In Search of Commensurability: Writings in Public Management in an Era of Governmental Reform

Abstract

T Vhe 1990s have been challenging years for theory builders in the public administration and public policy communities. The politically charged U.S. reforms made under the auspices of the National Performance Review and the sweeping governmental reform in democratic nations around the globe are nothing less than a sea change. Amid this change, two central themes have emerged: managerialism and governance. This essay highlights two key works on public management: Laurence E. Lynn, Jr.'s Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession and Don Kettl and H. Brinton Milward's edited volume The State of Public Management. These books are important because they seek to connect critical themes in public administration and public policy. Historically, scholars in the public administration and public policy communities have traded intellectual barbs and/or studiously ignored one another. Both of the books reviewed here deliver the implicit message that all members of the academic community should engage the changes occurring in the public sector, despite the celebrated differences between the two schools of thought. The issues raised in the two volumes reviewed in this essay, represent reasoned, thoughtful responses to such a changing environment. At this point, I would like to identify myself as a public administrationist, who is not without biases or ideological predispositions. Being a public administrationist, I consider the study of the public sphere to be about our collective social experience as much as it is about the delivery of public programs. This view reflects a concern for the social construction of meaning in the context of our civic life (Wamsley et al., 1990; Bellah, 1991). That said, however, it is clear that the dominant perspective on public management is well anchored to a functionalist approach toward knowledge (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). A central assumption I take to be shared by most public management scholars is that the social world is composed of empirical artifacts, relations, and networks that can be analyzed using rigorous analytical methods.