What is Public Administration ?

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Meaning and its Definition
Public administration is like any other administration which is carried out in public interest. Before we
dwell deeper into understanding public administration it would be beneficial to try and see how different
authors have tried to define what administration is.

Marx defines administration as - Administration is determined action taken in pursuit of a conscious

purpose. It is the systematic ordering of affairs and the calculated use of resources aimed at
making those happen which one wants to happen.

Frederic k Lane defines administration as organizing and maintaining human and fiscal resources to
attain a group’s goals.

A complete definition for public administration however is difficult to arrive at due to the sheer number of
tasks that fall under it. Some academicians argue that all the government related work falls into this
category while other choose to argue that only the executive aspect of government functioning comprises
of public administration.

We can also see how different authors have defined public administration:

According to L D White, Public administration consists of all those operations having for their
purpose the fulfillment or enforcement of public policy. On the other hand as per Woodrow Wilson
public administration is a detailed and systematic application of law. One can also say that public
administration is nothing but the policies, practices, rules and regulation etc, in action.

Now can public administration be divorced from social and political systems; certainly not and therefore
emerged another definition provided by F A Nigro who argues that public administration is essentially a
cooperative group effort in public setting. Secondly, it covers all the three branches of government
machinery, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. He further added that since public
administration plays a crucial role in formulation of policies therefore it is a part of the political
process as well (for e.g. Bills and Acts). Negro also said that public administration is different from
private administration in numerous ways and that it interacts with various private groups and individuals in
providing services to the community.

Also, on the nature of public administration there have been two popular views, one being the Integral
view and the other one is the Managerial view. The Integral view is all encompassing and consists of sum
total of all managerial, clerical, technical and manual activities and employees form all levels. This view
was endorsed by L D White and Dimock. It may differ from one agency to another depending on their
sphere of work.

On the other hand the Managerial view, as the name suggests says that the public administration involves
only the managerial activities. This view was supported by Simon, Smithburg, Thompson and Luther
Gulick.

After having said that; the word administration itself is highly contextual, and may vary in meaning and
definition from one organization to another.

So if you want to understand it from the context and setting of an organization, it can be roughly explained
that; the top leadership or the Board decides the vision, mission, short and long term goals and the
business unit heads then draw out action plans and create or reform processes, allot responsibilities,
direct planning, get people on board and start working towards achieving those set goals as per defined
guidelines. So, the Board can be the Government and the Business Unit Heads and their teams can be
the public administrators who are the implementers and actually the people who run the show.

In the next section we shall make an effort to understand whether public and private administrations are
similar, different or are there any overlaps between the two.

Nature and Scope of Public

Administration
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

The above quote by Schumpeter can call for a heated debate on its relevance and credence. However
there is no denying that bureaucracy; since a couple of centuries or so; has been an integral part of the
Government, the State the people and the way they function with each other.

Public administration is the single most important aspect of bureaucracies across the world; be it
a democratic, socialist or a capitalist state, more so in a socialist state, as all aspects of the citizen life are
influenced and decided by the government.

There has been considerable shift in the way the public administration was carried out in ancient and
medieval times when the initiatives were nothing more than sporadic administrative functions like
maintaining law and order and collecting revenues with little or no welfare activities. The people who
carried out those activities were selected by the monarchs and were no better than their personal
servants.

With changing times, the objective of public administration also underwent a change and by the
nineteenth century; an organized approach to public servants and public administration was adopted. This
approach was based on an exhaustive legal framework replacing the patriarchal and hereditary function
with bureaucracy.

The advent of this new approach to public administration happened due to many reasons. The foremost
being the Industrial revolution. With Industrial Revolution, the Government forayed into trade and
commerce; which was followed by Imperialism, Nationalism and Internationalism which added on to the
widening avenues of Government duties and responsibilities.

The times today are again vastly different from what existed a century ago and once again the
scope of public administration has also undergone a shift, it’s difficult to decide whether it is
paradigm or not. However, the increasing awareness amongst people especially in the developing
countries [for e.g. The Right to Information Act or RTI act in India] and an acquired knowledge of rights,
privileges and laws amongst the people of developed countries[for e.g. the debates on The Health Care
and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010] have thrown new challenges for the public administrators and
policy makers.

The demand for unified national services, the conflicting interests between the various economic sections
of the society and with global migration and subsequently globalization; the protection of the interests of
the multi-ethnic groups of the society have kept the public administrators occupied.

