Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool What is New Public Service? New Public Service is a movement grounded in the public interest, based on the ideals of democratic governance, and in a renewed civic engagement that is now being manifest in the way we interact with political leaders, in the way we engage with citizens, and the way we bring about positive changes in organizations and communities. The ideals of public service are critically focusing in understanding how public servants can be successful in the works they do. But nowadays a unifying set of themes and principles seems missing. The New Public Service consists of many diverse elements, and many different scholars and practitioners have contributed, often in disagreement with one another. Yet there are certain general ideas that seem to characterize this approach as a normative model and to distinguish it from others. Certainly the New Public Service can lay claim to an impressive intellectual heritage, including the work of those we mentioned earlier who provided constructive dissent to the rationalist prescriptions of the mainstream model. There are four contemporary precursors of the New Public Service; theories of democratic citizenship, models of community and civil society, organizational humanism and the new public administration, and postmodern public administration. Democratic Citizenship focuses on the rights and obligations of citizens as defined by the legal system. Citizenship which is a legal status is concerned with the individuals capacity to influence the political system. The state and the relationship of citizens to the state should be based simply on the idea of self-interest. Government exists to ensure that citizens can make proper choices for their self-interest by guaranteeing certain procedures and individual rights. For citizens of the state, they look beyond their self-interest to the larger scope which is the public interest. To encourage the public spirit, justice is emerged to evoke strong emotions in those who feel mistreated or exploited, and their resistance can often become quite forceful. Participation attempts to promote the public spirit, especially for those who are involved in decisions to implement. Deliberation provides a common ground of information so that people can start from the beginning together, and builds a sense of solidarity and commitment to solutions that may be proposed. In a case of Models of Community and Civil Society, a sense of community might be derived from
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a 3rd year student majoring in Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University, THAILAND

Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

many different levels of human association from neighborhood to the work group, or might provide a helpful mediating structure between the individual and society. Community is based on caring, trust, and teamwork, bound together by a strong and effective system communications and conflict resolutions. The interactive nature of community mediates between and reconciles the individual and the collectivity. Civil society is a place where citizens can engage another in personal dialogue and deliberation that is the essence not only of community building, but democracy itself. The activities of the grass-roots citizen-based movements within neighborhoods, work groups, and associations constitute laboratories of citizenship and arenas where people seek to work out new relationships with another. Modern technology becomes the way political leaders engage to the citizens. Organizational Humanism and the New Public Administration, top-down authority, hierarchical control, and standard operating procedures, arguing that such approaches reflect an insentivity to the moral posture of individual, specifically the question of individual freedom. And the last one is Postmodernism. Even though there are various postmodern theorists, they seem to meet at a similar conclusion because we are dependent on one another. Governance must increasingly be based on sincere and open discourse among all parties, including citizens and administrators. Postmodern public administration theorists are skeptical of traditional approaches to public participation, there seems to be considerable agreement that enhanced public dialogue is required in order to reinvigorate the public bureaucracy and restore a sense of legitimacy to the file of public administration. Serve Citizens, Not Customers The public interest is the result of a dialogue about shared values rather than the aggregation of individual self-interests. Therefore, public servants do not merely respond to the demands of customers, but rather focus on building relationships of trust and collaboration with and among citizens. (Denhardt and Denhardt: The New Public Service, Serve Citizens, Not Customers, p.45) The idea of public service is intertwined with the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. Public service derives from the civic virtues of duty and responsibility. Civic Virtue and Democratic Citizenship Theories of Citizenship: It was first developed in Aristotles Politics that the citizen engages in the work of polis because it is in that work that the individual attains his or her fullest humanity. Because humans are active, social, and moral beings, concerned with the purpose of life,
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Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

