New Developments in Public Administration Theory

New Developments in Public Administration Theory 


New Public Service 
1. Serve citizens not customers - Public interest is the result of a dialogue about shared values rather than the aggregation of individual self interest. 
2. Seek the public interest - Public Administration must contribute to building a collective shared notion of the public interest,  creation of shared interests and shared responsibility. 
3. Value citizenship over entrepreuriship - Public interest is better advocated by public servants and citizens than Economic managers.
4. Think strategically,  act democratically - Policies and programmes meeting public needs can be most effectively achieved through  collective efforts and collaborative processes.
5.Recognize that accountability is not simple- Public Administration should be attentive to more than the market. They should also attend to constitutional laws,community values, political norms, professional standard and citizen's interest. 
6.Serve rather than steer- Use shared , value based leadership in helping citizens articulate and meet their shared interest rather than controlling or steering society in a new direction. 
7. Value people;  Not just productivity- Public organizations are more likely to be successful if they are operated through processes of collaboration and shared leadership.


Post -Modern Public Administration 
Post-modern public administration theory can be most easily understood as the antithesis of positivism and the logic of objective social science.  Modernism is the pursuit of knowledge through reason, and knowledge thus derived is  simple assumed to be factual and therefore true. Equally important,  the age of reason rejected knowledge based on superstition or  prophecy and replaced it knowledge based on science.  All modern academic disciplines and fields of science are rooted in the enlightenment and in an Epistemology based on the objective observation of phenomena and the description, either quantitatively or qualitactively,  of phenomena.


Postmodernists describe modern life as hyperreality,  a blurring of the real and the unreal. Postmodernists claim that a fundamental break with the modern era has occurred recently. Mass media, information systems and technology are new forms of control that change politics and life.  Boundaries between information and entertainment are imploding , as are boundaries between images and politics. Indeed, society itself is  imploding. Modernity is also characterized in Postmodernists as particularly authoritarian and unjust.

Much of postmodern language has to do with the abuse of governmental power, including bureaucratic power. Key subjects in the postmodern lexicon are colonialism , including corporate colonialism, social injustice, gender inequality and the distribution of wealth between the developed and so-called third world. Finally,  modernity , in the postmodern perspective,  is primary concerned with objective knowledge and itsdevelopment;  postmodernists is more concerned with values and the search for truth than in characterizations of knowledge.  To postmodernists, modern public administration based on enlightenment logic is simply misguided.









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