Name: Towseef Shafi Mir.

Semester: 3rd
Section: A
Paper: 'Public Administration.'

"EVOLUTION OF THE DISCIPLINE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION".

Public administration is both a field of activity and a field of systematic study. As a part of
government activity, it has existed ever since the emergence of an organized political
system. However, as a field of systematic study, it is of recent origin. Indeed, there is no
sharp point in history where the story of public administration begins. However, an essay by
Woodrow Wilson in 1887 is often taken as the symbolic beginning. Wilson’s article entitled,
‘The Study of Administration’, published in Political Science Quarterly, was written at a
time when there was a crying need to eliminate corruption, improve efficiency, and
streamline service delivery in pursuit of public interest. His advocacy that ‘there should be a
science of administration’ has to be seen in its historical context. Wilson’s basic postulate
was that ‘it is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one’. Writing
against the background of widespread corruption, science meant, to Wilson, a systematic
and disciplined body of knowledge which he thought would be useful to grasp and defuse
the crisis in administration. While commenting on the domain of administrators, Wilson
argued that administrators should concentrate on operating the government rather than on
substituting their judgement for that of elected officials. The administration was separate
from politics and was confined to the execution of policies. So, there is a dichotomy between
politics and administration.

While Wilson gave the call, it was Frank J. Goodnow who practically fathered the
movement for evolving the discipline of public administration in the United States of America
(USA). In his book Politics and Administration, he also draws a functional distinction between
politics and administration. He writes, ‘The former having to do with the politics or
expression of the state’s will, the later with the execution of the policies’. Public
administration began picking up academic legitimacy in the 1920s, notable in this regard was
the publication of Leonard D. White’s Introduction to the Study of Public Administration in
1926, the first textbook entirely devoted to the field. It reflected the general characteristics of
public administration as non-partisan. Public administration was stated to be a ‘value-free’
science and the mission of administration would be economy and efficiency. While not
rejecting politics per se, the public administration reformers of this period sought better
government by expanding administrative functions (planning and analysing), keeping them
distinct from political functions (deciding). The politics–administration dichotomy emerged as
a conceptual orientation whereby the world of government was to be divided into two
functional areas, one administrative, and another political.

W.F. Willoughby’s book Principles of Public Administration (1927) appeared as the

second textbook in the field and reflected the new thrust of public administration. These were
that certain scientific principles of administration existed, they could be discovered, and
administrators would be expert in their work if they learned how to apply these said
principles (Henry 2007). The work of Frederick Taylor and the concept of scientific
management were to have a profound effect on public administration for the entire period
between the two world wars. Taylor believed that his scientific principles of management
were universally applicable. He was keen to apply them to public administration and
supported attempts by his disciples to employ scientific management techniques in defence
establishments. One of the first tests of applicability occurred when the Taft Commission on
Economy and Efficiency undertook the first comprehensive investigation of federal
administration. Its recommendations closely followed scientific management principles. This
period reached its climax in 1937 when Luther Gulick and Urwick coined seven principles
‘POSDCORB’ (Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting, and
Budgeting) in their essay ‘The Science of Administration’. Thus, this period marked the
tendency to reinforce the idea of politics–administration dichotomy and to evolve a value-free
science of management. The central belief was that there are certain principles of
administration, and it is the task of scholars to discover them and to promote their
application. Economy and efficiency was the main objective of the administrative system.

