Question 1

Paradigms of Public Administration by Nicholas Henry and Richard Stillman

Public Administration’s Eighty Years in a Quandary

Public administration’s development as an academic field may be conceived as a

succession of four overlapping paradigms. As Robert T. Golembiewski noted, each phase may be

characterized according to whether it has “locus (where)” or “focus (what).” A recurring locus of

public administration is the government bureaucracy but often this traditional locus has been

blurred. One focus of public administration has been the study of certain “principles of

administration” but again this has been altered with the changing paradigms of the field. He

observes that when locus has been relatively sharply defined, the other has been relatively

ignored in academic circles and vice-versa. Below are loci and foci of reviewing the intellectual

development of public administration.

PARADIGM 1: THE POLITICS/ADMINISTRATION DICHOTOMY, 1900-1926 - The concentration of

study during this period was on locus, where public administration should be.

A. Frank J. Goodnow (1859-1939) – in his published book on Politics and Administration(1900),

he identified two distinct functions of government:

1. Politics – has to do with policies or expressions of the state will.

2. Administration – has to do with the execution of these policies.

Goodnow and his fellow administrationists view public administration to center in the

government bureaucracy. During the “public service movement” taking place in American
universities in the early part of the century, public administration received its first serious

attention from scholars.

In 1914, the Committee on Instruction in Government of the American Political Science

Association issued a statement that political science was concerned with training for citizenship,

professional preparations such as law, and training “experts and to prepare specialists for

governmental positions.”

B. Leonard D. White (1891-1958) – he published in 1926 the first textbook devoted in toto to the

field of public administration, Introduction to the Study of Public Administration. The book is

considered by Waldo as quintessentially American progressive in character.

1. Politics should not intrude on administration;

2. Management lends itself to scientific study;

3. Public administration is capable of becoming a “value-free” science in its own right;

4. The mission of administration is economy and efficiency.

In this paradigm, the notion was to strengthen a distinct politics/administration

dichotomy by relating it to value/fact dichotomy. Everything that public administrationists

scrutinized in the executive branch was imbued with the colorings and legitimacy of being

somehow “factual” and “scientific”, while the study of policy making and related matters was left

to the political scientists. In political science departments, it is the public administrationists who

teach organization theory, budgeting, and personnel while political scientists teach virtually

everything else.
PARADIGM 2: THE PRINCIPLES OF ADMINISTRATION, 1927-1937 – the concentration of study

during this period was on focus – essential expertise in the form of administrative principles.

1. 927 - F. W. Willoughby published his book, Principles of Public Administration, the second fully

fledged text in the field depicting certain scientific principles of administration.

2. 1930s and early 1940s – Public administrationists were in demand for their managerial

knowledge, courted by industry and government alike. ‘Principles were principles, and

administration was administration.’

3. 1937 – Luther H. Gullick and Lyndall Urwick’s papers on the Science of Administration called

the “high noon of orthodoxy” pointed out the importance of principles to favor ‘focus’

THE CHALLENGE, 1938-1950

1. Politics and administration could never be separated in any remotely sensible fashion.

2. The principles of administration were logically inconsistent.

3. Questioned the assumption that politics and administration could be dichotomized. This is

supported by “A theory of public administration means in our time a theory of politics also.”

4. There could be no such thing as a “principle” of administration.

The first and second challenges were revealed in the books of Chester I. Barnard’s The

Functions of the Executive and Herbert A. Simon’s Administrative Behavior in 1938. The third

challenge was revealed by Fritz Morstein Marx’s Elements of Public Administration in 1946 and

John Merriman Gaus’s Trends in the Theory of Public Administration” in 1950. The fourth

challenge was revealed in the books of Robert A Dahl, Simon, Waldo, and others. Simon’s
Administrative Behavior pointed out that for every “principle” of administration there was a

counter-principle therefore it is questionable.

THE REACTION TO THE CHALLENGE, 1947-1950

Positive (on the part of public administration)

Alternative suggestions from Simon’s “A comment on ‘The Science of Public

Administration’” as reinforcing components for public administrationists:

1. “Pure science of public administration” – a thorough grounding in social psychology

2. “Prescribing for public policy” – resurrecting the unstylish field of political economy

However, public administrationists didn’t want to be ban from the richest sources of

inquiry which is the normative political theory, the concept of the public interest and the entire

spectrum of human values.

