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Public Administration: Public & Private Management
Term Paper ID:27910
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Essay Subject:
Discusses the various arguments & approaches toward reorganization of government services through privatization & other approaches.... More...
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9 Pages / 2025 Words
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Paper Abstract:
Discusses the various arguments & approaches toward reorganization of government services through privatization & other approaches.
Paper Introduction:
INTRODUCTION
The debate over the need to reorganize government and how best to accomplish that has been raging in academic and public administration circles for some time, but the debate has become a national and very public issue first because of the considerable dissatisfaction expressed in recent years on the part of much of the public with their public institutions and leaders and second because of the present effort by the Clinton Administration to do something about it. With the announcement early in September of Vice-President Gore's analysis of the issue and his recommendations for change, the debate is likely to become more heated in the months to come. One complaint has been that government is inefficient, especially when compared with the
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Businesses get most of their money from their customers; governments get most of their money from taxpayers. The public sector must cope with a variety of interestgroups, including large organizations in the private sector. It was from this effortthat the merit system for the civil service emerged. Position classification is theprimary element remaining from scientific management. They find that what must be done is to change the basicincentives that drive governments, which means a substantial change in theethical principles noted above by Jacobs and in the way those principlesare applied in practice: We must turn bureaucratic institutions into entrepreneurial institutions, ready to kill off obsolete initiatives, willing to do more with less, eager to absorb new ideas. (p. However, the approach also ignores fiveother principles thought to be important--competition, empowerment ofcitizens, the missions or goals of agencies, emphasis on earning ratherthan spending money, and catalyzing all sectors into action to solveproblems (pp. (1993, July/August). Actually,Jacobs offers a set of paradigms, one for the private sector as presentlyconstituted and one for the public sector. She refers to these paradigmsas Moral Syndromes. Complaints have been made that thisaffects what jobs can be performed by individuals, how they are paid, andhow managers make decisions. (1988). With the announcement early inSeptember of Vice-President Gore's analysis of the issue and hisrecommendations for change, the debate is likely to become more heated inthe months to come. In the privatesector this had been used primarily as an opportunity to develop systems ofefficiency ratings and productivity incentives, whereas in the publicsector the purpose was equitable compensation. ("Department Operations," 1993, p. 28-31). The fact that governments may raise money bytaxation while businesses do so when customers buy products or services oftheir own free will shows why the public focuses so intensely on the costof government services to exert as much control as possible--they want todictate how much the bureaucrats spend on every item to prevent waste,misuse, or theft of the taxpayers' money. Otherinefficiencies are also seen in public organizations based on employmentpractices, civil service controls, unions, and political patronage. Workers arenot advanced according to ability, and they cannot be disciplined exceptwithin the narrow range allowed by written rules themselves created in thepolitical arena. The Pendleton Actdefined the nature of this new system. Some feel that management techniques taken from the privatesector would benefit the public sector, while others see the two sectors asso different that private-sector management techniques would not betransferable to the public sector in any meaningful way.PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR MANAGEMENT The major issues in public administration today includeprivatization, decentralization, choice, and incentives. REFERENCESDepartment Operations. 19-2 ). & Gaebler, T. New York: Addison-Wesley.----------------------- 1 (1992). Administrativereform has been seen as a matter of strengthening the hand of publicofficials (Steinman & Miewald, 1984, p. Class differences were not as rigid as they were in England,and competitive examinations were more egalitarian in giving everyone theopportunity to apply. For the managerin the public sector, the ultimate test is not whether he or she produces aproduct or a profit but whether they please elected politicians.Politicians in turn tend to be driven by interest groups, and thereforepublic managers, unlike their private counterparts, must factor interestgroups into every equation. 