Administration matters so much because it is not enough to make policies and laws on paper. The
interpretation and translation of those policies and laws into actions and carrying them out is the difficult
part. The public administrators therefore have to play an important role in running the government as
machinery. Bureaucracy has often been sneered and ridiculed at but if the administrative work is stopped,
nothing really would be happening.

In almost all the countries the number of people employed in public administration work is appalling like in
USA the figure roughly stands at 2036000 civilians excluding the employees of Congress and Federal
courts, in England the figure runs into several thousands and in India the civil services exam itself draws
lakhs and lakhs of applicants while the selection percentage is meager [for e.g the 2006 numbers for
selection in the UPSC was 383983 applicants and 474 actually recommended for posts.]

The various important roles that public administration plays, the most important one are implementing
laws and policies and acting as their adjudicators. It is therefore important that the reader approaches the
study of public administration with an open mind and without prejudices to appreciate the full nature, role,
importance and relevance of the bureaucracy.

Public Administration: An Art or a

Science
At a first glance it seems easier to accept public administration as an art. It is just the administration of
Government affairs and for most part it does not follow the laws of Science like absence of normative
value, predictability of behavior and universal application. So, does that mean we cannot list it into a
respectable category of scientific subjects?

There are many authors who ferociously defended it and argued that public administration as an area of
study is indeed a Science. The earliest of them was Lorenz von Stein an 1855, a German professor from
Vienna who said that public administration is an integrated Science and viewing it just as
administrative laws was a restrictive definition. In modern times, categorizing public administration as
Science found favor with many, the most important one being the father of American public administration,
President Woodrow Wilson. We shall read more about the Wilsonian view of public administration in the
next article, however he mainly emphasized that the objective of administrative study is to discover what
government can properly and successfully do and how it can do those things with utmost efficiency with
least possible cost of money or energy.

After Wilson another important argument came from Frederick Taylor who wrote a book called The
Principles of Scientific Management (1911) in which he proposed to discover one best way of doing
things/operation and thus save on cost on time and energy. Luther Gulick and L Urvick collectively
published, Papers on the Science of Administration which reaffirmed its status as a Science. W F
Willoughby stated that public administration like Science has certain fundamental principles
which can be generally applied and therefore it is a Science.

However, there still remain certain aspects to be established before public administration can be actually
and in real terms, be classified as a Science. The places of normative values in public administration
should be clearly defined. More efforts should be put in to understanding the human nature and dynamics
at play in public administration. Lastly, the principles of public administration should derive references
from across the worlds, cultures, type of states etc to make them more universal and free of cultural,
religious and political biases.

The advent of the modern welfare state itself has added, to the changing approach to public
administration. The kind of activities and sphere of works have never been more varied and dynamic and
there has been a never before interest in actually improving the efficiency of the government.

Subject matter experts like Frederick Taylor have opened ways to exploration, experimentation,
observation, collection of data and analysis based on which principles and laws can be made. There are
increasing number of authors like Metcalfe, Fayol, Emerson, Follett, Mooney, and more recently Drucker
etc who have written on the subjects of administration. In-fact Drucker wrote a book called “The Age of
Discontinuity” and one of the chapters of the book called The Sickness of Government became the basis
of the New Public Management theory popular in 1980s which emphasized the market oriented
management of the public sector.

So, one can safely say that with the changing times and more and more studies carried out in the field of
social sciences, administration and human relations, the subject of public administration can no longer
take the shelter of art and would have to emerge stronger with relevant and fundamental principles like
that of Science.

Public and Private Administration

The expansion of public sector into industrial enterprises has been into practice for quite some time, a
little over half a century now. The public sector organizations in order to function efficiently are borrowing
heavily from the business knowledge, administration and process orientation of the private organizations.
However, there still remains a considerable difference between these two administrative practices.

It would be interesting to learn about both similarities and differences between these two to arrive at a
better understanding. Let us first understand the differences and see what the authors and subject matter
experts have to say about it.

According to Paul H. Appleby the public administration is different from private administration in
three important aspects, the first is the political character, secondly the breadth of scope, impact
and consideration and public accountability. These differences seem very fundamental and very valid
in the Iight of our own exploration of the subject in previous articles.

Josia Stamp went a step further and identified four aspects of difference of which the only one similar to
that of Appleby’s is that of public accountability or public responsibility as Stamp identifies it. The other
three are:

 Principle of uniformity

 Principle of external financial control

 Principle of service motive

Herbert Simon cited very practical and easy to understand differences based on popular beliefs and
imagination and therefore might seem more appealing. He said that public administration is bureaucratic
while private administration is business like. Public administration is political while private administration is
apolitical. And finally; the aspect most of us would swear by that public administration is characterized by
red tape while the private administration is free of it.

