Abstract:

The New Public Management (NPM) approach, which represented a huge inflection from the Traditional Public Administration (TPA) mentality in the wake of transition from the welfare state to neo-liberal policies, ushered in a novel paradigm in the field of public administration with radical reforms. This, in turn, led to changes in the way public service are provided and the manner these services are conceptualized, with direct impact on the concept of citizenship. The concepts of public service and citizenship are of obvious importance for the state and public administration. Indeed, public service provided to citizens constitute a major component of public administration, and citizenship is naturally an essential element of public administration. Studies on public administration, however, tend to treat citizenship as a secondary concept. This is more visible in the NPM, signifying a transition from administration to management. However, "citizenship" should be a central concept in public administration studies. Indeed, it is quite natural for a community to breed administration crises if it does give citizenship a central role in its affairs. It is witnessed that increased criticism is directed at the public administration  approaches whose citizenship conception can hardly be described as democratic and as a result, these perceptions are doomed to fall from grace. Therefore, there is an increased need for evaluation of the "relationship between public service and citizenship."  To this end, this study aims to assess the NPM's citizenship concept within the context of public service from a theoretical perspective.

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