Public administration considered the formulation of public policies within public bureaucracies

and their delivery to the polity.

Negative (on the part of political science)

Political scientists resisted the growing independence of public administrationists. Lynton

K. Caldwell called for “intellectualized understanding” of the executive branch rather than

“knowledgeable action” on the part of public administrators.

The drawing card for student enrollments and government grants favoring public

administration affected the field of political science.

The formation of the National Science Foundation in 1950 brought the message to all that

the chief federal science agency considered political science to be distinctly junior member of the
social sciences based on increasing evidence that political science was held in low esteem by

scholars in other fields.

PARADIGM 3: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS POLITICAL SCIENCE, 1950-1970 (locus)

1950s – Establishing linkages between public administration and political science. Public

administration is an “emphasis”, an “area of interest”, a “synonym” of political science.

1962 – Public administration was not included as a subfield of political science in the report of

the Committee on Political Science as a Discipline of the American Political Science Association.

1964 – A survey of political scientists indicated that the Public Administration Review was slipping

in prestige among political scientists relative to other journals and signaled a decline of faculty in

public administration.

1967 – Public administration disappeared as an organizing category in the program of the annual

meeting of the American Political Science Association.

1972 – A survey indicated that only four percent of all the articles published between 1960 and

1970 could be included in the category of “bureaucratic politics”, the only category of the 15

possible that related directly to public administration.

PARADIGM 4: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, 1956-1970 (focus)

1956 – An important journal, Administrative Science Quarterly was founded by an

administrationist on the premise that public, business, and institutional administration were false

distinctions. Thus, administration is administration.

to Keith M. Henderson and others. “Organization development” began its rapid rise as a specialty

in administrative science due to its involvement in social psychology, opening up of organizations,

and self-actualization of the members.

A conflict arises between the public administration and private administration as

triggered by administrative science. However, after years of painful dilemma, it was conceived

that the concept of determining and implementing the public interest constitutes a definition of

public administration.

THE EMERGING PARADIGM 5: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, 1970-?

(locus)

The term “public affairs” became popularized.

Public administrationists have been increasingly concerned on areas of policy science,

political economy, public policy-making process and its analysis, measurement of policy outputs.

INSTITUTIONALIZING PARADIGM 5: TOWARD CURRICULAR AUTONOMY

Public administration is, at last, intellectually prepared for the building of an institutionally

autonomous educational curriculum. This is because of the presence of a paradigmatic focus of

organization theory and management science and also a paradigmatic locus of the public interest

as it relates to public affairs.

EVOLUTION OF THE FIELD OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION by Alex Brillantes, Jr. and Maricel

Fernandez
 The discipline of the field of public administration can be divided into two major phases:

the traditional / classical phase from the late 1800s to the 1950s to the modern phase, from the

1950s to the present. The Modern phase can be further divided into the following sub-phases:

development administration (1950s to the 60s), new public administration (1960s to the 70s),

new public management and reinventing governance (1980s into the 90s) and finally public

administration as governance (1990s into the present). The following is an indicative matrix that

reflects the phases in the evolution of public administration.

Traditional / Classical Public Administration

Public Administration can be traced back to human history. It has been suggested that it

is as old as the ancient empires of China, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Mesopotomia. The

institutionalization of administrative capacity for collective purposes is the foundation of public

administration. Such arrangement, according to Caiden (1982), has existed in all societies. All

societies are devoted to advancing the general welfare or the public interest. The idea that

“public administration should not be considered administration of the public but administration

for the public” has been practiced and expressed in the Code of Hammurabi, in Confucianism and

in the funeral oration of Pericles. (Caiden 1982: 7) In other words, the idea of client-oriented

public administration has its roots in ancient public administration.

Caiden (1982) also noted that the genesis of Public Administration must have had

originated from monarchial Europe where household officials were divided into two groups: one

in charge of public affairs, i.e. the administration of justice, finance, training of armies, and the

other is responsible for personal services. Rutgers (1998) supports this claim that (i.e. royal)

administration had already been manifested way back in the mid 17th century and early 18th
century in Prussia. F.K. Medikus (as cited in Rutgers 1998) likewise argued on the study of public

administration and its positions amidst the sciences in the 18th century. He advocated

“cameralism” and claimed that it should be treated as an autonomous field of study of great

importance to the state. Cameral science is designed to prepare potential public officials for

government service. This practice flourished in Europe until the 21st century but it was, in the

long run, replaced by administrative law and legal studies.

