Nurses and the prospects of participative management in the NHS

Abstract

In many ways the management of public services is a different type of activity from management in most parts of the private sector. Because of the character of the relationship involved in the actual provision of public sector services, which is in most instances quite unlike that involved when services are supplied on the open market, management has grown up in response to quite different problems and pressures and takes quite different forms (Ackroyd et al. 1989). Moreover, the patterns exhibited by public sector management can be seen to be just as viable and efficient in their own context as private sector management often is when it coordinates and directs the supply of goods to the market. If this is so, it would be wrong to assume that the management found in public sector services is, or still less should be, an imitation of management in the private sector. Equally erroneous is the idea that the development of management must necessarily imply the extension of the market, privatization and the elimination of public service as traditionally understood (Hindess 1987).