Suply and Demand of Public Managers. An Analytical Framework of the Institutionalization of the Professional Public Management

This document refers to an institution that is still emerging, and one with countercultural characteristics in comparison with those which have served as the dominant models in Public Administration for decades. Professional public management has yet to reach a degree of precision that will facilitate a clear conceptual delimitation. In view of this, today, efforts to measure its genuine degree of development and institutionalization are fraught with difficulty. This paper aims to make a contribution towards bringing a little order to reflection on the theoretical context of professional public management and to offer an analytical framework that will ease the task of evaluating its expansion and institutionalization in various political-administrative systems. Thus it will attempt, on the one hand, to identify and describe the variables of institutionalization, that is to say, the basic parameters that condition how these emerge, take root, expand and become consolidated in time. This work will group these variables into two blocks, situated, respectively, with relation to the demand and the supply of public managers. On the other hand, it will note the principal factors whose effect, in our judgement, leads to the production and development of these variables.

This study does not consider that there is one single pattern that can explain the expansion and consolidation of professional public management in every case. On the contrary, there will be a tendency for the different variables of institutionalization and the factors that have an effect on these to appear, form groups and show a coherent relationship with the contexts, history and institutional traditions of the various countries. However, this does not prevent us from taking specific account of certain elements of these processes when analysing their degree of progress, and this paper has attempted to examine these elements in a systematic manner. Its ultimate aim is to pinpoint key aspects that will enable public sector innovators both to select the most effective instruments with which to act according to the circumstances of each case, and to design processes and sequences of reform that are coherent and realistic.