PUBLIC ADMINISTRATON REFORM: FROM TRADITIONAL TO NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
HISTORY OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
The new public management (NPM) movement started to develop in the late 70s and early 80s. The United Kingdom was the first mover. They were reformed by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and communal governments in the United States which faced the predicament of recessive developments and tax revolts of their citizens. Other common wealth nations such as New Zealand and Australia joined and after their reform success, almost all OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and development) countries also joined in, including other countries in the world (OECD 1995).
INTRODUCTION
As a contemporary paradigm of public administration, New Public Management (NPM) unveils the failures and inadequacies of public sector performance over time, and the traditional public administration. It has been established as a summary description of the way of fine structuring the public sector bodies, to bring their management approaches in close proximity to business methods.
The world-wide administrative reform movement ( caused by the Thatcherism process, originating from UK) in public management has been brought about by the necessity of the government to respond to the fiscal stress caused by changes in international economic system, on the other hand by the unrelenting demands for government services and regulations in national political systems.
These stresses bred a lot of policy responses aimed at budgetary restraint and at lowering the public services of governments, including different measures to privatise government operations and to deregulate private economic enterprises.
The global reform movement in public management has been ...
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...lacks some of the good aspects as seen from the old model high ethical standards. Moe (1994) points out that the new public management fails to account for critical differences between private and government sectors, thus it ignores that government is based on a rule of law not market driven mechanisms.
CONCLUSION
There have been changes in public sector and reforms which had never been seen before. For a number of reasons, the traditional model of public administration is replaced by a new model of public management. This change involves much more than mere public sector reform. It implies changes in the operation of the public services. The new public management can be useful to government and ought to be seriously considered. However, new public management is not a blanket solution to all predicaments of public administration in modern governments.
The main aim of public service is to deliver services that are of need to its people. How fast a public manager can address its people’s problem and concerns indicates its effectiveness. Responsiveness of the manager develops trust between him, the government, and the people. According to (Rainey, p106) bureaucratic responsiveness implies two things; responsiveness to the people’s wishes or responsiveness to the interest of the government.
Wilson described public administration as “the most obvious part of the government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself.” Furthermore, public administration is efficient and detailed implementation of public law. Every particular application of general law is a demonstration of administration.
Public administration is the implementation of government policy. It is also an academic discipline that studies this implementation and prepares civil servants for public service. It was high in demand during the 1930’s and early 1940’s. It is known as the “high noon of orthodoxy”, marked by the publication of Luther H. Gulick and Lyndall Urwick’s Papers on the Science of Administration in 1937. Suggested by some administrationalists, it should be the center of government bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is a body of non-elective group officials who are in control of the government policy. As part of the academic aspect, it prepares the person to serve in the executive branch of local, state, and federal government. It entails the specific
Segal. (2002, February). Providing public sector services in a time of change: The total rewards perspective. [Electronic version]. Public Sector Letter. 2-4.
The call to public service cannot be answered by one who lacks a direction, a focus, or a clearly articulated goal: a “vision.” Charles Goodsell discusses the idea of vision at length in his article, A New Vision for Public Administration, but falls short of granting the “new” vision we are promised, giving us little more than fodder for a strategic planning session and recycled ideas from our nation’s founders. The “vision” for the discussion herein is to dismantle Goodsell’s “New Vision” by reducing those ideas into manageable moving parts, identifying the ideas that have been reused, and recycling those pieces that are redundant to the current system.
The study of public administration only continued to grow over the course of the next two decades. As the study of public administration expanded, so did the development of s...
In the future I would like to see myself, as a continuously promoted public official who could possibly become a pro-active politician in today’s demanding political arena. To achieve this, I would like to gain more knowledge which can help me reach intellectual maturity to the latest practices adopted in the field of Public Administration. My desire for self-development in this area and curiosity to learn past and contemporary developments in different societies will help me to solve the problems easily.
Public sector reforms adopted in a number of countries such as USA, UK and New Zealand in the last fifteen years and characterised by efficiency units, performance management, contracting out, market type mechanisms, and agency status have come to be known as the New Public Management or NPM. Appearance of the NPM as shifting the paradigm from the old traditional model of administration has been promoted by a remarkable degree of consensus among the political leadership of various countries and is presented today as the major tool for public sector management reforms.
NAZ, M. E. (2003). ORIGIN, IDEAS AND PRACTICE OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT:LESSONS FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES. Asian Affairs , 33.
This essay discusses the radical transformation of the principles and foundations of public administration from traditional to New Public Management. Firstly the essay will attempt to define the key terms of traditional public administration and the doctrine of New Public Management. Rabin J. (2003) explains that New Public Management embodies “a process in public administration that uses information and experiences obtained in business management and other disciplines to improve efficiency, usefulness and general operation of public services in contemporary bureaucracies.“Traditional Public Administration progresses from governmental contributions, with services perceived by the bureaucracy.
...r pillars of public administration are equally important in the process of public administration and complement one another in the provision of quality public service. When public administrators have economy in mind they focus on the best combination of available resources to provide optimum public service. To ensure that public service is not limited to only a section of the public, the issue of equity is taken into consideration so that public interest is realized. Efficiency and effectiveness additionally go hand in hand in ensuring that allocated resources are used in the best possible manner to attain set goals. Thus whereas the first three public administration pillars – Economy, efficiency and effectiveness are concerned with how public service is provided the fourth and most recent addition (Equity) concerns with for whom public service is provided.
The New Public Management is not a simplistic Big Answer, but rather, it is a normative reconceptualization of public administration consisting of several interrelated components, which creates innovative bureaucracies that provide better services . This essay shall be against the notion that public sector should run like a business, by discussing the origin of the New Public Management (NPM) in relation to globalization and the Cold War, while also depicting its negative implications on anonymity and accountability which are essential to the running of the Public Sector due to ministerial responsibility. To conclude, a future description of NPM on Canada shall be given in order to affirm my stance.
Max Weber, Henri Fayol and Luther Halsey Gulick all addressed issues, concerning how an overall organization should be structured, bureaucratic administration, while Frederick Taylor’s theory of scientific management concentrated on techniques for increasing production (Tomkins, 2005). This essay will focus on the disadvantages and the advantages, including the effective and efficient components, of bureaucracy in public management.
Public policy can be defined as “What ever governments choose to do or not do” (Dye, 2008, p 2). In the context of this essay, public policies are a set of actors by the government in order to reach out to the masses. The ministries and departments are mandated to deliver specific mandates in the form of public goods and services.