Public management is a term that considers that government and non-profit administration resembles private-sector management in some important ways. As such, there are management tools appropriate in public and in private domains, tools that maximize efficiency and effectiveness. This contrasts with the study of public administration, which emphasizes the social and cultural drivers of government that many contend (e.g. Graham T. Allison and Charles Goodsell) make it different from the private sector.
Studying and teaching about public management are widely practiced in developed nations. Such credentials as the Master of Public Administration degree offer training in decision making relevant to the public good using public infrastructure.
The public manager will deal with critical infrastructure that directly and obviously affects quality of life. Trust in public managers, and the large sums spent at their behest, make them subject to many more conflict of interest and ethics guidelines in most nations.
Read more about Public Management: Organizations
Famous quotes containing the words public and/or management:
“Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)