An Interpretive-Phenomenological Critique of the Science of (New?) Public Management: A Polemic
Public Administration as a field of academic inquiry has faced numerous challenges. Public management scholars focus exclusively on the executive level of management in public organizations. Knowledge possessed by lower-level managers, workers, and/or the public is ignored and deemed to be irrelevant or unimportant in the decision-making process within agencies. In general, technical rationality, or what passes for traditional management practice and the new public management, has had some success for executives and managers in public organizations insofar as motivating individuals for instrumental purposes. (*) The success of public management as a social and political movement makes it difficult to overcome. The concentration of the “public management movement” on the executive level of management has supplanted traditional public administration and public service. It is the ideology of public management that is the primary focus of this paper. Alternatives including the New Public Service and the knowledge analytic will be presented briefly as a counterpoint to address the democratic shortcomings of the public management movement, both new and old.*See Guy B. Adams and V. Ingersoll’s “Culture, Technical Rationality, and Organizational Culture,” in American Review of Public Administration, December 1990, 20/4: 285 – 302, for an excellent elaboration of the concept. In general, technical rationality is an approach to thinking that “has stripped reason of any normative role in shaping human affairs” (Adams and Balfour 1998, xiii).