Ethical Public Entrepreneurship: a Necessity for the 21 Centry

Public entrepreneurship is a management approach developed by the reinventing government movement. Reinvention is a response to more than two decades of conservative attacks on the efficacy of government. The Proposition 13 property tax revolt in California in the early 1970s started a relentless public and media fueled campaign for government to do more with less. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher escalated those demands for smaller, cheaper government to the international level and forced many public officials desperately search for a way out of the crisis they faced. For many, the answer is simply privatization. For others, it is a time of great receptivity to the promise and potential of management innovation and creativity. Reinvention attempts to provide strategies for improving public management in its time of crisis, including a recommendation that managers act entrepreneurially (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993; Osborne and Plastrik, 1997).