The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

7The Influence of Weber and Taylor on Public Sector Organizations' Communication

Jari Vuori, Kaidi Aher, and Marika Kylänen

Introduction

This chapter explores Max Weber's and Frederick Taylor's influence on the communication undertaken by public sector organizations. Across the world, such organizations find themselves between two paradigms, namely bureaucracy and scientific management, which later inspired new public management (NPM). Both bureaucracy and scientific management have been used in public sector organizations for over a century, and during this time they have become global phenomena. Most governments around the world have been affected by bureaucracy, as the quantity of articles published on it globally indicates: it has been studied in Europe, the United States, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. Taylorism has also traveled quite far as a principle, having influenced the development of benchmarking, strategic management, and NPM.

NPM, which has incorporated many of the principles and values of Taylor's scientific management, has been seen as a serious rival to bureaucracy in public sector organizations in recent decades, but it has been criticized just as heavily. For example, according to Du Gay (2005):

The idea, often propagated in the more dramatic of new public management texts, of a single, universal (and now obsolete) bureaucratic regime of public administration is as implausible as the solution proffered to this illusory problem: a global recipe which ...