30 years of International Journal of Public Sector Management: looking back and forward

摘要

This year, 2017, we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the International Journal of Public Sector Management. This issue therefore has a slightly different character than regular or special issues have: it consists of ten contributions by distinguished international expert scholars in the field of public management. They were asked to write an essay on what they consider important developments or remaining questions about public management over the past 30 years. This has led to an interesting and highly varying bundle of essays - with a number of common denominators as well. Eran Vigoda-Gadot has carefully mapped the academic development of public management ideas, themes and theories. The question remains however whether public management ideas like NPM originated in practice or in theory and this is exactly where Owen Hughes' contribution picks up the debate: to which extent has there really been a change from public administration to public management? Is public administration as a discipline trendsetting and predicting future developments, or is only codifying and labelling what is going on in practice anyway? The relationship between academia and practice is important, although not always clear or intense, as Christopher Pollitt argues when he points out that public management as a discipline is in fact neglecting the most important questions of this time (read more to find out which ones these are!). And there is more criticism: Guy Peters concludes that public management scholars seem to have forgotten that public administration is also about governance and politics, while Sheila Kennedy stresses that the role of law and the Constitution seems to have disappeared from the discipline. Joyce Liddle (former editor of IJPSM) adds to this the fact that the all-important link to teaching - to train the practitioners of the future - has been lost, at least in the UK but to most readers her contribution will provide some striking resemblance to their home country's situation. All authors call for more attention to these aspects of public management.