Public governance in this context is the delegation of powers and resources by public
bodies to private and quasi-private agencies to manage and provide governmental
functions and underlying services.
This paper reviews the conceptual background and frameworks underlying
changes in public administration and public management under the rubric of TPG. In
particular, it reviews the debates about bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy in the
reform of Public Service Organisations (PSOs). Furthermore, it critically examines the
tendency to conflate public administration with bureaucracy and public management
reform with post-bureaucracy and the superiority of the latter over the former.
Although these debates may seem arcane to policy makers and public managers, the
adoption of apparently post-bureaucratic discourses and practices by these
communities does bear directly on the operations of PSOs in their day to day
activities and the individuals whose work for them. Within a policy setting of public
sector reform, the discourses of TPG influence practice and outcomes. As stated above,
post-bureaucracy has become a term that has almost become a clarion to practitioners
to engage in organisational reform of public services. By emulating private sector
procedures and organisational values, these communities of practice ironically
institute new or extended forms of bureaucracy: the central argument of this paper.
Specifically, the replacement of public administered norms by contracts regulated by
quasi-independent agencies creates different internal and external bureaucracies.