What Faculty say

Public management as a field of inquiry has been developed at Bocconi University since the early Seventies on the basis of the following guiding principles:

• Economic rationality is only one of the factors influencing individual and organizational behaviour; its importance, though, is growing because of the growing gap between available resources and needs to be satisfied.
  
  
• Economic rationality should be applied both to the processes of "wealth production" (typically taking place in business enterprises) and to the processes of "wealth consumption", i.e. the use of resources to satisfy needs (typically taking place in families and public sector organizations).
  
  
• The general principles of economic rationality are universal, but should be translated into different tools and techniques depending on whether they are applied in a market or in an institutional environment. Since some goods cannot be provided by market forces, public sector organizations require the development of a specific management culture. This culture should be based on common grounds with business management culture, but develops its own approaches and tools, suitable for the setting where governmental activities take place.
  
  
• Public management should not be mistaken with the political organisation of a given jurisdiction. Two separate processes give legitimacy to power: the former is connected to professional skills, and especially to the ability to use resources effectively; the latter is connected to political processes, and ultimately to social consensus. It is necessary that the two processes are autonomous, so that they can interact, but remain separately identifiable.
  
  
• Notwithstanding the existence of trade-offs, efficiency is not an alternate criterion to equity and social responsibility; rather it should be considered as instrumental to the achievement of the goals of public policies. Higher levels of efficiency allow pursuing higher levels of social welfare, as they are specified by each country through its own political processes.
  
  
• Change in public sector organizations cannot be achieved by transferring any management "model", but rather by triggering complex processes which lead to the establishment of management "systems" guided by new principles and translated into new behavioural patterns.
  
  
• In order to foster change it is necessary to encourage the development of new knowledge (both technical and organizational) and new skills (both operational and decisional), and then act on people by creating a proactive attitude toward improvement.
  
  
• The effectiveness of public actions does not depend only on the quality of the processes through which policies are designed; the way in which they are implemented also plays a paramount role in determining whether actual needs are satisfied or not, and at what cost for society as a whole.
  
  
• The best policies are not those which are "rational" in abstract terms, but rather those coherent with existing technical, social, financial circumstances and, above all, with the knowledge, the skills and the attitudes of the personnel available in the institutions in charge for their implementation.
  

• The public sector is not a unitary system that can be governed with bureaucratic rules, but rathera complex system of institutions relatively autonomous in their organizational choices, although accountable for the relationship between their outcomes (in terms of impact on the needs they are expected to satisfy)and the resources they use.
  

Source: Luca Brusati (2000), "Meeting the Challenge of Public Sector Reform: A Managerial Perspective", EBS Review, Vol. 11 (June).