they seek to attain higher ends and must, as well as engage in self-determination. Citizenship does not mean as an instrumental activity (a mean to an end). Porock defined citizen as a political being to the citizen as a legal being, existing in a world of persons, actions, things. The term things is referred to land or trade (Aristotle), that is why Aristotles citizens were persons acting on one another, so that their active life was a life immediately and heroically moral. (Porock 1995, 34). For Gaius, actions of people mostly were focused on possession of things, with legal actions. Rousseau defined the citizen as one who acts with the good of the community in mind. Citizenship involves a commitment to the community and members. James Madison concerned about the heaviest misfortunes of the new republic which was the unsteadiness and injustice (with) which a factious spirit has tainted our public administration. (Madison 1787/1987, #10, 1). The Role of the Citizen: Ordinary citizens engage in dialogue and discourse concerning in the directions of society and act based on moral principles such as thosr associated with the term civic virtue. High definitions of citizenship mostly are Aristotles, Rousseau and Mill, because they seem to distribute power and authority, as well as view citizens as sharing equally in the exercise of authority. Low definitions of citizenship include Thomas Hobbes, and other contemporary democratic elites, because they support the hierarchical distribution of authority, with the greatest power wielded by those at the top. In modern American society, the politics of power or low citizenship has come to dominate unlike the politics of participation or high citizenship. Building Citizen Involvement: High levels of public participation in a democratic society are our belief that through active participation we can most likely achieve the best political outcomes that reflect the broad judgments of the people; second, we might fulfill the democratic objective; third, democratic participation enhances the legitimacy of government. The idea of democratic morality, by Emmett S. Redford that an expression of the democratic ideal resting on these premises. First, democratic morality assumes that the individual is the basic measure of human value. Second, it means that all persons have full claim to the attention of the system. Third, it assumes that individual claims can best be promoted through the involvement of all persons in the decisionmaking process and that participation is not only an instrumental value, but is essential to the development of democratic citizenship. Public Service as an Extension of Citizenship The idea of democratic citizenship has implied a certain duty on the part of the citizen to contribute to the community. Public service is called public service because it is based on experience
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Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

relying on the responsibility of all citizens to serve, but it is now a full-time occupation. Public servants are people who run for and serve in elective public office, either short time or throughout a career. However, today the public servants can be someone who works outside the government. It could be a nonprofit organization or advocacy group. But they have to make a difference to improve themselves to be significant.

The Old Public Administration and Client Service The Old Public Administration was largely concerned with either the direct delivery of services or the regulation of individual and corporate behavior. Client means a party for which professional services are rendered. It derives from the Latin cliens which means dependent or follower. It was seen as in need of help, and those in government made honest efforts to provide the help that was needed. The New Public Management and Customer Satisfaction The New Public Management views relationship between those in government and those served or regulated by government that is worthwhile to elaborate the notion of citizen as customer. It derives from the economic theory of democracy that explains political behavior in terms of economic competition. Citizens or customers make decisions according to their selfinterests. They enjoy certain rights and liberties protected by the states system of jurisprudence. The New Public Management brings about the idea of consumerism which citizens as consumers. It is related to the experience of business. Citizens are not only customers; they are also owners. The term customers may be benefit when being used within business or market; while citizens may not, because it may better concern in the government. The bottom line for democratic government is accountabilitynot profits or citizen satisfactionand customer service does not provide a good proxy measure for accountability. (Kettl 2000a, 43). The New Public Service and Quality Service for Citizens The New Public Service recognizes that people who interact with government are citizens. We are subjects of government. Our activities are directly related to the government. Who engage in a direct transaction with government might be considered as a customer, while someone who receives a service from government is defined as a client. Citizens are described as bearers of
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Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

rights and duties within the context of a wider community. Customers do not share common purpose but rather seek to optimize their own individual benefits. There have been a variety of efforts to define public sector quality. The below list is developed for the local government: Convenience, security, reliability, personal attention, problem-solving approach, fairness, fiscal responsibility, and citizen influence. The theory of consumerism suggests that there is an imbalance of power between those who provide services and those who receive services. There are five key factors to shift greater power toward consumers: Access, choice, information, redress and representation. The theory of consumerism can point citizens in the right direction with respect to improving service quality. However, the theory cannot address the political question of how power might be more extensively shared between the governors and the governed, the administrators and the administrated. (1988, 156) Agencies should consult and involve their users in these tasks and should provide effective remedies if things go wrong. Issues of service improvement need to be attentive not only to the demands of customers but also to the distribution of power in society. However, the New Public Services first step is to provide the public service with an improvement and extending democratic citizenship. Why New Public Service is more preferable than the two paradigms? To understand how and why the New Public Service is different from the previous two paradigms, we need to identify, connote, and exemplify what they are. The Old Public Administration The Old Public Administration, it is well-known since the acknowledgement by Woodrow Wilson, the former lecturer and later the President of the United States that the growing and increasingly complex administrative tasks of government by commenting that it is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one (Wilson 1987/1887,200). He compared the way the business was run, as well as advised that government should establish executive authorities, controlling essentially hierarchical organizations and having as their goal achieving the most reliable and efficient operations possible. Two key themes were emerged on the study of public administration were the politics and administration dichotomy and unified and largely hierarchical structures of administrative management. Politics and administration dichotomy is the separation between the two sciences. However, there has been a blur comprehension in the distinction between the two. Appointed administrators are
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Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

