Recruitment and selection in the public service

Abstract

Graham Allison, a well-:known American political scientist, once asked whether public and private management were 'fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects' (Allison, 1994). Do government and business truly inhabit different worlds? Several scholars of public management, particularly those with a political science background, would say yes. Government, they believe, is fundamentally different from business because it operates in a political milieu and its objectives have little to do with profit maximisation. One cannot therefore expect public organisations to function like private firms. Scholars and practitioners of management may see things differently. They might point out that, however distinct government might be, efforts to improve its performance are ongoing, just as they are in private firms; and that in both public and private sectors those efforts draw on a common toolkit of management techniques. From this perspective the differences rather than the similarities between public and private sectors look superficial.