The management Guru Peter Drucker sums up the difference in more comprehensive manner. He says
that the very intuition which governs both kinds of administration is different from each other. While the
public administration functions on service intuition the private administration follows the business intuition.
They also have different purposes to serve, with different needs, values and objectives. Both of them
make different kind of contribution to the society as well. The way the performance and results are
measured is different in a public administration than that of private one.

Let us now understand the similarities between the two and see to what extent and in which areas are
they similar. You would be surprised to know that there are many similarities between the ways in
which a public and a private administration functions. The similarities are so much that some subject
matter experts and authors like Henry Fayol, M P Follet, Lyndall Urvick do not treat them as different.
Fayol said that all kinds of administration function on some general principle irrespective of them being
public or private. The planning, organizing, commanding and controlling are similar for all administrations.

The above arguments and several other points suggested and illustrated by other authors as well clearly
point out that there are more similarities between the two administrations than what we see and
understand.

 The managerial aspects of planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling are the same for
public and private administration

 The accounting aspects like maintenance of accounts, filing, statistics and stocking are the same

 Both of them have a hierarchical chain of command or reporting as the organizational structure

 Both get influenced, adopt and reform their own practices in the light of best practices of the
other. They also share the same pool of manpower

 And lastly they share similar kinds of personnel and financial problems

Woodrow Wilson’s Vision on Public

Administration
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of USA (1913-1921) and is often addressed as the father of
American Public Administration. Wilson and his contribution to the subject of public administration is
widely read and referred to. He was one of the first political leaders who emphasized the need to increase
the efficiency of the Government.

Wilson argued that administration is the most obvious part of the Government and the least
discussions happen around it. He further says that despite being the executive, the operative and the
most visible side of the Government and being as old as the Government itself it has remain hidden from
the scrutiny and inspection of writer, authors and subject matter experts where it should have been the
centre of debates and researches. He shows little appreciation towards the obsession regarding the
constitution of Government, the philosophical approach towards the existence of State, the sovereignty or
some greater meaning lying at the heart of the Government. Basically what he meant was the know-how
of the actual business of Governing people and how that can be made more efficient.

In the context of the early 20th century USA and the world in general, Wilson and his ideas regarding
administration made sense. Life had changed much since the good old days of farms and cattle and now
there were complexities of trade and commerce, stocks and bonds and financers and then the national
debts, the ever increasing conflicts between the capitalist class and the workers. In the light of these
developments, ways the Government can function also needed a change which unfortunately was not
assessed adequately resulting in inefficiency and wastage of resources.

In addition to above aspects, the Government’s sphere of work was expanding, like the postal service in
America and rail-road lines in Europe. So, if the transition was happening at the grass root level say for
example to manage rail-road, national commissioners were made in addition to older state
commissioners, the resulting extension of administrative function became a matter which needed to be
delicately handled and not carried out in haste.

Wilson also clarified that the studies conducted in the field of public administration were mostly
carried out by French and German academicians and were therefore not entirely relevant and
suited to the needs of the American people and State in its original form. He suggested that any
principle adopted from Europe would have to be Americanized and modified for the complex and
multiform state and a highly decentralized form of Government in the USA.

Wilson had carefully studied the administrative practices of not just France and England but a small
nation like Prussia and praised the ruler Frederick the Great who regarded himself as the chief servant of
the people and his office as a public trust. He also wrote favorably of Napoleon and his recasting of
French administration after ending the monarchial rule. He however; wrote harshly about the ways of
English administrators and those of his own country; pointing out that their history was not of
administrative development but of legislative oversight. There were little progress made in Government
organizations but vast leaps taken in law making and political criticism.

While reading Wilson one cannot help but wonder that whether enthroning public opinion in the matters of
Government a wise decision at all? The dark side of it is that it becomes a larger obstacle to manage;
since any change or reform proposed needs to get pass veto at so many levels. To sum up, Wilson
proposed a very no-nonsense and businesslike approach to administration which should be free of
shackles of political doctrines.

