Public Sector Services and Their Management*

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThis article reviews the characteristics of a range of public sector services suggesting that the delivery of these services sets up special problems for management and results in distinctive practices by managers. It is an attempt to generalize about the findings from a series of research projects in the public sector"] and to connect these with other recent research findings concerning the behaviour of public sector workers. It will be argued that services such as social work (Whittington and Bellaby, 1979; Wilding, 1982) health and psychiatric care (Bellaby and Oribabar, 1980;Haywood and Alaszewski, 1980;Mackay, 1989) and the police (Bradley et al., 1986;Colman and Gorman, 1982;Fielding, 1988;Grimshaw and Jefferson, 1987) have sufficient in common that they may be instructively treated as a relatively homogeneous group.Although the argument presented here is not formalized into an excessively schematic representation, the elements of a model of public sector management will be outlined. It will be suggested that managerial problems encountered in one service are often reproduced in a slightly different form in another: what are managerial issues in, say, the health service or the police, are likely to be found, with some differences of detail, affecting education and the social services. Briefly put, we argue that the relationships between public sector workers and their clients (relations of provision) are quite different from the relationships involved in the provision of services in a market. For this reason the relationships which support and underwrite the provision of public services including managerial roles (relations for provision) take characteristic forms. We suggest that the characteristic managerial stance towards public services is what we designate 'custodial management', because the primary aim of such management is to preserve and perpetuate customary kinds and standards of service provision.We do identify variations of policy or orientation amongst public sector managers. In particular, we distinguish what we call budgetary and policy Addmsjor reprints:

Converging patterns in hospital organization: beyond the professional bureaucracy

“…Also, in all contexts health care management tended to be characterized as passive ad custodial in deference to professional groups -especially physicians -who exerted considerable control over health care demand [20][21][22].…”

The Grit in the Oyster: Professionalism, Managerialism and Leaderism as Discourses of UK Public Services Modernization

“…These related not only to funding allocation systems, the generation and utilization of performance data and the extended use of 'consumers' as appraisers of service performance but also, even more crucially, the removal of structural obstacles and the eradication of cultural and ideological barriers that stood in the way of progressive modernization. Thus, the containment and dilution of established professional power and authority in public service specification and delivery emerged as the major priority for a fully-fledged NPM discourse insofar as professionalism was identified as a fundamental drag on the technical and organizational changes -market-based competition, metricsbased performance measurement, and managerial-based control systems -on which service modernization depended (Ackroyd et al 1989;Farrell and Morris 2003;Flynn 1999). As Clarke and Newman suggest (1997: 50-55), by the early 1990s the 'core discourse' of NPM, increasingly influenced by neo-liberal radicalism and 'transformational managerialism', had become strategically directed to remaking the organizational forms through which UK public services were provided around the managerial prerogative of 'the right to manage'.…”

New Public Management et professions dans l’État : au-delà des oppositions, quelles recompositions ?

“…Elles constituent une attaque d'au moins trois composantes du phénomène professionnel : diminution de l'autonomie ; mise en cause de la dimension discrétionnaire du jugement dans les pratiques de travail ; critique du métier, de son efficacité et de ses coûts. Les réformes contemporaines apparaissent comme autant de stratégies visant à renforcer les contrôles, en général, et le contrôle managérial en particulier (via les instruments gestionnaires), sur de puissants groupes professionnels délivrant les biens collectifs (par exemple, Ackroyd et al, 1989).…”