Public management or managing the public?

This paper starts from the paradox of public decline and public proliferation as a basis for examining three contemporary puzzles about public management in the UK. The first centres on the question of what is the ‘public’ in public services and explores several different potential answers. The second examines the relationship between public management and managing the public, looking at new demands and pressures on public services to produce an improved public. The third considers the increasingly difficult relationship between public futures and future publics