Public Administration – Public Management interface: How Different is the ‘Management’ from the ‘Administration’?

The field of public administration has gone through some evolution and still going through such paradigmatic shifts. Going beyond the traditional public administration, which had been underpinned, by bureaucracy and the quest for democracy and rules, the field evolved to public management with its most popular variant new public management, which puts greater emphasizes on market orientation and adoption of private sector management principles into the public sector. However, to what extent is public management dissimilar with the traditional notion of public administration? Is public management significantly different from public administration? Is it a genuinely new area of academic enquiry or is it merely an old subject that is being dusted off and recycled? Does public management designate a coherent theoretical and methodological approach? Adopting content analysis of extant literature, these cross-cutting questions are adequately addressed in this paper with an emphasis on the nexus between public administration and public management. The paper concludes with the interconnection between the public administration, public management and the emerging approaches.