Since this paper tries to trace the roots of Philippine Public Administration, it shall dwell

on American theories and principles which admittedly influenced the direction and development

of the formal study of the field of public administration in the Philippines, both at the levels of

theory and practice. It will be recalled that public administration as academic field of study

formally begun with the establishment by the Americans of the Institute of Public Administration

(IPA) in the University of the Philippines (UP) in 1952. Hence, the close affinity of Philippine PA

theory to American PA theory and practice can not be divorced.

1800s to 1950s

If the roots of Public Administration as a distinct field of study have to be traced, the

tendency is to draw on Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 classic essay, “The Study of Public

Administration,” which was written at the height of Progressive Movement in the US.5 It was in

that essay that there was a serious claim that public administration should be a self-conscious,

professional field. Wilson suggested the distinction between politics and administration i.e.

administration should be politics-free and that “the field of administration is the field of

business;” (Wilson 1953: 71) thus, establishing what became known as the “politics-

administration” dichotomy.6 Although Wilson set a demarcation line between politics and
administration, Frank Goodnow (1900), the “Father of American Public Administration,”

presented a more meticulous examination of politics-administration dichotomy in his book,

“Politics and Administration” that “supplanted the traditional concern with the separation of

powers among the various branches of the government.” (Shafritz and Hyde 1997: 2) Politics-

administration dichotomy has provoked long-running debates which persist until today. It may

be argued though that, as far as the Philippine experience is concerned, the dichotomy is artificial

and that in practice, power and partisan politics have had a disproportionate influence upon the

workings of public administration in the Philippines.

Max Weber (1946), a German sociologist who is known as the “Father of Modern

Sociology,” made a lucid descriptive analysis of bureaucratic organizations. He presented some

major variables or features of bureaucracy such as: hierarchy, division of labor, formally written

rules and procedures, impersonality and neutrality; hence, providing a reference point in

evaluating both the good and bad effects of bureaucratic structures. (Weber 1946 as cited in

Shafritz and Hyde 1997)

It was in 1926 that the first text in the field of public administration was written by

Leonard D. White. His book, Introduction to the Study of Public Administration,7 is one of the

most influential texts in public administration to date. One of his assumptions was that

administration is still an art. He, however, recognized the ideal of transforming it into a science.

Interestingly, his work avoided the potential pitfalls of the politics-administration dichotomy but

rather concentrated on emphasizing the managerial phase of administration.

From Classical, Neo-Classical to Integrative/Modern Organization Theories

“one best way approach” in accomplishing task. Classical organization theory evolved from this

notion. Another popular manifestation of this approach was that of Luther Gulick’s POSDCORB

methodologies.8 Gulick and Urwick (1937 as cited in Shafrtiz and Hyde 1997) integrated the ideas

of earlier theorists like Henri Fayol9 into a comprehensive theory of administration. They

believed that a single science of administration, which exceeds the boundaries of the private and

the public sector, exists. The reasoning of the science of administration was largely borrowed

from Fayol’s fourteen principles of organization. POSDCORB, however, was seen as less

influential in post-war American government. Thereafter, Simon, Waldo and Appleby attacked

the idea of POSDCORB. Simon (1946) in his book, “Administrative Behavior,” created a distinction

between theoretical and practical science. He introduced more common principles in the

literature of administration which highlighted administrative efficiency and specialization when

he wrote the article, “The Proverbs of Administration.” (Simon 1946 as cited in Shafffritz and

Hyde 1997; Stillman 1991) On the other hand, in 1945, Appleby, led a postwar attack on the

concept of politics-administration dichotomy by drafting a convincing case that “public

administration was not something apart from politics” but rather at the “center of political life.”

