Public Management
Lectures 1–10 (incl. guest lectures)
Key definitions (blue), one-line takeaways (green) and cross-lecture links (orange)
How the course fits together
The whole course is organised on a three-level scaffold. Almost every individual topic is a piece of
this map, and the exam rewards seeing how the pieces relate so it is worth fixing the scaffold in your
mind before diving into detail.
• MACRO: concepts and theories that hold for all public sector organisations: what public
management is and how “publicness” works (L1), how performance is conceived and measured
(L2), the reform paradigms that prescribe what managers should prioritise (L3), and the public
values that sit underneath all of it (guest lecture).
• MESO: matters that are organisation-specific and therefore something a manager must actively
strategize about: organisational scale (L5), red tape (L6) and strategic management (the
strategic-management guest lecture). The right answer here depends on the particular
organisation and its environment.
• MICRO: the public manager’s relationships with key actors: street-level bureaucrats (L9),
politicians (L8) and citizens (L10).
Public Management | Page 1
,Five ideas run through the whole course and act as connective tissue. Keep an eye out for each one
reappearing:
(1) the core-vs-dimensional view of what counts as “public”
(2) the objective-vs-subjective choice in how we measure things
(3) street-level discretion and the organisational response strategies that follow from it
(4) the running tension between public value creation, conflict and destruction
(5) the reform paradigms (OPA / NPM / NPG) as an engine that explains why other phenomena look
the way they do.
Public Management | Page 2
,PART A
MACRO: ideas true for all public organisations
Performance, paradigms and values: what every public manager should know and apply, regardless
of the organisation.
Lecture 1: Introduction to Public Management
The introductory lecture is structured around three deceptively simple questions
1. What? (what is it that we manage)
2. Who? (who does the managing)
3. So what? (why study any of this)
Understanding this spine is itself part of the learning goal, because the rest of the course keeps
returning to it.
What? public organisations and public value
Public management is the management of public organisations, and what marks those organisations
out is that they exist to create public value rather than private profit. The natural follow-up
question: how do public organisations actually differ from private ones? Turns out to have two
competing answers, and the lecture’s main intellectual move is to show that the two are
complementary rather than rival.
The core (legal) approach
“public vs private” as a dichotomy, a yes/no question decided by ownership. An organisation is
public if government owns it and private if it does not.
The appeal is obvious: it matches everyday intuition, it is simple, and it is easy to apply because the
ownership criterion is usually clear. The weakness is that a great many real organisations refuse to
sit neatly in one box.
Examples
A university takes in tuition (private income) and public subsidies, and is partly steered by
politically appointed boards
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) raises the same difficulty. Wherever funding, control
and purpose come from a mix of sources, the dichotomy strains.
The dimensional approach
Treats publicness not as a switch but as a scale: an organisation is “more or less public” according to
how much externally imposed political authority bears on it.
You analyse this along several dimensions
Its resources (for instance the percentage of its funding that is public)
Its goals and agenda (how far these are set politically)
Its communication (for instance how often it is in contact with government).
Public Management | Page 3
, The pay-off is a far more honest picture of hybrid organisations. The cost is that measurement
becomes tricky, with a real risk of comparing apples with oranges if the dimensions are
operationalised carelessly.
The Publicness Puzzle (Bozeman & Bretschneider, 1994):
The two approaches answer different questions and therefore complement each other. The core
view answers the coarse (= opposite of smooth) question “does being public vs private matter at
all?”
Goal of the study = verify the extent to which a dimensional understanding of publicness provides
additional explanatory power over a core understanding.
The dimensional view refines it to “if it matters, which dimensions are doing the work?” Their study
of public and private R&D laboratories illustrated this, private labs leaned toward patents and
licences (a private kind of output), public labs toward publishing research (a public kind of output).
Public Management | Page 4
Lectures 1–10 (incl. guest lectures)
Key definitions (blue), one-line takeaways (green) and cross-lecture links (orange)
How the course fits together
The whole course is organised on a three-level scaffold. Almost every individual topic is a piece of
this map, and the exam rewards seeing how the pieces relate so it is worth fixing the scaffold in your
mind before diving into detail.
• MACRO: concepts and theories that hold for all public sector organisations: what public
management is and how “publicness” works (L1), how performance is conceived and measured
(L2), the reform paradigms that prescribe what managers should prioritise (L3), and the public
values that sit underneath all of it (guest lecture).
• MESO: matters that are organisation-specific and therefore something a manager must actively
strategize about: organisational scale (L5), red tape (L6) and strategic management (the
strategic-management guest lecture). The right answer here depends on the particular
organisation and its environment.
• MICRO: the public manager’s relationships with key actors: street-level bureaucrats (L9),
politicians (L8) and citizens (L10).
Public Management | Page 1
,Five ideas run through the whole course and act as connective tissue. Keep an eye out for each one
reappearing:
(1) the core-vs-dimensional view of what counts as “public”
(2) the objective-vs-subjective choice in how we measure things
(3) street-level discretion and the organisational response strategies that follow from it
(4) the running tension between public value creation, conflict and destruction
(5) the reform paradigms (OPA / NPM / NPG) as an engine that explains why other phenomena look
the way they do.
Public Management | Page 2
,PART A
MACRO: ideas true for all public organisations
Performance, paradigms and values: what every public manager should know and apply, regardless
of the organisation.
Lecture 1: Introduction to Public Management
The introductory lecture is structured around three deceptively simple questions
1. What? (what is it that we manage)
2. Who? (who does the managing)
3. So what? (why study any of this)
Understanding this spine is itself part of the learning goal, because the rest of the course keeps
returning to it.
What? public organisations and public value
Public management is the management of public organisations, and what marks those organisations
out is that they exist to create public value rather than private profit. The natural follow-up
question: how do public organisations actually differ from private ones? Turns out to have two
competing answers, and the lecture’s main intellectual move is to show that the two are
complementary rather than rival.
The core (legal) approach
“public vs private” as a dichotomy, a yes/no question decided by ownership. An organisation is
public if government owns it and private if it does not.
The appeal is obvious: it matches everyday intuition, it is simple, and it is easy to apply because the
ownership criterion is usually clear. The weakness is that a great many real organisations refuse to
sit neatly in one box.
Examples
A university takes in tuition (private income) and public subsidies, and is partly steered by
politically appointed boards
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) raises the same difficulty. Wherever funding, control
and purpose come from a mix of sources, the dichotomy strains.
The dimensional approach
Treats publicness not as a switch but as a scale: an organisation is “more or less public” according to
how much externally imposed political authority bears on it.
You analyse this along several dimensions
Its resources (for instance the percentage of its funding that is public)
Its goals and agenda (how far these are set politically)
Its communication (for instance how often it is in contact with government).
Public Management | Page 3
, The pay-off is a far more honest picture of hybrid organisations. The cost is that measurement
becomes tricky, with a real risk of comparing apples with oranges if the dimensions are
operationalised carelessly.
The Publicness Puzzle (Bozeman & Bretschneider, 1994):
The two approaches answer different questions and therefore complement each other. The core
view answers the coarse (= opposite of smooth) question “does being public vs private matter at
all?”
Goal of the study = verify the extent to which a dimensional understanding of publicness provides
additional explanatory power over a core understanding.
The dimensional view refines it to “if it matters, which dimensions are doing the work?” Their study
of public and private R&D laboratories illustrated this, private labs leaned toward patents and
licences (a private kind of output), public labs toward publishing research (a public kind of output).
Public Management | Page 4
