Derecho y management en las administraciones públicas

Are the apradigms of public management and administrative law incompatible? Judging from the way many politicians and public managers perceive them, this would appear to be the case. nevertheless, the hypothesis of this paper is just the opposite. In order to justify this hyphotesis the author examines the close coincidence between the paradigms that are the basis of traditional administrative law ("the anti-discretionary proyect") on the one hand and the traditions of classic bureaucracy and "scientific" management. Law and Management have trouble communicating and the author sees this as a result of the different speeds at which changes in the paradigms of the two fields are taking place. While management has alredy abandoned any pretension to universal rationality of the bureaucratic model and is searching for more complex and plural forms of rationality, administrative law is still clinging to the mechanistic and universal intellectual paradigm that is sometimes called the "anti-discretionary project". This is causing public managers to perceive administrative law as just another "bureaupathology". This paper advocates the need to produce a paradigm shift in administrative law in order to foster the potential of a dialogue with post-bureaucratic public management.