The Public’s Three Primary Roles
Controversy persists among public administration scholars and
practitioners,especially in the United States, over how to view the
public’s role in public management,with the principal disagreement
focusing on whether to view the public as customers (e.g., Osborne and Gaebler 1993) or as citizens (e.g., Schachter 1997).
But the citizen versus customer debate oversimplifies by ignoring other roles
that the public plays relative to public management.
Frederickson (1991, 396) suggested five roles,and Roberts more recently listed
seven “models of administration and the roles that citizens and
administrators are expected to play in each of them,” with a caution
that those are only “some of the better known models” (2004,327–28).