The Art of the State - Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management

This important new study aims to explore questions central to current debates over public management. Combining contemporary and historical experience, it employs grid/group cultural theory as an organizing frame and method of exploration.

Why does public management - the art of the state - so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service? What are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services? Are the forces of modernity set to produce world-wide convergence in ways of organizing government? Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services. And contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues that variety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management.

Table of Contents:
Part I. INTRODUCTORY
1. Public Management: Seven Propostions
2. Calamity, Conspiracy, and Chaos in Public Management
3. Control and Regulation in Public Management

Part II. CLASSIC AND RECURRING IDEAS IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
4. Doing Public Management the Hierarchist Way
5. Doing Public Management the Individualist Way
6. Doing Public Management the Egalitarian Way
7. Doing Public Management the Fatalist Way?

Part III. RHETORIC, MODERNITY, AND SCIENCE IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
8. Public Management, Rhetoric, and Culture
9. Contemporary Public Management: A New Global Paradigm?
10. Taking Stock: The State of the Art of the State