It was time when traditional veberian hierarchical public administration model easily coincided with modern cultural context. Things began to change after postmodernism era appeared on the stage together with New Public Management implementation and New Governance attempts. What is your explanation in short about the role of cultural context for change of public administration models?
Dear Arvydas,
Postmodernism has influenced public administration and governance in various ways. Most importantly because it brought forward new perspective on public administration and governance and therewith inspired the construction of new models. Models that conversely effected the practices of public administration as description and prescription always tend to get mixed. Understanding governance as network instead of as hierarchies for example has stimulated many approaches that aim to develop and manage networks. In this sense new ways of understanding public administration, especially when captured in a model, can have a performative power. In relation to economics the book by MacKenzie et al. (Do economists make markets) is an interesting read. Postmodernism also brought attention to the constructed and contingent nature of public administration models and therewith it increased the awareness of possible alternative models. Additionally postmodernist reflections where often used to show limitations, shortcomings or even failures of particular models and therewith they also stimulated the debates about alternative models (such as new public management to increase the effectiveness or new governance to enhance the democratic values).
What's the goal?
In some cultures, celebrating creation/nature/out existence through religious practice is the goal. In others it is profit maximization. In others, the objective is freedom, whether of opinion or actualized economic freedoms facilitated by public education, health care, etc.
The role of culture is that it contributes to defining the objectives.
In any administration, when managing for results, a prerequisite to managing for results is to define objectives.
So I suggest that the role of culture is that it is the main contributor to defining objectives.
May I request that you define the terms "New Public Management" or "New Governance"?
To respond more directly to the question: I think in postmodernism we are generally more accepting of differentiated priorities between cultures, etc., even though we are often still very interested in finding common ground, and ways in which our cultural developments can be mutually reinforcing towards mutual benefit (even if achieved by pursuit of private gain). So we no longer try to impose Victorian education on the entire world, but instead exchange ideas while other places develop their own education systems, often during processes of capacity building, etc. Capacity building nowadays rarely involves saying "our way is the best way", rather, it's more like "this is how we do it, that's where it took us, and if you want help, this is the kind of help we're offering". That's postmodernist, in my opinion, and relevant to public administration and governance.
Dear Nathan,
New Public Management has its principles and methods. Principles are - competition, orientation towards results (only), orientation towards satisfaction of clients, quantitative evaluation of results and absolutisizing of quantitative side in administration. Methods are taken from the private sector as "benchmarking", one stop method, priorities planning, total quality management, etc. In general NPM means implementation of private sectors methods into public administration.
New Governance puts accents on somehow different aspects - openness, transparency, democracy, pluralism, social justice, social responsibility, non-corruption, active role of NGOs. NG speaks not so much about clients as it speaks much about the citizens and participation. In NPM the leader of the organization had a decisive role for organization and implementation. In NG - the co-governance and co-participation are on the first roles. Not only the results, but process in NG also matters.
Logically to ground NPM is much easier - it has clear principles and clear methods. NG has very much welcomed principles, but it suffers of the lack of concrete implementation methods. Cultural context means for that much. It is a very wide subject for discussion.
Thank you. I'm more familiar with that as "managing for results" in the public sector, and "monitoring and evaluation" as the management mechanisms used to manage for results. I was not familiar with the terminology.
Basically, this is benchmarking, goal setting, and explicitly tying activities to objectives and outcomes, with regular reporting, etc.
So I reiterate the perspective that the role of culture is in the goal setting.
Some places have limited management capacity. Many people will be inclined to say "they don't have a culture of managing for results" or some such equivalent statement. But that's not a fair statement when it's hard to find a university graduate in town let alone someone with experience running a business or a public sector department (and the familiarity with reporting which facilitating tracking results and identifying shortcomings).
In many places, participation itself will be important. So you can speak of "participatory monitoring and evaluation", where transparency provides a public with information on baselines and progress towards targets, which allows them to pressure government if things aren't progressing well or if the goals are not what they actually want.
In which case, it can be argued that the role of culture is not only in setting objectives, but also in defining the processes which will be required for the public to be satisfied with governance and public administration practices.
Charles Fox provided one of the most coherent responses to this question in "Reinventing Government as Postmodern Symbolic Politics" in the 1996 issue of PAR. The issue for me was the lack of coherence between the NPM rhetoric and the logic of performance management. Fox's (1996) paper offers some good insights.
Hi Everybody,
I was wondering can we assign a particular time frame for evolution of Post Modernism in Public Administration , making it more relevant to fit in the paradigm of Public Administration?
Second is there any difference in the post structuralist approach and Post modern in Public Administration(PA) and its impact on PA ?
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