Public and Private Administration:A Comparative Analysis

Introduction

Historically in America two different institutional approaches to management science have developed: one in the private sector and one in the public sector. Recently, this conventional taxonomy has been challenged, and around the country there has been emerging a more generic approach to management. In response to this, public administration theorists have developed a new body of literature emphasizing the differences between the two sectors. The central purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between public sector and private sector management within the context of available literature. As such, the key substantive issue discussed here is whether there is an inherent conflict between the rational, private management model with its criteria of economic efficiency and the political public management model with its criteria of consensus and compromise.
A central element of recent reform efforts associated with “reinventing government” is that pu...