Managing Public and Private Organisations

The debate about markets and politics and the role of the state in producing goods and services, which dominated the 1970s and 1980s, raised the issue of whether there are differences between the ways that organisations located in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains are structured and managed. One view was that there were significant differences reflected in the use of different terms to describe the processes of running organisations in the public and private sectors. ‘Management’ described the way that private businesses were run, whilst ‘administration’ was a description of the approach to running public bodies. The former was associated with a so-called rationalist approach to organisational decision-making, with managers seen as the agents for achieving organisational goals and corporate growth with the most efficient use of resources. In the public sector, by contrast, public officials, employed by state agencies, implemented and executed governmental policies determined by the political authorities within a framework of law, where efficient use of resources was of only secondary importance.