If Wilson is the pioneer of the discipline, Max Weber is its first theoretician who provided the
discipline with a solid theoretical base. His ‘ideal’ type of bureaucracy continues to remain
fundamental in any conceptualization of organization. Weber’s formulation has been
characterized as ‘value neutral’. It simply provides a conceptualization of a form of social
organization with certain ubiquitous characteristics. It can be examined from three different
points of view, which are not, of course, mutually exclusive. First, bureaucracy can be
viewed in terms of purely structural characteristics. In fact, the structural dimension has
attracted the most attention in the discussions on bureaucracy. Features like division of work
and hierarchy are identified as important aspects of structure. Second, bureaucracy can be
defined in terms of behavioural characteristics. Certain patterns of behaviour form an integral
part of bureaucracy. According to Weber, the more bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized’, the more
completely it succeeds in eliminating official business love, hatred, and all purely personal,
irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is ‘the specific nature of
bureaucracy and its special virtue’(Weber). Third, bureaucracy can also be looked at
from the point of view of achievement of purpose. This is an instrumentalist view of
bureaucracy. As Peter Blau suggests, it should be considered as an ‘organization that
maximizes efficiency in administration or an institutionalized method of organized social
conduct in the interests of administrative efficiency’.

What is distinctive in the Weberian formulation is the attempt to construct an ‘ideal type’ or a
mental map of a ‘fully-developed’ bureaucracy. The ideal type is a mental construct that
cannot be found in reality. The bureaucratic form, according to Weber, is the most efficient
organizational form for large-scale, complex administration developed so far in the modern
world. It is superior to any other form in precision, stability, maintenance of discipline, and
reliability.

Following the Second World War, many of the previously accepted theories of public
administration came under attack. Under the crisis decision-making atmosphere of the
Second World War, Washington quickly exposed the politics–administration dichotomy as a
false division. The rapid pace of mobilization decisions in a wartime environment quickly
demonstrated the necessity for flexibility, creativity, and discretion in decision-making. The
rigid, hierarchically based proverbs of administrative practice proved totally ineffective in
such an environment. Finally, as a result of these experiences, now the attempt was to
reintroduce a focus on the broader social, moral, and political theoretical effectiveness to
challenge the dogma of managerial effectiveness.

In 1938, Chester I. Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive challenged the

politics–administration dichotomy. Dwight Waldo, a leading critic, questioned the validity of
‘principles’ borrowed from the scientific management movement in business and urged the
development of a philosophy or theory of administration based upon broader study and a
recognition of the fact that public administration cannot be fruitfully studied from its political
and social setting. The most formidable dissection of principles appeared in Herbert
Simon’s Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in
Administration Organization (1947), a volume of such intellectual force that it led to
Simon’s receiving the Nobel Prize in 1978. Simon proposed the development of a new
science of administration based on theories and methodology of logical positivism. The focus
of such a science would be decision-making. He maintained that to be scientific it must
exclude value judgements and concentrate attention on facts, adopt precise definition of
terms, apply rigorous analysis, and test factual statements or postulates about
administration. Simon’s work sets forth the rigorous requirements of scientific analysis in
public administration. About some of the classical ‘principles’, Simon’s conclusion was that
these were unscientifically derived and were no more than ‘proverbs’.

The pioneering studies which resulted from the experiments in the Hawthorne plant of the
Western Electric Company in the late 1920s also challenged many prevailing ideas about
incentives and human behaviour in groups. Since the Second World War similar studies
have been carried on at a number of universities. These studies of human behaviour stress
the human aspect of administration; the need of employees for recognition, security, and ego
satisfaction; and the importance of the social environment and group attitudes in work
situations. They reach the conclusion that employee-oriented supervision is more
effective than production minded, authoritarian supervision. Thus, these studies
brought out the limitations of the machine concept of organization by drawing attention to the
social and psychological factors of the work situation.

The claim that public administration is a science was challenged by Dahl in his ‘The Science
of Public Administration: Three Problems’ (1947). He argued that the quest for principles
of administration was obstructed by three factors: values, individual personalities, and
social framework. Dahl argued that a science of public administration cannot emerge
unless we have a comparative public administration. He further hoped that the study of
public administration inevitably must become a much more broadly based discipline,resting
not on a narrowly defined knowledge of techniques and processes, but rather extending to
the varying historical, sociological, economic, and other conditioning factors.