2 ) Osborne and Gaebler point out that such disparities createfundamentally different incentives in the private sector. Privatization, for instance, is a response to the perceptionthat the changed environment has reduced whatever efficiency government-operated programs may once have had. Vice-President Gore has addressed this issuein his reinvention of government and states: One of the things we're finding is that the personnel system is way too rigid and stratified, hierarchical, inflexible, encumbered with too many regulations, and it doesn't allow for the kind of creativity and freedom of movement that high-performing organizations are known for. New York: Random House.Miewald, R. 6). This was part of a reformmovement brought about by a new sense of idealism, in part fueled by newlyarrived immigrant groups and by eastern personalities who attacked thepatronage system as the tool of the political machines. Osborne and Gaebler determine that the government system can bechanged and that it can make better use of private-oriented managementtechniques, though it can never be run like a business because it isinherently too different from a business. They cite the case of Total QualityManagement, increasingly popular in the public sector. Osborne and Gaebler (1992)point out that management in the two sectors moves at a different pace.Government is democratic and open and thus moves more slowly than business,where managers can make quick decisions behind closed doors. 4)PRIVATE SECTOR MANAGEMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR MANAGEMENT Osborne and Gaebler (1992) point out other instances where privatesector management techniques have been adapted to the public sector in waysthat then make the approach peculiar to the public sector and lesseffective than in the private sector. Such reform movements have developedbefore, and generally they have strengthened rather than weakened thebureaucratic system which defines our public institutions. Businesses are usually driven by competition; governments usually use monopolies. The approach causespublic institutions to focus on five of the principles seen as important byOsborne and Gaebler--results, customers, decentralization, prevention, anda market (or systems) approach. Problems in administrative reform. Osborne and Gaebler,however, state that government and business are fundamentally differentinstitutions in a variety of ways: Business leaders are driven by the profit motive; government leaders are driven by the desire to get reelected. (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992, p. Reinventing government. In the private sector, in keeping with what analysts havenoted above, what is prized is performance, on top of which has developed aunion bargaining system to protect the workers from arbitrary decisions andto give some security over time. The 194 Social Security Act included aprovision that those state officials administering funds granted under theact had to be employed through a merit system, a provision that wouldbecome common in federal programs. Osborne and Gaebler (1992) discuss the reinvention of government andnote that for many people, the idea of doing so calls forth the image ofrunning government like a business. 2-5.Dresang, D. In the private sector,optimization is the goal, while for the public sector, maintenance of thehierarchy and of power relations is the goal. & Steinman, M. The basic assumption inthe work of these bureaus was that there were no essential differencesbetween the public and private sectors. The federal government, through its power of the purse, forcedmany jurisdictions to follow suit. INTRODUCTION The debate over the need to reorganize government and how best toaccomplish that has been raging in academic and public administrationcircles for some time, but the debate has become a national and very publicissue first because of the considerable dissatisfaction expressed in recentyears on the part of much of the public with their public institutions andleaders and second because of the present effort by the ClintonAdministration to do something about it. 2 -21). There are clear differences between the public and the privatesectors in terms of management style, management philosophy, and otherelements. A so-called merit system was created to replace the earlier spoilssystem at the end of the nineteenth century. Public personnel management and public policy. The merit system spread to various jurisdictions inthe United States, but it did not do away with the patronage systementirely. Moral Syndrome A applies to the private sector andshows what is expected of the manager and worker operating in thisenvironment: Moral Syndrome A Shun force Come to voluntary agreements Be honest Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens Compete Respect contracts Use initiative and enterprise Be open to inventiveness and novelty Be efficient Promote comfort and convenience Dissent for the sake of the task Invest for productive purposes Be industrious Be thrifty Be optimisticThe second paradigm applies to the public sector, where differentpriorities reign: Moral Syndrome B Shun trading Exert prowess Be obedient and disciplined Adhere to tradition Respect hierarchy Be loyal Take vengeance Deceive for the sake of the task Make rich use of leisure Be ostentatious Dispense largesse Be exclusive Show fortitude Be fatalistic Treasure honor The differences described here by Jacobs (1992, pp. Systems of survival. Some feel that the sectors are so different that a transfer ofeffective management techniques from the private sector would be doomedbecause the public sector has different demands entirely, as Osborne andGaebler indicate. During this period, therewas an emphasis on specialization that fostered the rise of a number of newprofessions, and personnel management itself was one of those professions.Personnel work before had been clerical work, but the demands of scientificmanagement were greater (Dresang, 1991, pp. A paradigm offered by Jacobs (1992) suggests some of theunderlying differences and the reasons for those differences. They come tothe conclusion that government cannot be run like a business (p. U.S. Civil servicereform associations emerged to agitate for change. 