(Stillman 1991: 123)

In 1948, Dwight Waldo tried to establish the direction and thrust of Public Administration

as a field of study in his book, “The Administrative State,” which hit the “gospel of efficiency” that

dominated the administrative thinking prior to Word War II. 10 That same year, Sayre attacked

public personnel administration as “the triumph over purpose.” (Shafritz and Hyde 1997: 74) In

1949, Selznick introduced the so-called “cooptative mechanism” where he defined “cooptation”
as “the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy determining structure of

an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence.” (Shafritz and Hyde

1997: 147)

A contemporary of Goodnow was William Willoughby (1918). Willoughby stressed the

role of the trilogy covering all three branches of government but he was more known for his

budgetary reforms. He discussed the movements for budgetary reforms in the US in view of the

budget as an instrument for democracy, as an instrument for correlating legislative and executive

action, and as an instrument for securing administrative efficiency and economy. Mary Parker

Follet (1926) also made some significant contribution to the discourse of Public Administration

as one of the proponents of participatory management and the “law of situation” which can be

attributed to the concept of contingency management. She illustrated the advantages of

participatory management in her article, “The Giving of Orders. “ In the 1920s and early 1930s,

Elton Mayo conducted the Hawthorne experiments on the theory of individuals within an

organization which propelled the human relations school of management thought. Chester

Barnard (1938) presented a more comprehensive theory of organizational behavior when he

wrote the functions of the executive. He argued that for the executive to become more effective,

he should maintain an equilibrium between the needs of the employees and the organization.

Maslow (1943), on the other hand, focused on the hierarchical needs of the individual. His

“theory of human motivation,” states that the human being has five sets of needs: physiological,

safety, love or affiliation, esteem and ultimately, and self-actualization. His concepts were later

explored and developed into more comprehensive theories and principles as advocated by other

researches in organizational behavior and management, such as, Herzberg’s “motivation-

Likert’s Systems 1 to 4, among others. (Shafritz and Hyde 1997)

Modern Public Administration

The indicative period of modern public administration in the 50s. The sub- phases include:

(a) development administration; (b) new public administration; (c) new public management and

reinventing government; and PA as governance.

The discipline of public administration has been characterized as one with a continuing

“identify crisis.” To a certain extent, it was that “identity crisis” that served as theme that led to

the emergence of the New Public Administration movement in the 70s. Rutgers (1998) argued in

“Paradigm lost: Crisis as Identify of the Study of Public Administration,” that public administration

lacked an “epistemological identity.” In the Philippines, Reyes (2003) revisited the so-called

“identity crisis” of public administration initially raised by various scholars of the discipline in his

various writings. He contended that the crisis revolved around the imperative to define a public

administration rooted to the development aspirations of the Philippines. The identity crisis,

however, continues up to today in the Philippines.

Development Administration (1950s to 1960s)

Development Administration (DA) as a field of study emerged in 1950s and 1960s with

the third world countries as the focal point. The term “third world” may be attributed to the

French demographer and economic historian Alfred Sauvy, who at the height of the Cold War in
1952, used the term to distinguish developing countries outside the two power blocs; namely,

the First World and the Second World respectively. (Chilcote 1984) Nef and Dwivedi (1981) on

the other hand, attributed the concept of DA to Goswami in 1955 and later popularized by Riggs

and Weidner. They coined the term “development administration” to refer to developing

countries which are largely found in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. These developing countries

endeavored to make concerted efforts in order to be recognized as “emerging nations” and to

resurrect themselves after World War II. In the context of “emerging nation,” Landau (1970)

described DA as the engineering of social change. Likewise, according to Ilchman (1970), these

countries were “concerned with increasing the capacity of the state to produce goods and

services to meet and induce changing demands.” (Ilchman 1970: 136) Gant (1979) on the other

hand, defined DA as not merely addressing state functions such as public service delivery and

enforcement of laws but the inducement and management of change to pursue development

aspirations. These developing countries were in urgent need to implement fundamental reforms

in their politico-administrative machinery.

Khator, however, argued that DA was built upon several critical assumptions that: (1)

development needs are the most important needs of developing countries, (2) the development

needs of developing and developed countries are inherently different, (3) development can be

administered, (4) developmental know-hows are transferable; and (5) the political, social, and

cultural context of development can be easily altered. (Khator 1998: 1778) Likewise, Fred Riggs,

in his “Frontiers of Development,” identified two foci in development administration:

development of administration and the administration of development. Most development

the administration of development in third world countries. (Khator 1998)

Given the situations above, DA maybe considered as “management of innovation”

because it was aimed at helping countries that are undergoing reconstruction and social

transformation.

