The Corporate Management Framework as Administrative Science: A Critique

Abstract: A corporate management framework has been the basis for a transformation of Australian public administration in recent years. Program budgeting, corporate planning, performance contracts, program evaluation and new forms of efficiency scrutiny are among the techniques introduced. They stem from a dominant paradigm of technical and instrumental rationality, within which a framework of practical remedies and technologies of power carries the corporate management label. Four concepts underly this framework and its techniques: the product format, instrumentalism, integration and purposive action. The framework has fundamental problems. The product format is inappropriate for many public services and overvalues quantifiable, single‐purpose outputs while denigrating claims of worth and effectiveness made on non‐economic grounds; instrumentalism ignores the political dimensions of public organisations; integration denies the value of decentralised forms of service development and delivery and, paradoxically, contradicts current private management precepts; and purposive action displays an unwarranted optimism about the potency of technical rationality under central direction. The four principles must be reviewed as offering few prospects for genuine and lasting reform.