Thus, dissent from mainstream public administration accelerated in the 1940s in two
mutually reinforcing directions. One objection was that politics and administration could
never be separated in any remotely sensible fashion. The other was that the principles of
administration were something less than the final expression of managerial rationality.

In the post Second World War period, the emergence of new nations in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America have set in a new trend in the study of public administration. Western
scholars, particularly the American scholars, began to show much interest in the study of the
varied administrative patterns of the newly independent nations. In this context, they
recognized the importance of the relevance of environmental factors and their impact on the
different administrative systems in these nations. This factor largely accounts for the
development of comparative, ecological, and development administration perspectives in the
study of public administration (Naidu, Apparao, and Mallikarjunayya). In this regard, the
contribution of Ferrel Heady, F.W. Riggs, and Edward Wiedner is significant.The
cross-cultural and cross-national administrative studies have provided the impetus needed
for the extension of the scope of public administration.

The period of the late 1960s was a time of academic foments that yielded a new perspective
which was a distinctly public perspective. This was the new public administration. In the late
1960s, a group of young American scholars voiced strong resentment against the
contemporary nature of discipline. At the Minnowbrook Conference I (1968), they
advocated for what is known as new public administration to make the study and practice of
the subject relevant to the needs of the emerging post-industrial society. The said
conference was truly a wake-up call for the theorists and the practitioners alike to make the
discipline socially relevant and accountable. It was held in the backdrop of a turbulent time
which was marked by a series of contemporary developments like social upheavals in the
form of ethnic skirmishes across the American cities, campus clashes, Vietnam War and its
repercussions in American society, and the like. Above developments coupled with a deep
sense of dissatisfaction among the practitioners regarding the present state of the discipline,
especially its obsession with efficiency and economy, had ushered in a qualitatively improved
phase in public administration, subsequently christened as new public administration. The
Minnowbrook Conference I was famous for bringing about arguably a new era in public
administration informed with relevance, values, social equity, and change. Public
interest formed the core of the deliberations. Relating administration to the ‘political’ was the
central focus of the new public administration school.

Public choice school is another landmark in the evolution of public administration. Far from
accepting bureaucracy as ‘rational’ and ‘efficient’, the protagonists of this school have been
highly sceptical about its structure and actual operating behaviour. The argument of
Niskanen, Downs, and Tullock, in this context, is based on the assumption of
administrative egoism. The bureaucrats are, in their view, individualistic self-seekers
‘who would do more harm than good to public welfare’ unless ‘their self-seeking
activities are carefully circumscribed’.This explains the tendency towards bureaucratic
growth that brings in more and more rewards for the officials and quid pro quo. To mitigate
the evils of bureaucratic monopoly, Niskanen (1971) suggests the following steps:

● stricter control on bureaucrats through the executive or legislature;

● more competition in the delivery of public services;
● privatization or contracting-out to reduce wastage; and
● dissemination of more information for public benefit about the availability of
alternatives to public services, offered on a competitive basis and at competitive
costs.

The public choice school has been successful in pointing out that there are alternatives
available for the delivery of services to citizens. The role of the market as a competing
paradigm has challenged the hegemonic position of the state. Also the power of the
bureaucracy has been similarly slashed, opening up possibilities of non-bureaucratic
citizen-friendly organizational options.

The Minnowbrook Conference II, which was held in 1988, is another landmark in the
evolution of public administration. The outcome of the conference gave birth to the New
Public Management (NPM) approach to governance. Its emergence reflected the changes
that took place in the Western nations. State as a major dispenser of social justice had been
increasingly questioned across the globe since the late 1970s. The popular mood was
against the state for its dismal performance in almost every sphere—social, political, and
economic. Recent changes in the form of governance in advanced Western countries also
contributed to the development of NPM. From the late 1980s and early 1990s public sector
management in the advanced Western democracies underwent a sea change. NPM is
depicted as a normative conceptualization of public administration consisting of several
interrelated components: providing high-quality services that citizens value; increasing
the autonomy of public managers; rewarding organizations and individuals on the
basis of whether they meet demanding targets; making available human and
technological resources that managers need to perform well; and, appreciative of the
virtues of competition, maintaining an open-minded attitude about which public purposes
should be performed by the private sector, rather than public sector.

