Challenges and Opportunities in Public Service

There is great irony in the fact that America is widely heralded as the most successful liberal democracy in the world, while those who are its caretakers are generally held in very low esteem. This irony plays out on a daily basis as we witness constant efforts to place ever more popular checks on our public servants while simultaneously urging them to conduct government “more like a business.”
In fact, our affection for democracy seems inversely related to affection for those who are responsible on a daily basis for making the system work on our behalf. Why is this? In large part, we have a long tradition of distrust of governing power. A sense of distrust so strong that it fueled colonial unrest, a revolution, and a civil war that nearly tore apart a newly formed American nation.
Administrative challenges are daunting and often confusing to public servants, and while the conflict over specific issues ebbs and flows, there is no cure for the underlying tensions that give rise to them. These tensions are deeply rooted in the American constitutional tradition.
In their role as democratic stewards, career public servants help maintain the legitimacy of our democratic institutions. Through their constant contact with citizens and the communities tied to the different sectors, career officials give daily witness to what democratic governance means. Each governmental encounter, however small and seemingly insignificant, provides an opportunity to learn more about the problems, prospects, and responsibilities of democratic governance.
This ongoing process of justification and legitimation is not simply a matter of finding a rule or a law that authorizes a given course of action. Public servants in government have a unique set of process expectations that set them apart from their for-profit and nonprofit sector counterparts.
Public servants affect the validity of their government agencies through process, results-oriented and constructive legitimacy. When we discuss knowledge, we are referring to the facts, information, and skills acquired by a public servant through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
These three types of tacit knowledge contribute to the vital capacity for making judgments where other types of rational or systematic decision making fail because they lack conditions sufficient for their application. Tacit knowledge is central to successfully managing in public administration.
This process of institutionalization establishes cultural identity that makes the whole greater than the sum of an organization’s parts. The entity is valued not only for what it can do, but for what it is as an organ of civil society.
Public administrators will increasingly need to tend to the condition of civil society as an outcome of public actions. Different types of institutional forms have essential differences among the sectors based on how they arbitrate value differences and the breadth of interests they serve.
The general government, special district, for-profit, and private nonprofit sectors are each suited to perform distinctive tasks. It is important for public administrators to know what each sector can do particularly well and why, as they are occasionally called upon to use their discretionary authority to help restructure the relationship among the four.