3 Answers

PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION<button id="___id13" class="md-inline-toc md-button md-link"></button>

<section id="toc36939" data-level="2">

The classical definition

Throughout the 20th century the study and practice of public administration has been essentially pragmatic and normative rather than theoretical and value free. This may explain why public administration, unlike some social sciences, developed without much concern about an encompassing theory. Not until the mid-20th century and the dissemination of the German sociologist Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy was there much interest in a theory of public administration. Most recent bureaucratic theory, however, has been addressed to the private sector, and there has been little effort to relate organizational to political theory.

A prominent principle of public administration has been economy and efficiency, that is, the provision of public services at the minimum cost. This has usually been the stated objective of administrative reform. Despite growing concern about other kinds of values, such as responsiveness to public needs, justice and equal treatment, and citizen involvement in government decisions, efficiency continues to be a major goal.

In its concern with efficiency and improvement, public administration has focused frequently on questions of formal organization. It is generally held that administrative ills can be at least partly corrected by reorganization. Many organizational principles originated with the military, a few from private business. They include, for example: (1) organizing departments, ministries, and agencies on the basis of common or closely related purposes, (2) grouping like activities in single units, (3) equating responsibility with authority, (4) ensuring unity of command (only one supervisor for each group of employees), (5) limiting the number of subordinates reporting to a single supervisor, (6) differentiating line (operating or end-purpose) activities from staff (advisory, consultative, or support) activities, (7) employing the principle of management by exception (only the unusual problem or case is brought to the top), and (8) having a clear-cut chain of command downward and of responsibility upward.

Some critics have maintained that these and other principles of public administration are useful only as rough criteria for given organizational situations. They believe that organizational problems differ and that the applicability of rules to various situations also differs. Nonetheless, and despite much more sophisticated analyses of organizational behaviour in recent decades, such principles as those enumerated above continue to carry force.

Public administration has also laid stress upon personnel. In most countries administrative reform has involved civil service reform. Historically, the direction has been toward “meritocracy”—the best individual for each job, competitive examinations for entry, and selection and promotion on the basis of merit. Attention has increasingly been given to factors other than intellectual merit, including personal attitudes, incentives, personality, personal relationships, and collective bargaining.

In addition, the budget has developed as a principal tool in planning future programs, deciding priorities, managing current programs, linking executive with legislature, and developing control and accountability. The contest for control over budgets, particularly in the Western world, began centuries ago and at times was the main relationship between monarchs and their subjects. The modern executive budget system in which the executive recommends, the legislature appropriates, and the executive oversees expenditures originated in 19th-century Britain. In the United States during the 20th century, the budget became the principal vehicle for legislative surveillance of administration, executive control of departments, and departmental control of subordinate programs. It has been assuming a similar role in many of the developing countries of the world.

</section>
<section id="toc36940" data-level="2">

Recent interpretations

The classical approach to public administration described above probably reached its fullest development in the United States during the 1930s, although since that time, through educational and training programs, technical assistance, and the work of international organizations, it has also become standard doctrine in many countries. However, some of its elements have been resisted by governments with British or continental-legal perspectives, and even during the 1930s it was being challenged from several quarters. Since that time study of the subject has greatly developed. It has also become somewhat confused as a result of certain inconsistencies in approach.

The orthodox doctrine rested on the premise that administration was simply the implementation of public policies determined by others. According to this view, administrators should seek maximum efficiency but should be otherwise neutral about values and goals. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even more so during World War II, however, it became increasingly evident that many new policies originated within the administration, that policy and value judgments were implicit in most significant administrative decisions, that many administrative officials worked on nothing except policy, and that, insofar as public policies were controversial, such work inevitably involved administrators in politics. The supposed independence of administration from policy and politics was seen to be illusory. Since the 1930s there has thus been increasing concern with policy formation and the development of techniques to improve policy decisions. Although the concept of a value-free, neutral administration is regarded by many as no longer tenable, no fully satisfactory substitute has been offered. How to ensure that responsible and responsive policy decisions are made by career administrators, and how to coordinate their work with the policies of politically elected or appointive officials, remain key preoccupations, especially in democratic states.

It was with governmental efforts to combat the Depression that new informational devices were introduced, including national income accounting and the scrutiny of gross national product as a major index of economic health. The applied techniques of fiscal and monetary policy have become established specializations of public administration. Economists occupy key posts in the administrations of most nations, and many other administrators must have at least elementary knowledge of the economic implications of government operations. France, Sweden and other Scandinavian nations, Great Britain, and the United States were among the leaders in developing economic planning techniques. Such planning has become a dominating concern of public administration in many of the developing countries.

<section id="toc36941" data-level="3">

Responses to incrementalism

As economic and social intervention by governments has increased, the limitations of “incrementalism” as a public administration practice have become increasingly apparent. Incrementalism is the tendency of government to tinker with policies rather than to question the value of continuing them. A number of techniques have been introduced to make decisions more rational. One such technique, widely applied, is cost–benefit analysis. This involves identifying, quantifying, and comparing the costs and benefits of alternative proposals. Another, less successful, technique was the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System(PPBS), introduced into the U.S. Department of Defense in 1961 and extended to the federal budget in 1965. According to PPBS, the objectives of government programs were to be identified, and then alternative means of achieving these objectives were to be compared according to their costs and benefits. In practice, PPBS made little difference in federal budgeting, partly because the objectives of governmental programs were difficult to specify and partly because comprehensive evaluation took too long. PPBS was abandoned in 1971, and similar attempts, such as Management by Objectives and Zero-Base Budgeting, both introduced in the 1970s, were equally short-lived and ineffective. Comparable schemes in western Europe, such as the method called “rationalization of budgetary choice” introduced into France in the late 1960s and the so-called Programme Analysis and Review in Great Britain in the 1970s, were likewise unsuccessful.