The main features of the NPM are:

● It proposes a thorough organizational revamping so that organizational structure will

become conducive for organizational leadership. Organizational restructuring
includes simplifying organizational procedures, flattening of hierarchies, and so on;
● one of the major hallmarks of NPM is the empowerment of citizens. Unlike the
traditional public sector,
● it reconceptualize citizens as ‘active customers’ to be always kept in good humour;
● it calls for more autonomy for the public sector managers.
● It is in favour of greater elbow room for managerial leadership by providing public
managers with greater flexibility personnel policy like contractual appointment,
workplace bargaining, and so on;
● application of rigorous performance measurement technique is another hallmark of
NPM;
● it suggests disaggregation of public bureaucracies into agencies, which will deal with
each other on a user-pay basis;
● inspired by New Right philosophy, the NPM is in favour of cost-cutting in public
sector;
● it encourages quasi-markets and contracting out techniques to ensure better
management of ailing cash-strapped public sector; and
● it believes in a decentralized form of governance. It encourages all kinds of
organizational and spatial decentralization.

The NPM focuses on the entrepreneurial government. It is a participatory management and

community-owned governance, in which citizens are considered as active consumers and
not as passive recipients of programmes and policies. The main motto is to empower
citizens.
The publication of Reinventing Government by Osborne and Gaebler (1992) redefined
the functions of the government. The authors argue in favour of ‘entrepreneurial
government’ that is certain to bring about radical changes by

(a) improving public management through performance, measurement, and evaluation,

(b)reducing budgets,
(c) downsizing the government,
(d) selective privatization of public enterprises, and
(e) contracting out in selective areas.

Thus, the focus is on de-bureaucratization, democratization, and decentralization of the

administrative processes in the interest of the citizens. The concept of governance has
further led to the recognition of the role of multiple agencies in organizing and undertaking
public business. In addition to formal governments, the role of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations has been acknowledged as
supplementary public agencies.

In the late 1990s, Janet and Robert Denhardt have proposed a new public service model in
response to the dominance of NPM..A successor to NPM is digital-era governance, focusing
on themes of reintegrating government responsibilities, needs-based holism (executing
duties in cursive ways), and digitalization (exploiting the transformational capabilities of
modern IT and digital storage). Another new public service model is what has been called
new public governance, an approach which includes a centralization of power; an
increased number, role, and influence of partisan political staff; personal-politicization of
appointments to the senior public service; and, the assumption that the public service is
promiscuously partisan for the government of the day.

Globalization is another phenomenon which has brought a paradigm shift in the nature and
scope of public administration. It has virtually unshackled the discipline from the classical
bondage of structure and paved the way for a more flexible, less-hierarchical, and
accommodative kind of discipline informed by networks and collaboration. However, more
than two decades down the line, ever since globalization was first thrust upon the nation
states, public administration did show absolutely no sign of receding. On the contrary,
rendering those dooms-day predictions wrong, public administration reincarnated in a
readjusted form to cope with the new set of challenges. In fact, globalization had increased
the urgency of having a more proactive public administration. However, the traditional notion
of public administration with a sheltered bureaucracy, rigid hierarchy, and organizational
principle no longer exists today. Both structurally and functionally, public administration has
experienced a metamorphosis of sort. Structurally speaking, thanks to the sweeping
socio,economic–political transformation under globalization, the rigid, hierarchical, and
bureaucratic form of governance has given way to a more flexible, de-hierarchical, and
post-bureaucratic form of governance based on networks and partnership. Similarly, at the
functional level public administration has witnessed a profound transformation in the form of
delivery of public goods and services. Until recently, the delivery of goods and services was
considered as one of the important functions of public administration. But, the onset of
globalization and the eventual rolling back of the welfare state ushered in a new
collaborative form of public administration, where state administration has had to readjust
itself to deliver public goods and services in collaboration with the innumerable other players
and NGOs functioning at the societal level.

