From Public Administration to Public Management: Reassessing a Revolution?

It is a point of continuing debate whether the study of public administration can in any circumstances be graced by a disciplinary label. Rhodes (1996), for example, has argued that the study of British public administration was traditionally insular, dominated for a long period by an institutionalist tradition characterized by an interest in administrative engineering, but a distaste for theory. As Rhodes also observes, this position emphasized, albeit in a traditional sense, the political and ethical context of administration public administration existed within a wider framework of accountability relationships and political and moral responsibilities. We might add to this the way government and public administration was seen as linked within a framework of administrative law, which, while not formalized in the sense of continental Europe, was important.