THE CONTENDING PERSPECTIVES ON PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION

Abstract

This article draws upon the philosophy of the social sciences to develop a framework that permits a critical analysis of public management. It uses this framework to construct a taxonomy that enables the identification of the competing philosophical paradigms that underpin contending perspectives on what constitutes good public management, so enabling the articulation of their salient risks and thus their fundamental flaws. It finally proposes the philosophical requirements for a coherent approach to public management reform. All approaches to public management reform (Peters and Savoie 1998; Dixon 1996; Dixon, Kouzmin, and Korac-Kakabadse 1997; Kouzmin, Dixon, and Korac-Kakabadse 2001) have their origins in conflicting and competing values, beliefs, and attitudes on what constitutes good public management, which are, in turn, a product of perceptions about how the world works and how other people behave. Underpinning these competing world-views are competing philosophical predispositions about what constitutes valid knowledge (true beliefs) and what gives rise to human actions. Public management involves addressing knowledge problems (related to, for example, understanding problem causation and the likely consequences of problem solutions), which is an epistemological issue; capability problems (related to, for example, designing problem solutions), which is an ontological issue; decision-making problems (related to, for example, choosing among competing problem solutions), which is a rationality issue; implementation problems (related to, for example, organizing and coordinating resources to solve identified problems), which is also an ontological issue; and motivation problems (related