PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

Public Management

Public Management

Introduction

Management is a general term used in the public sector to denote the organisational means by which public policy of governments is implemented. Public policy refers to the political process whereby governments make decisions about the range of public goods and services that they are willing (Self 2000, 17-32), or not prepared, to provide. Such decisions, which can be strongly political and not necessarily rational, may be designed to provide, redefine, or delete a service or public good. Public policy, therefore, is the amalgamation of the many decision sets that governments make across a range of policy fields. Governments will make decisions about their willingness to act or not act in certain areas, and these decisions may then be translated into specific laws and regulations. (Hood 1991, 3-19)

Explanation

The concept of governance is increasingly used in the literature on public administration, resulting in a vast body of European literature that stresses the importance of networks and markets as steering modes besides hierarchical structures. Although it is a widely held general belief that today's public sector organizations are managed through a mixture of three different ideal-typical steering modes (hierarchy, market and network), not many scholars have succeeded in conducting strong comprehensive and thoughtful empirical studies of the conflicts and synergies among them. Louis Meuleman's doctoral thesis, Public Management and the Metagovernance of Hierarchies, Networks and Markets. The Feasibility of Designing and Managing Governance Style Combinations clearly is an effort to comprehensively understand the 'why' and 'how' of governance mixtures from the standpoint of public managers.

Governance has different meanings across disciplines, so it is important at the outset of this review to understand the author's meaning in comparison with leading definitions in the literature. As the author defines it, governance includes 'the totality of interactions, in which government, other public bodies, private sector and civil society participate, aiming at solving societal problems or creating societal opportunities' (p. 11). To coordinate these interactions, a public manager can choose among elements of the three ideal-typical governance styles: hierarchy, market and network. Puzzled by the specific working of the negotiation process between those inherently conflicting governance styles, the author comes up with the term metagovernance. This key concept of the study helps him to analyze the 'governance of governance', which refers to the way in which line and project managers actually design and manage sound combinations of the different styles and, as a result, produce some degree of coordinated governance. The study concerns the development and management of governance modes not only between a public organization and societal actors, but also and specifically the metagovernance inside the organization itself.

In the introduction, Meuleman formulates the central research question: 'Under which conditions may (internal) metagovernance of governance style mixtures be applied by public managers as metagovernors? What is their logic of action, their rationale'? (p. 5). To empirically study this question, the author first outlines the vast body of literature on governance, resulting in a research framework for analyzing ...