains a continuing debate as to whether administrative leaders and bureaucrats in the public sector should operate as private sector entrepreneurs or should be seen as the conservators of our constitutional values and the principles on which this country is based. The ideational discourse between the reinventing government movement and the conservator-ship paradigm continues to resonate a yet-unresolved intellectual crisis in public administration. The real conservators of American constitutional and administrative values are not the individuals who man her offices; rather, it is society in general that must assimilate and articulate these values. Bureaucrats come and go, but society remains essentially what it is. Rather than conservators or entrepreneurs, bureaucrats are “contracted” custodians of our administrative values but not the repository of those values. By drawing on the principal-agency thesis, this paper offers an alternate premise—the contractarian approach—for assessing bureaucratic accountability in public administrative practice.