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The New Public Management has championed a vision of public managers as the entrepreneurs of a new, leaner, and increasingly privatized government, emulating not only the practices but also the values of business. Proponents of the New Public Management have developed their arguments largely through contrasts with the old public administration. In this comparison, the New Public Management will, of course, always win. We argue here that the better contrast is with what we call the "New Public Service," a movement built on work in democratic citizenship, community and civil society, and organizational humanism and discourse theory. We suggest seven principles of the New Public Service, most notably that the primary role of the public servant is to help citizens articulate and meet their shared interests rather than to attempt to control or steer society.
Public management has undergone a revolution. Rather than focusing on controlling bureaucracies and delivering services, public administrators are responding to admonishments to "steer rather than row," and to be the entrepreneurs of a new, leaner, and increasingly privatized government. As a result, a number of highly positive changes have been implemented in the public sector (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Osborne and Plastrik 1997; Kettl 1993; Kettl and Dilulio 1995; Kettl and Milward 1996; Lynn 1996). But as the field of public administration has increasingly abandoned the idea of rowing and has accepted responsibility for steering, has it simply traded one "adminicentric" view for another? Osborne and Gaebler write, "those who steer the boat have far more power over its destination than those who row it" (1992, 32). If that is the case, the shift from rowing to steering not only may have left administrators in charge of the boat-choosing its goals and directions and charting a path to achieve them-it may have given them more power to do so.
In our rush to steer, are we forgetting who owns the boat? In their recent book, Government Is Us (1998), King and Stivers remind us of the obvious answer: The government belongs to its citizens (see also Box 1998; Cooper 1991; King, Feltey, and O'Neill 1998; Stivers 1994a,b; Thomas 1995). Accordingly, public administrators should focus on their responsibility to serve and empower citizens as they manage public organizations and implement...