Hence, public administration in the era of globalization has been playing a new role of
‘enabler’ or ‘facilitator’ by privatizing the substantial part of welfare delivery functions.
Several methods have been used to facilitate the privatization of welfare delivery, namely,
contracting out, encouraging private provision, introducing quasi markets, mobilizing
voluntary sectors, and the like. However, the shift from the role of a direct provider to a
facilitator of welfare delivery has not made public administration redundant. In fact, it has
continued to enjoy its key position. The centrality of public administration is neither denied by
the state nor by the market. Though, the rationale of having a public administration differs
widely, for a state, a vibrant public administration is fundamental for its sustenance. It
provides the state with an adequate support mechanism to govern. In a market economy,
public administration has a great instrumental value, which not only facilitates the smooth
functioning of the market, but also legitimizes its operations within a society. Market
economy is also anxious to add a human face by provisioning the key social services. The
significance of public administration will remain despite globalization as Farazmand has
reassured us about its continuity as a self-conscious enterprise and as a professional field,
in the broader sense of the term (Farazmand 1999). Globalization has ‘transformed the
nature and character of state from traditional administrative welfare state to a
corporate welfare state’ with the corresponding changes in the nature of public
administration. In a traditional public administration set-up, an elaborate administrative
mechanism was put in place to facilitate the smooth delivery of public services, which was
popularly known as ‘public administration model of welfare delivery’. This model
envisaged an impartial and efficient administration, informed with five distinctive features,
namely, a bureaucratic structure, professional domination, accountability to the
public, equity of treatment, and self-sufficiency. However, such providential nature of
services had come under severe challenge with the emergence of market alternatives
advocated by the New Right movement in the West from the late 1970s to early 1980s. A
bold step like the privatization of welfare delivery was prescribed on the pretext of efficiency
and economy. The introduction of the globalization package under the garb of the structural
adjustment programme (SAP) in the early 1990s had further accentuated demand mooted
by the advocates of the New Right movement.

Public administration has developed as an academic discipline through a succession of

number of overlapping paradigms which are as follow;
Stage I : Politics - Administration dichotomy(1887-1926).
Stage II : Principles of Administration (1927-1937).
Stage III : Era of Challenge (1938-1947).
Stage IV : Crisis of Identity (1947-1970).
Stage V : Public Policy Perspective (1970-continuing).

Nicholas Henry has described five paradigms in the intellectual development of the Public
Administration in the following manner:

Paradigm 1: The Politics/Administration Dichotomy(1890-1926).

Paradigm 2: The Principles of Administration (1927-1937).
Paradigm 3: Public Administration as Political Science (1950-1970).
Paradigm 4: Public Administration as Administrative Science(Management).
Paradigm 5: Public Administration as Public Administration ( 1970-?)

Thus, public administration has undergone a sea change in response to new inputs from the
contemporary socio-economic and political scene. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to
grasp the nature of public administration in terms of the Weberian conceptualization
underlining its rigid, rule-bound and hierarchic characteristics. Instead, the preferred form of
administration is one which is accessible, transparent, and accountable, and where the
citizens are consumers. Furthermore, the notion of ‘public’ in public administration has
acquired new dimensions where the public–private distinction is more analytical than real
since there is a growing support for both cooperation and healthy competition between these
two sectors in the larger interests of societal development. To sum up, public administration
has gone through various stages in its evolution and growth as an academic discipline. The
evolutionary process indicates the shifting boundaries of the discipline in response to
constantly emerging social needs.

Bibliography.

● M. Bhattacharya, Restructuring Public Administration: A New Look.

● Public administration by M. Laxmikanth.
● Public Administration in a Globalising world by B.C. Prakash Chand.
● Class Notes.