still accountable to their political masters, not the citizens. Moreover, a neutral and competent civil service is controlled by and accountable to those elected politicians. Secondly, the administrative management underneath the unified and largely hierarchical structures of the Old Public Administration has created the unity of command and a strict division of labor between the superior and subordinate levels. In Herbert Simons public service theory, becomes a bridge between the Old Public Administration and the New Public Management. It focuses on the idea of public goods as the output of public agencies; the individual, assuming that the individual decision maker is rational, self-interested, and seeks to maximize their own utilities; and different decision rules or situations will result in different approaches to choice making. The New Public Management The New Public Management seems to be more private or business approaches as it is said that to run government like a business, The ideas came from the market mechanisms and terminology. Therefore, the definition of the citizens seems to be customers of the public agencies. Steer, not row, is used to describe that the public servants should not assume the burden of service delivery themselves, but should define programs that others would then carry out, through contracting or other such arrangements which both within the government agencies and across boundaries or government sectors. The terms accountability to customers, high performance, restructuring bureaucratic agencies, redefining organizational missions, streaming agency processes, and decentralizing decision making are used to describe the New Public Management. New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, and later the United States were the leading countries reforming the New Public Administration in the world. In New Zealand, the government is only involved in activities that could not be more efficiently and effectively handled by other organizations, but the government adjusts the private incentive approach to use with that particular activities. Budget systems tend to be more focused on the performance and results. In Australia, the corporate-style planning processes were used, while the British reform leaded by Margaret Thatchers neo-conservative aimed to reduce the size of the state to decrease the costs and spin off activities that might be run better by the private sector. Reinvent government was used by the United States, during the President Bill Clinton, works better and cost less was brought to use. Agency theory which means one individual acts on behalf of another; managerialism or neo-managerialism which means success is defined by the quality and professionalism of managers are intellectual support for the New Public Administration.
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Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

Why New Public Service is more preferable than the two paradigms? There are many perspectives why the New Public Service is more preferable than the two paradigms. First, nowadays, liberal ideology becomes the dominantly global ideology which derives from liberal democracy. Moreover, democracy principle includes politics and economics in itself. Therefore the Old Public Administration and the New Public Management are not described all aspects of the New Public Service. Second, the Old Public Administration (Administrative man) and the New Public Management (Economic man) concentrate in the particular rationalities. But the New Public Service focuses in the broader term of Public Administration. Third, New Public Service wants to serve citizens in the state, thus the shared values are important, unlike the two paradigms that focus on politics and economics. Fourth, according to the previous topic, it explains how and why the New Public Service is more preferable. Citizens in the state are seen to be more touching than clients or customers. Fifth, rowing and steering do mean very rare for public administration that it should be served to citizens. Government and citizens have the roles to negotiate among each other before implementing or making decisions. Sixth, according to the idea of three paradigms, the New Public Service aims to serve citizens, thus it creates the web to connect citizens from different various groups to achieve policy objectives, while other two focus on their related organizations and institutions. The Old Public Administration looks into its government agencies. In contrast, the New Public Management pins down to the economic institutions. Seventh, the New Public Service is not interested in being responsible to the elected politicians and business- or self-interests, but values, norms, standards, and citizen interests. Eighth, according to the previous reasons, the New Public Service tries to avoid rowing to the administrative officials and steering by entrepreneurs. However it prefers the constraint and accountability in discretion. Ninth, the New Public Service does not rely on hierarchical structures and decentralized structure with the absolute power like other two, but structures are collaborative. Tenth, as its name, the New Public Service attempts to serve citizens with the devotion without the expected pay or benefits. Example of New Public Service Listening to the CityThe Rebuilding of New York

Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serve Citizens, Not Customers Saittawut Yutthaworakool

After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, many strategies, including advisory boards, public meetings, and mailings were used in New York to bring about participation by citizens. This project was called Listening to the City. The process began when the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, a coalition of business, community, labor, university, and civic groups, was formed to develop strategies for redeveloping Lower Manhattan. They held the meetings in various places. They developed relationships each other, even though there were a lot of differences in races, ages, ethnic, geographic locations, educational and economic background. Language translators provided translations in different spoken-languages such as Chinese or Spanish. The discussion was divided up into ten-to-twelve person per group. They had face-to-face dialogue with technology, for example, the ideas were recorded in the laptops, and wireless keypads were used for the participants to vote in various questions. The low-income and immigrants wanted to be heard as well, because they wanted not only accommodation rebuilding, but also their lives and communities by addressing economic development, job creation, culture, transportation, recreation, and other civic goodness. Some complained about the program. Moreover, they called to the planners to start the plan again. Unbelievable, they started over again. And that leaded to citizens voices were heard, and their recommendations were heeded. The citizens concerns and priorities have continued to the decision makers to develop and implement plans for redeveloping their beloved Lower Manhattan.