Researching public policy and public administration: are Australian academics on the right track?

Academic agenda example: ‘New public management’

Firstly, what exactlyis ‘new public management’? By this I mean, not ‘what is the content of new public management’, but ‘what is its status as a tool or technique’? It is not a model or a theory in the sense that it tells us why things might be happening – its intent is descriptive, rather than explanatory. Perhaps we could say that new public management (NPM) is a framework which posits something important about administrative reform as a social process, which works its way out in different contexts – a paradigm, in other words (Stewart 2009, ch 7). Maybe, too, it is a kind of ontology, in a sub-discipline (public administration) that struggles to locate itself convincingly in the world of management research.

From the perspective of what scholars choose to write about, though, we can certainly say that NPM is an agenda: a way of focusing attention. For more than two decades, the academic agenda in the study of public management has been dominated by this approach, and by the concerns associated with it –privatization, outsourcing etc.

The impact has been particularly strong in writing about public administration in Australia, where Candler found a strong ‘paradigmatic’ influence (see Candler 2008). The effect was less strong in studies of Canadian public administration. Brazil, Candler’s third example, showed very little effect: Brazilian scholars continued to follow a Marxian path of analysis.

It might be argued, with these differences in mind, that scholars were always aware of the extent to which UK-related concepts (such as ‘agencification’) could or should be discussed, and cherry-picked the NPM menu. However, careful research has shown quite different ‘trajectories’ in each country, even those belonging to the Anglo-world (Pollitt and Bouckaerdt 2000). This should tell us, or should have told us, that ‘new public management’ is simply shorthand for change in each country.

The real point about an agenda is not so much what is included in it, but what has been excluded. What have we missed as a result of the focus on NPM? Speaking for Australia, I would say: a great deal. We have missed what has not changed: the supremacy of the bureaucratic form. We have also missed what may have been most distinctive about the Australian trajectory: the assertion of political control, and the erosion of a public service that believed in itself, and managed itself: in many ways the antithesis of what new public management was meant to be about. Practitioners writing in the academic literature (Podger 2006; Shergold 2007) tackled some of these subjects but academics, by and large, did not: perhaps indicating a growing divide between the worlds of practice and of theory.

So, what should Australian-based scholars be doing?

This paper has, deliberately, set out to attack some sacred cows, particularly the belief that public policy/administration models and frameworks are inherently generalisable (as implied by the usual practice of referencing models drawn from the international literature).  But the more important point is the limiting impact that these approaches have had on the way Australian scholars have worked. Consequently, there is some ground to make up in the study of Australian phenomena. In the interests of connecting the argument with some practical recommendations, I would advocate that we:

-generate more theory from Australian circumstances  - ie inductive empirical (‘grounded’) theory based on qualitative/quantitative methods.

- be more critical of theories/models/frameworks drawn from the American and British literature. When adopting an approach, perhaps consider those that are broad enough to travel well (such as institutionalism in its more flexible forms);

- study the generality of Australian experience rather than the exceptions: for example, many of us have been attracted to the study of networks, because there has been so much international interest in these phenomena – but they may be less important in the Australian context than elsewhere;

- take more of a lead from practice ie what is actually happening in public agencies (although this is easier said than done, as the Australian national and state bureaucratic systems are incredibly secretive).