Quantitative economic measurement is useful up to a certain point, but the value of human life, of freedom from sickness and pain, of safety on the streets, of clean air, and of opportunity for achievement are hardly measurable in monetary terms. Public administration has thus increasingly concerned itself with developing better social indicators, quantitative and qualitative—that is, better indexes of the effects of public programs and new techniques of social analysis.

Another development has been an increasing emphasis on humanrelations. This originated in the 1930s when what became known as the Hawthorne research, involving the workers and management of an industrial plant near Chicago, brought out the importance to productivity of social or informal organization, good communications, individual and group behaviour, and attitudes (as distinct from aptitudes).

Awareness of the importance of human relations influenced the conduct of public administration. Many shibboleths of administration (hierarchy, directive leadership, set duties, treatment of employees as impersonal “units” of production, and monetary incentives) were challenged.

By the late 1930s the human relations approach had developed into a concept known as “organization development.” Its primary goal was to change the attitudes, values, and structures of organizations so that they could meet new demands. Trained consultants, usually from outside the organization, undertook intensive interviewing of senior and junior staff, and sensitivity training and confrontation meetings were also held. Unlike the rationalistic PPBS approach, organization development stressed the identification of personal with organizational goals, the “self-actualization” of workers and managers, effective interpersonal communication, and broad participation in decision making. Its direct use within governmental agencies has been limited and has not always been successful, but it has had considerable indirect influence upon administrators.

Another modern movement in public administration has been the greater participation of citizens in government. It was stimulated during the 1950s and ’60s by a growing feeling that governments were not responding to the needs of their citizens, particularly minority groups and the poor. A variety of experiments to involve citizens or their representatives in making governmental decisions were begun in the 1960s. These involved the delegation of decision making from central to local offices and, at the local level, the sharing of authority with citizen groups.

</section>
<section id="toc36942" data-level="3">

Public policy approach

From the early 1970s increasing analysis of the way government policies affected the public resulted in a concept called the “public policy approach” to administration. This examines to what extent each stage in devising and executing a policy affects the overall shape and impact of the policy. According to the concept, the way a problem is conceived in the first place influences the range of remedies considered. The nature of the decision-making process may determine whether a course of action is merely incremental or truly radical. Indeed, it has been argued that the nature of the decision-making process shapes the outcome of the decision itself, particularly when the process is dominated by a powerful interest group. Moreover, the willingness of the government to evaluate programs, and modify them if necessary, affects the outcome. Many supporters of the public policy approach regard the concept as an important tool for constructing a body of knowledge on which recommendations can be based.

Until World War II there was relatively little exchange among nations of ideas about public administration. As early as 1910, however, a professional organization, which eventually became the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS), had been established. At first its membership consisted principally of scholars and practitioners of administrative law in the countries of continental Europe. By the late 1980s the IIAS had a membership drawn from some 70 countries. Its triennial congresses have covered all aspects of the field.

Since World War II international interest in administrative systems has grown, precipitated by the necessity of cooperation during the war, by the formation of international organizations, by the occupation of conquered nations and the administration of economic recovery programs for Europe and the Far East, and by aid programs for developing countries. One by-product of aid programs was a renewed appreciation of how crucial effective administration is to national development. It has also become apparent how parochial and culture-bound styles of public administration have often remained within individual countries.

Another effect of this international communication and sharing of experiences has been the realization that development is not exclusive to the so-called underdeveloped countries. All countries have continued to develop, and public administration has increasingly been perceived as the administration of planned change in societies that themselves have undergone rapid change, not all of it planned. Government has no longer been merely the keeper of the peace and the provider of basic services: in the postindustrial era government has become a principal innovator, a determinant of social and economic priorities, and an entrepreneur on a major scale. On virtually every significant problem or challenge—from unemployment to clean air—people have looked to the government for solutions or assistance. The tasks of planning, organizing, coordinating, managing, and evaluating modern government have likewise become awesome in both dimension and importance.

</section>
</section>
<section id="toc36943" data-level="2">

Education and training

European universities have traditionally produced administrative lawyers for their governments, but legal skills alone are hardly adequate for handling contemporary problems. U.S. universities began graduate programs in the early years of the 20th century, and by the late 1980s there were more than 300 university programs in public administration. Nevertheless, very few of the scientists and other specialists who become administrators in their fields attend such programs.

Training programs have particularly flourished since World War II, many of them with government help. Some are attached to universities. In establishing the École Nationale d’Administration as one of its civil service reforms of 1946–47, France provided an extensive course for recruits to the higher civil service. It was not until 1969 that Britain established a Civil Service College under the new Civil Service Department. In the United States the government established a variety of educational and training programs during the 1960s, including the Federal Executive Institute and the Executive Seminar Centers. Many less-advanced countries have since established centres for the training of public administrators.

</section>

8 years ago. Rating: 4

....transfer of experience

8 years ago. Rating: 4

The military is hierarchical and responsibilities are clearly defined. Everyone knows what he's supposed to do, when and how, if not always why. There is no chaos.

Good role model for public administration, private sector, too.

8 years ago. Rating: 4