Public management: first approximations

Public Management as a synthesis of business management and public administration confronts some severe conceptual problems that are rooted in the dissimilarities between business and government. In the two books reviewed, the authors attempt to build concep- tual frameworks for studying public management which minimize the importance of many of these differences. As a result, both books come closer to meeting the expanding market for texts which present management tools and techniques than most of the other texts written in the past few years using a “Public A.dministration as Political Science” approach. Nevertheless, both books still fall considerably short of providing a coherent and comprehensive solution to the problem of defining the scope and substance of the field of Public Management. Therefore, Public Management, as presented in these books, remains largely a truncated field of study limited to issuestof internal management control and ,cost effectiveness. For the field to flourish, it must find a way to bridge and dissolve the dichotomies between politics and administration, policy and management, and political and technical rationality.