‘No philosophy, please, we are managers’. Public Management and the common good: Euro-Atlantic convergences
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852310375539 |
| Published date | 01 June 2010 |
| Author | Claude Rochet |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
‘No philosophy, please, we are managers’
Public Management and the common good: Euro-Atlantic
convergences
Claude Rochet
Abstract
Public management, as an academic discipline, has been, up to now, inspired by a
managerialist approach, axiologically neutral, which cast aside the great questions
regarding the ends of public life, those of the common good and of the ‘good
life’ that were at the very basis of classical political philosophy. Governing has
been reduced to ‘governancing’, relying on the presupposition that good means
automatically leading to good ends. Based on critiques of this drift, we witness
on both sides of the Atlantic the renewal of the old republicanism that makes
the common good the aim of public administration. This debate has been at the
very foundation of the modern democracies since the 17th century in England, to
the foundation of the United States and the republican tradition stemming from
the French Revolution. This article envisages how public management could reju-
venate itself to mend the broken link between the managerial and the political,
putting emphasis on what would be the consequences on the training of public
managers.
Points for practitioners
Practitioners are often stuck in a false alternative: either a state bureaucracy or the
adoption of a neoliberal solution represented by the bundle of the new public
management tools based on the search for efficiency. This article goes back to
the roots of the debate on the role of the state in economic growth since the
Renaissance and shows that the issue is not one of chosing between state or no
state but to articulate appropriately the political role of the state as an institution
maker and end the initiatives of the market. By drawing a comparison between
Claude Rochet is Full Professor, Institut de la Gestion Publique et du Développement Economique,
Paris and Institut de Management Public et de Gouvernance Territoriale, Aix-en-Provence.
© The authors, 2010. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Vol 76(2):279–312 [DOI:10.1177/0020852310375539]
280 International Review of Administrative Sciences 76(2)
the first financial crisis (the 1720 South Sea crisis) and the current crisis, it points
out the central role of polity against the current predominance of economics in
the mainstream ideology, and rehabilitates the role of civic virtues in ruling public
affairs. A comparison is made between classical Europe and the history of the US
that shows this debate has been constant in nation-building and the the present
period of turbulence calls for a renewal of the role of the politics, far from the NPM
hype that dominated the field of public administration for the past twenty years.
Key words: Political philosophy, research programmes, public management,
common good, history of England, History of the United States, financial crisis
‘Management is not a neutral technique but an activity inexorably linked to politics,
public poliicies, the law and the stakes of civil society. It is always present in values
and /or ideologies
Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert Public Management Reform:
a Comparative Analysis, 2004
It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make
things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they
would set less value on the work, and more upon the workman; that they would
never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to
it is individually weak, and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been
devised, to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and
enfeebled citizens.
A. de Tocqueville. De la Démocratie en Amérique.
Public management has been dominated by the idea that the notions of the state
and government can be reduced to ‘good governance’: efficiency and transparency
of public action, clarification of the decision-making and responsibility circuits, etc.
Should we, from now on, cease to govern and replace it with ‘to governance’, that
is reducing politics to management? Opposed to these ideas from neo-classical
economics, which emphasized the importance of organizational performance,
are ideas from institutional economics and the evolutionary school, which insist
on the role of institutions in both the developing countries and in the evolution of
developed counties and have been able to identify the comparative institutional
advantages in the explanation of differences in growth between nations.
Good management does not necessarily mean good government. Managing
well does not mean governing well: our accounts may be accurate but our political
choices can be unjust or mistaken. The ‘indicators of good governance’ promoted
by the OECD and the World Bank, aim to define the ultimate criteria for compari-
son between nations using the practice of benchmarking. These techniques, which
originated in the private sector, are diverted from their original use, which was as a
self-evaluation tool in the context of quality procedures, and can only be applied to
recurring processes in a stable, comparable environment, such as the QCD (quality,
cost, deadline) of civil servants’ pay or the time taken to access an emergency ser-
vice. Turning them into an ultimate classification of what constitutes a ‘good govern-
ment’ by compiling heterogeneous data out of context makes little sense and could
Rochet Public Management and the common good 281
simply be, as Pollitt (2010) notes, a vague desire on the part of the World Bank to get
its hands back on the promotion of a single model after the abandonment of the
Washington consensus and the rediscovery of the role of the public sector.
Matt Andrews (2008), in a comparison between the level of development over
twenty years and classification according to the World Bank indicator, shows first, that
the sole criteria of good governance are inconsistent; second, that there is no correla-
tion between performance development and the observation of these criteria, and,
above all, third, that it is not appropriate for developing countries to try to use these
criteria. Formal indicators, without a solid theoretical base about long-term develop-
ment, about the role of the state in development and which would permit an under-
standing of how development strategy is determined in each country, are necessary
in order to define what an effective and efficient state would really be.
This work began to be undertaken by heterodox economists (Reinert, 2007, Chang
2003, Sapir 2007, Rodrik 2008 — amongst others) in an effort to link institutional and
developmental economics by emphasising the political characteristic of such criteria.
The aim of this article is to contribute to this thought-process and to move away from
the strictly managerial approach to public decision-making, by showing that advances
in institutional economics are forcing us to re-emphasize the classical criteria of politi-
cal philosophy — that of the common good — at the centre of public decision-making
and to see their effect on pubic sector administrators.
This article is composed of five parts:
1 The first part will look at the limitations of purely managerial approaches arising
from the New Public Management (NPM) and will integrate the most recent
knowledge from evolutionary theories in order to escape the false alternative
posed by current thought: either a bureaucratic state, or no state at all, in the
name of faith in the auto-regulating capacity of the market.
2 It is now possible to reconsider the role of the polity in this dynamic by
underlining the fact that the role of the state lies in the evolution of the system
of beliefs — particularly in periods of technological change and transitional crisis
— which implies a return to considering the fundamental questions of political
philosophy: those of the common good and the role of civic virtue.
3 The third part looks at the fortunes and misfortunes of civic virtue in the building
of modern nations, comparing, the evolution of the debate, since the 17th
century, in England, France and in the making of the United States.
4 The fourth part concerns the Euro-Atlantic debate centred on the role of
republicanism which updates the role of the common good as the basis of the
evolutionist institutional dynamic and consequently of public organizations.
5 In the conclusion, the implications for the education and the training of the
elite public administrators will be considered from the perspective of updating
Weber’s model, in both its fundamental and practical aspects, as regards skills
development.
282 International Review of Administrative Sciences 76(2)
The limitations of a purely managerial approach
The New Public Management vogue (hereafter referred to as NPM) developed
theories concerning the difference between management and politics through the
canonical principle ‘let managers manage’ on the ground that administrative com-
plexities had become much too big for the powers-that-be to deal with without
being overloaded by minor technical questions at the expense of the essentials.
NPM, in its first wave of reforms in New Zealand, based its theories on the neo-
liberal corpus: agency theory, the theory of public choice and transaction costs
(Gregory, 2006). The state becomes primarily a provider of services, its intervention
in the economy and its...
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