Public and economic life: End-Of-The-Century public administration theory in the united states

The literature of American public administration theory in the 1990s reveals the difficulty of defining the public sector in a time of anti-government sentiment and calls for devolution of functions from the national to state and local governments, privatization or contracting out of services at all levels, and "reinventing" government so that it operates more like the private sector. In this societal context, writing in the field often devotes attention to the relationship of the public sector to the broader society and to attempts to cope with the effects of market-based, economic thinking on the public sector. This paper examines some of the recent writing in public administration journals and books on the roles of public practitioners, the status of the public sector as a social institution, and approaches such as postmodernism, feminism, and discourse as alternative models of action in the public sphere. It concludes with discussion of the implications of the market-oriented political culture on public administration theory and practice.