Loose Cannons and Rule Breakers, or Enterprising Leaders?

One of the many controversial aspects of the New Public Management is its encouragement of public-sector entrepreneurship. In his review of Osborne and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government, Goodsell (1993) points out that entrepreneurship could conflict with traditional values such as due process and accountability. In a seminal article defining the New Public Management, Hood (1991) notes that its emphasis on the values of economy and parsimony could come at the cost of the ethical values of honesty and fairness and the organizational values of robustness and resilience. Similarly, Jane Jacobs (1993) differentiates between commercial values and guardian, or traditional public-sector values, and argues that transposing one sector’s values to another sector’s institutions will lead to ethical lapses.