New Public Management Model

The term new public management was coined by scholars from UK and Australia (Hood 1991 and
Hood and Jackson 1991), who were working in the in the areas of public administration. Now, the
origin of this new term was to propose a new point of view towards the organizational design in the public
sector, however after a decade, the meaning of this term in discussions and debates became many.
Some scholars choose to define it as the introduction of new institutional economics to public
management and some used it to refer to pattern changes in policy making. Before we make an effort to
further understand the various aspects of New Public Management, let us see how it is different from the
traditional public administration.

The new public management which emerged in the 1980s represented an attempt to make the public
sector more businesslike and to improve the efficiency of the Government borrowed ideas and
management models from the private sector. It emphasized the centrality of citizens who were the
recipient of the services or customers to the public sector.

New public management system also proposed a more decentralized control of resources and exploring
other service delivery models to achieve better results, including a quasi-market structure where public
and private service providers competed with each other in an attempt to provide better and faster
services. [For e.g. In UK the purchase and provision of healthcare was split up between National Health
Services or NHS and Government funded GP fund holders, this increased efficiency as the hospitals now
needed to provide low cost procedures to win both patients and funds.)

The core themes for the New Public Management were:

 A strong focus on financial control, value for money and increasing efficiency

 A command and control mode of functioning, identifying and setting targets and continuance
monitoring of performance, handing over the power to the senior management

 Introducing audits at both financial and professional levels, using transparent means to review
performances, setting benchmarks, using protocols to ameliorate professional behavior

 Greater customer orientation and responsiveness and increasing the scope of roles played by
non public sector providers
  Deregulating the labor market, replacing collective agreements to individual rewards packages at
senior levels combined with short term contracts

 Discouraging the self regulatory power of the professionals and handing over the power from
individuals to management

 Encouraging more entrepreneurial management than beurocracy with high retrospective

accountability requirements upwards

 Introducing new forms of corporate governance, introducing a board model of functioning and
concentrating the power to the strategic core of the organization

With changing times newer aspects were included in the NPM model mentioned above as well and what
the scholars term as NPM model 2 was brought in. The critical aspects of this new model were:

 Introduction of a more elaborate and evolved quasi-market system

 Creation of more fragmented or loosely contracted public sector organizations at the local level
setting in a change from management of hierarchy to management of contract

 Distinguishing between the small strategic core and the large organizational periphery, market
testing and contracting out the non strategic functions

 Delayering and downsizing

 Introduction of new managerial concepts like Management by Influence, creating network for of
organizations, creating strategic alliances between the organizations

 Moving away from standardized service forms to more flexible and varied service forms

Now, as more and more work was done in the areas of Human Resources and Relations and popular
texts which stressed on the need of excellence, the importance of organizational culture, values, vision
and the concept of Learning Organization introduced by Peter Senge (1990) influenced the new public
management as well and therefore suitable changed were also suggested in the theory by the scholars.

 In a bottom up form of organization- Organizational development and learning was gaining

importance. Organizational culture was seen as a glue which holds the organization together,
judging the performance by results etc were the new point of views

 In the top down form of organization- Securing changes in organizational culture was cited as
important, clarifying and projecting the vision and leadership from top to down was asked for,
private sector emerged as a role model for the neo style public sector, training, corporate logos,
communication strategies, assertive HR and all the other aspects that are characteristic jargon of
private sector were encouraged to be adopted So, basically the new public management was a
radical movement to change not just the way a public sector functions but also the entire
perception about it.

Approaches to Public Administration

We have come across a number of times during our exploration of the topic, that it is somewhat difficult to
define public administration in concrete terms. It has close association, interaction and influences from
several fields of studies like law, political and social science administrative science and human relations
and even behavioral science for that matter. One can easily infer that the approaches to study this field
would also be as varied and as vast as the subject matter itself. And indeed so, that there are many
approaches to public administration as we shall read about in consecutive articles. For the moment,
we would take a step back and try and understand the reason behind so many approaches to this field of
study and why were they required.

Public administration as a serious subject which required scientific attention was first promulgated by
Woodrow Wilson and as we read in the Wilsonian vision of Public Administration he fiercely
recommended that there should be more scrutiny and debate and studies carried out in this area to make
it more efficient and robust.

However, it was only during the beginning of the twentieth century that American Universities introduced
Public Administration as a subject of academic study influenced by L.D White’s important book called
Introduction to the Study of Public Administration. There were also attempts made by scholars to
differentiate between politics and administration, hence comparative study of two to understand Public
Administration better came into existence.

