Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which public agencies and private firms -- and, therefore, public and private management -- can be regarded as different. On the one hand, public agencies can be regarded as serving a higher purpose, namely the public good, rather than simply making money for someone. The phrase "public service ethos" implies such a higher purpose.

On the other hand, public agencies can be regarded as sheltered from the competitive pressures that act on private firms, and thus lacking the motivation for improving efficiency that a competitive marketplace is presumed to generate. The word "bureaucrat," with its negative connotations, encapsulates this latter distinction, in which public agencies are viewed as inherently less efficient -- and public management, at least good public managemen

In the English-speaking nations, with their traditions of limited government and suspicion of governmental authority, the latter presumption tends to predominate, with public servants and managers not having the aura of state authority they enjoy in many other societies. This attitude is reinforced by the perception that (for example) civil-service regulations make it harder to discipline or fire public employees, presumably making the public manager's task more difficult.

Llewellyn, S.; and Tappin, E. (2003). Strategy in the public sector: Management in the wilderness. Journal of Management Studies, 40, pp. 955-82.

Even if the presumption that public managers must be underperformers is eliminated, it might be supposed that the environments in which they work, subject to a high degree of scrutiny by political superiors and political pressure groups, would give them less scope for innovation, risk-taking, or creativity. An Australian study, however, found that there was little difference between the rate at which management technique innovations were adopted by public and private managers (Palmer and Dunford, 2001, pp. 56-57). A study of the British National Health Service (NHS) found that executives with a public service background were actually more flexible and more willing to take risks than were executives who came to the NHS from backgrounds in private industry (Sheaff, 1997, p. 201).

Tracing the impact of assimilation or incorporation of these professionals into a public agency may, however, be complicated by evolutionary changes within the field itself. An interesting instance is the provision of dental care in Britain, and the choices of entering the public system or remaining in private dentistry (Taylor-G