23-24) indicatediffering views of the goal for the manager. The authors note that anotherconsequences is that public employees view risks and rewards verydifferently than do private employees. One complaint has been that government is inefficient,especially when compared with the private sector where efficiency is linkedto profits, while the public sector lacks incentives to spur managers to beefficient. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.Osborne, D. The rigidity of job classifications in the public sector is one wayscientific management has developed differently than in the private sectorand has perpetuated inefficiencies. The appeal of this notion is found inthe related idea that business optimizes effort to achieve an end at aslittle cost as possible while government operates more for the process ofdoing something than to accomplish it and more to keep the engine runningthan to worry about how much it costs to run it. For all thecalls for government to be run more like a business, business itself makesthat difficult to accomplish. Theseand other problems have been noted in the effort to "reinvent" governmentin the Clinton Administration. (1991). In government, the incentive is allin the direction of not making mistakes. L. New York: Longman.Jacobs, J. The public sector will never be the same asthe private sector, but this still does not mean it cannot be reshaped toallow for certain management techniques to be transferred for greaterefficiency. Congress passed theClassification Act in 1923 in response to pressures to standardize wages aswell as for greater efficiency in government. Laboratories of democracy. Most of theseissues have developed in response to changes in the economic, social, andlegal framework for public administration at all levels of government andto a perception that the existing system is not adequate to serve a givenfunction. The system is designed to protect theworkers from political decisions, but in practice it protects them fromnearly any personnel decision a manager might wish to make. As a result, standard businessmethods used to motivate employees do not work well in the public sectorenvironment (pp. The current round is based onthe desire to empower the citizenry and to make the administrator moreeffective, not more powerful. The primary agents for thischange were bureaus of municipal research, funded by private philanthropyand existing outside the boundaries of government. (p. The system of public personnel management has developed over timefrom political interplay intended to set personnel decisions outside therealm of political influence, the idea being that a new administrationcould not simply reward supporters and punish opponents below a certainlevel. 21).Jacobs's lists of moral positions shows different ways of thinking in thetwo sectors, while Osborne and Gaebler's analysis of mode of operationshows how these different ways of thinking are manifested in practice andshaped by the requirements of each sector.EXAMPLE OF PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION The administration of the personnel function is one of import in boththe public and private sectors, but the systems developed for each arequite different. In 199 the Supreme Court ended manycontinuing patronage practices by conferring constitutional status to thekey merit principle that the selection of public employees may not includeparty affiliation requirements (Dresang, 1991, pp. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School.Osborne, D. (198). (1992). 23) Osborne (1988) notes how many governors are addressing these issue atthe state level and how they are seeking nonbureaucratic solutions toproblems, often turning to third-sector organizations for aid: They believe that many of the large, centralized government programs created in the past--medicaid, medicare, welfare, housing programs-- have been inefficient and wasteful (often because government had to buy off the private sector, as in the case of medicare and medicaid). It is based on the belief thatprivate organizations are more efficient because they operate from theprofit motive and thus institute economies and controls that publicorganizations, which do not have to make a profit, fail to do. They are probably correct inthis assessment. 31-33). In the public sector, a system ofadvancement has been developed that exists largely outside of anydetermination of performance. There was also a change from theBritish system in terms of the grouping of positions into free tiers, afterwhich entrance to each tier was linked with formal educationalrequirements. Department of State Bulletin, pp. The next major phase in public personnel management came with thework of Frederick Taylor on scientific management, an example of a privatesector approach adapted to the public sector. 327)There is thus often a tension between the public and private sectors thatmilitates not only against making the public sector more like the privatebut that places the private in a position of control damaging to publicsector reform.
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