Sometime later the Principles approach to public administration was introduced. This approach was
influenced by W. F. Willoughby’s work called Principles of Public Administration in 1927. His work
emphasized that scientific study and research of administration can help derive fundamental principles
regarding the same. This approach was championed by other authors and scholars like Fayol, Mooney,
Lyndall, Urwick etc. So, resorting to scientific method of exploring, researching, observing, recording,
classifying etc was used to study Public Administration.

By this time, some important work had started happening in the areas of Human Relations by the likes of
Elton Mayo, his Hawthorne experiment threw interesting light on social and psychological forces in work
situations. So the importance of attitudes, feeling, sentiments and social relations, work group dynamics
etc started influencing the vey formal structure and way of working; present and preferred by the public
organizations.

After the Second World War, behavioral sciences were quite a hot debate in the academics with a lot of
research and work carried out in the field. Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behavior and Robert Dahl’s,
The Science of Public Administration: Three Problems; critically questioned the inadequacies and
limitations of the orthodox public administration of the pre war days. Simon focused on the aspect of
decision making in Public Administration and stressed on the need to develop a robust and relevant
administrative theory based on precise and logical study of human behavior.

And recently with the advent of technology in every walk of life and a common consensus amongst
authors and scholars that both public and private administration are similar in many manner, the
management science approach to public management came into existence.

The newest approach is that of policy analysis approach since the Government is venturing into new
areas and different activities with increased involvement in welfare programs, the process of making
public policies and its analysis, the measurement of the output etc became the new areas of study for the
scholars and subject matter experts.

In the subsequent articles we shall dwell deeper into some of these approaches described above and see
how they shaped and influenced the study of Public Administration.

Historical and Legal Approach to the

Study of Public Administration
The study of History is often cited as important to understand the present as well as the future. The study
of public administration also cannot be complete without understanding the evolution and progress of
civilizations.

The Historical approach to public administration focuses on the administrative systems, process
and policies practiced in the past and then try to interpret them relevantly in the context of
present times. There are two sides of the coin which the scholars have argued, while this approach may
provide rich details regarding what worked and what not in the past but authors like John Pierre and B
Guy Peters say that the study of history cannot provide any usable information which can be used now
and the students of public administration should not have such misconceived notions. The important point
to note is that scholars should know when to revisit the past and when to disassociate from it to draw
pertinent theories and conclusions.

The study of history of administration does not become any lesser important even in the light of above
contrasting argument. It remains important because developments in society over time and ages have a
lasting effect on the quality and quantity of public services delivered.

This approach helps the scholars and students to understand that how the Government adjusted its
administration and functioning with changing times and what ramifications it had. The study of the past
also provides crucial information regarding why some methods, policies, systems etc were adopted and
which needs did they address.

With the importance of historical approach established in studies of public administration, we shall now
see what the legal approach to public administration was. Taking the legal route to public administration
would venture into the formidable legal structure and organization of public bodies. As the name
suggests, this approach associated itself with laws, rules, regulations, codes, official duties etc. It also
described the power, limitations and discretionary powers of the authority and judicial decisions. Many
countries especially in Europe like Germany, France, Belgium and others have adopted the legal route to
study public administration.

It works well for these countries as they have two distinct divisions of laws, the constitutional and the
other administrative. The constitutional law mainly dealt with the interrelation of power between the
legislative, executive and judicial branches of the Government while the administrative part concerns itself
with the functioning of the public organizations.

The legal approach throws light on the legal framework in which the public administration
operates but excludes other important and informal aspects like sociological and psychological
dynamics at play and therefore is considered an incomplete approach by many scholars. However
there were many other takers for it and in USA, Frank J Goodnow, was an important advocate of this legal
approach. In his book Politics and Administration he challenges Montesquieu’s theory of separation of
power in the book Esprit De Lois which proposed three branches of power; legislative, executive and
judiciary but highlighted the independence of judiciary from administrative as the sole recognition of
judicial power. According to Goodnow, this in itself was not sufficient and that extreme form of this theory
was incapable of application to any concrete political organization. Goodnow and his further work have
greatly influenced the way the American Public Administration shaped up in the later years.

Institutional Approach to Public

Administration
The instructional approach to the study of public administration concerns itself with the
institutions and organizations of the State. The core area of this method lies in detailed study of the
structure, the functioning, rules, and regulations of the executives, legislatures and the departments of the
Government. The scholars who practice this approach consider administration to be an apolitical and
technical function which lies only in the aspect of policy implementation.