In the Philippines, The term “development administration” was used to suggest that it

may be an appropriate framework to examine the State’s experience as it tries to rebuild its

institutions within a democratic framework, as it struggles to new economic, political and social

challenges, and as it adapts to the trends and demands of globalization. Additionally, DA

principles have been among the major themes that ran through the various lectures and writings

of Raul De Guzman, who together with OD Corpuz (1986) initially addressed the question: “Is

there a Philippine Pa?” Since the idea was to steer developing countries for economic

development and social progress, the term DA became closely associated to foreign aid and

western models of development. These Western countries provide grants and aids to developing

countries for nation-building, economic development, institutional strengthening, and people

participation in development. As to administrative reform, which is one of the core values of DA,

De Guzman (1986) described and analyzed the structural and behavioral characteristics of the

Philippine public bureaucracy and argued that the “implementation of administrative reform

should have two major dimensions: reforming the structures of the bureaucracy and reforming

the behavior of those in the bureaucracy.” (De Guzman 1986 as cited in Brillantes 1994: 8)

Development administration has always been one of the central features of the various long- and

medium-term Philippine Development Plans since the seventies. The paradigm for bureaucratic
reform continues to evolve in various intellectual and practical debates but government

continues its work amidst all these. Until recently, all Philippine development plans since the

seventies had a specific chapter devoted solely to development administration.

New Public Administration (late 1960s to 1970s)

The term “New Public Administration” or New PA may have emerged from the

Minnowbrook Conference in 1968 in Syracuse University. The conference was the brainchild and

inspiration of Dwight Waldo who brought together young public administrators and scholars to

discuss important issues and varying perspectives on public administration. The conference

created a hullabaloo. One of its controversies is that it had rejected the classical theories of public

administration and instead offered new principles. For instance, Frederickson in his essay,

“Towards a New Public Administration,” adds social equity to the classic definition of public

administration. Conventional or classic public administration sought to only answer inquiries on

efficiency and effectiveness like: how can the government offer better services with available

resources (efficiency) or how can we maintain our level of services while spending less money

(economy)? In introducing the principles of New PA, he adds the question: “Does this service

enhance social equity?” (Frederickson 1971) Moreover, the Minnowbrook conferees also

questioned the relevance of traditional public administration to existing deprivation with an era

of fast-paced technological advancement in the backdrop. Frederickson argued that, disparities

existed because public administration focused less on social purposes or values of government

policies and programs and more on the economy and efficiency of execution. The value-free and
neutral stance of traditional PA has alienated the less privileged and deprived groups in the

society. New PA’s proponents, likewise, advocated that public administrators should not be

neutral; they should be committed to both good management and social equity as values to be

achieved. New PA then called for client-oriented administration, non-bureaucratic structures,

participatory decision-making, decentralized administration and advocate-administrators.

(Frederickson 1971; Nigro and Nigro 1989) With the above contentions, it can be said that the

theme of New PA is “change” and the challenge is for the public administrators is their capacity

to accept change.

Question 2

Kuhn (1970) defines an anomaly as a violation of the "paradigm-induced expectations

that govern normal science. Anomalies are detected through empirical analyses and have formed

the basis for most discoveries in the natural sciences. For Kuhn, the discovery of anomalies

provides the impetus for paradigm change within a field of study. Anomalies are empirical

difficulties that reflect differences between the observed and theoretically expected data.

The functions of a paradigm on the other are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and

to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the

ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed

by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that

science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a

different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the

different scientific theories. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by
Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects

some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on

the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer

approximations to the truth than earlier theories.

Lastly, Kuhn argued that science does not progress by a linear method of gathering of new

knowledge, but also called paradigm shifts in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a

particular field is suddenly transformed.

In public administration theory and practice, the concept does not imply a universal truth.

Instead, the acceptance of best practices is tenuous since they can be revised by various methods,

such as statutory law, case law and judicial rulings, the work of professional organizations and

measures adopted by public and private employers. Discourse and the acceptance of change are

integral parts of the learning process.

Question 3

Politics-administration dichotomy in Woodrow Wilson’s study holds that politics and

administration are inherently different and should be approached as such. He said that “the field

of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics.

Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not

political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered

to manipulate its offices.”

Woodrow Wilson's politics-administration dichotomy is relevant to the attainment of

anti-graft and corrupt practices in the Philippines by counteracting the majority of the incumbent
voters and avoiding a Republican self-government and the overwhelming amount of “selfish,

ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish” persons whom the “bulk of can vote.” It also reinforces the

principle of check and balances.