The Public Interest and Public Administration
| Published date | 01 May 2006 |
| Date | 01 May 2006 |
| Author | Howard Elcock |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.2006.00256.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Public Interest and Public
Administration
Howard Elcock
University of Northumbria
Ever since ancient Greece, philosophers have assumed the existence of a public interest that is
more than the sum of the interests of the individuals that make up a polity. However, the utili-
tarians and more recently the theorists of the ‘New Right’ have argued that the public interest
consists simply of individual interests summed together, with the result that the related notion
that public servants have a special duty to protect and promote the collective public interest has
been subjected to sustained attack. However, the collective public interest remains in the form of
four values that public servants are required to promote: accountability, legality, integrity and
responsiveness. In consequence, public sector management is essentially different from business
management and can only be subsumed within the latter to a limited extent when considering
the education pf public servants.
Is there such a thing as the public interest?
For centuries there was general acceptance that there is a collective public inter-
est that constitutes more than the aggregate of individuals’ interests. In conse-
quence, public administrators required a special training and status to ensure that
they would protect and further that public interest. Since Plato’s Republic,many
writers have held that state administrators have to be trained to protect the public
interest (Chapman, 1988; Fry, 1969; O’Toole, 1996). From the public administra-
tors’ role as guardians of the public interest, many aspects of their education, train-
ing careers and social status are to be derived.
Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarian disciples argued in contrast that the public
interest is defined only as the sum of the interests of the individuals who make up
the community, a view shared by the contemporary ‘New Right’, with profound
effects on both the practice of public management and on the education and train-
ing programmes deemed appropriate for public servants (Elcock, 2005), leading to
the displacement of training in public administration by academic specialists
therein by business management courses offered by business schools. Francis Terry
(2003, p. 3) has written of ‘a depressing assumption that the private sector holds
a virtual monopoly of the management skills and experience required (to improve
public management) and that these must be bought at whatever cost’. Some sup-
porters of the business management approach have argued that management is a
generic science whose precepts can be practised in any organisational context
(Perry and Kraemer, 1983). Public management courses have therefore been
absorbed into business management degrees and their teachers relocated in busi-
ness schools. These developments have stimulated a debate about the future of
POLITICS: 2006 VOL 26(2), 101–109
© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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