Public Service: Problems, Professionalism, and Policy Recommendations

The impetus for the assessment of the public service in this issue is a disturbing fact: Our society seems to have an insatiable appetite for public services, yet it is ceaseless in its criticism for those who provide those services. Such criticism seems increasingly frequent from citizens in a variety of roles: taxpayers, voters, politicians, service consumers, corporate executives, reporters, academics, writers, artists, and so on. Although many of the complaints have face validity, they pose disturbing contradictions. In particular, the very citizens who ask public organizations to address society's most difficult problems-problems that the private sector has in large part abandoned-also hold that our public service is not capable of handling such difficult tasks. Although these people demand bureaucratic rules, bureaucratic objectivity, and bureaucratic fairness from government, they criticize public servants for being unnecessarily rigid bureaucrats. And, although they demand that the public sector respond to considerations of equity and compassion, not just of efficiency and profitabilitythe major criteria for success in the private sector-they charge that government is unbusinesslike or inefficient. In sum, our society has constructed an image of public servants as bumbling bureaucrats entangled