Now, there were many authors like L D White and Luther Gulick who concentrated their effort in
describing what an institutional structure was and did little to build any theory actually. The reader may be
intrigued as to why this special attention was paid to define institutions. The present day definition of
institution encompassing all kinds of rules, regulations and organizations is argued as inaccurate by many
authors like B Guy Peters and Jon Pierre. Institutionalization of an organization takes time.

An organization keeps getting complex by adding informal norms and practices which happens through its
interaction with the external environment and they are in a sense independent of the individuals who
make an organization at a given point of time. However, according to Selznick (1957), any organization
which is complex needs to be infused with value which is beyond the technical requirement of the tasks
that are performed by that organization. This means that an organization has a distinctive sense of self
and identity and its way and its beliefs become important for the society as well. It also starts representing
the aspiration of the community and in turn influences the community with their own values and beliefs. A
real institution becomes a symbol for the community in many ways, like the very building in which it is
housed. It can be interestingly explained and seen all through the History that the revolting group often
occupy the presidential palace or offices or the parliamentary buildings or pose a threat to the powerful
and symbolic structures like the terrorist threat on the Pentagon during 9/11 and the 26/11 Taj Hotel attack
in India.

The above discussion becomes relevant with respect to the study of public administration
because Government organizations are institutional in many ways and represent the needs and
aspirations of the community. Therefore, studying and understanding their administration becomes
important to make them more efficient and result oriented.

The traditional study of public administration emphasized on the knowledge of History and Law but this
institutional approach focuses on the organizational structure, goals and principles as primary. So, a lot of
attention was given to the problems related to the functioning of an organization like delegation,
coordination & control and bureaucratic structure.

The main drawback to this approach was that little or no attention was given to the external sociological
and psychological factors. These factors affect the organization in ways which are not always subtle, but
have strong ramifications on the health and well being of an organization.

With this new approach the older approach and theories to the study of public administration also
underwent a few changes. There were serious questions raised on the politics- administration bifurcation.
The premise that the basic principles of administration can be applied universally was also challenged
with the emergence of diverse administrative environments. The administrative goals of economy and
efficiency were supplemented with social and economic progress. And also, a lot of management
principles came into the field of public administration. We shall explore a couple of more approaches to
the study of administration in subsequent articles.

Behavioral Systems Approach to

Public Administration
The behavioral approach to public administration owes its genesis to the Human Relations Movement of
the 1930s. The movement started off as a protest to the traditional approaches to public administration
that focused on organizations, institutionalization, rules, and code of conducts etc with absolutely no
mention of people who are the center of all these activities.
The pioneering work done by Taylor and the emergence of Scientific Management created quite stir not
just in the industrial sector but also in management and study of public administration. Henry Fayol
worked on his Fayolism at around the same time as Taylor and came up with different set of functions and
principles for the management bringing in terms like discipline, unity of command, equity and team spirit.

Herbort Sumon was one of the torch bearers of this moment and stated that administrative
behavior is part of behavioral sciences and the study of public administration cannot be complete
without the study of individual and collective human behavior in administrative situations. The
behavioral approach has certain salient features like:

 The literature that has been written on the topic stays away from being prescriptive. It follows a
descriptive course with an exception to the studies carried out in the areas of motivation

 Individuals were paid attention to and aspects like motivation, decision making, authority and
control were brought into focus

 The informal aspects of an organization and communication patterns amongst the members were
emphasized

 The effort was to identify operational definition of terms and a lot of empirical study like field study,
laboratory study and statistical methods were conducted

 It borrows a lot from other social sciences, social psychology and cultural anthropology

This approach made more sense and had greater relevance than earlier approaches as it took into
consideration the fact that the political, social, economical and psychological environments have an effect
on human motivation and which ultimately has an effect on the work output of an individual. It also helped
to develop an understanding of what, how and why of the way the public administrators act. It showed
that the way administration is conducted is influenced by human sentiments, presumptions biases and
perception, which many of us may have experienced firsthand during our interaction with government
organizations and public administrators.

Behavioral approach has contributed to the study of public administration in many ways like the
scholars started studying cross-structural and cross-cultural administrative behaviors and which
further paved the way for the comparative study of public administration.

Like all new things, this approach too has its fair share of criticism and the critics have ruthlessly
questioned the utility of this approach in the analysis of administrative problems. They find it limited in
scope and of little use. The study of public administration goes beyond small social groups and deals with
large communities and therefore the behavioral approach falls short.

The modern behavioral approach is leaning towards becoming more action oriented and prescription
format nevertheless. Roscoe Martin and his Craft Perspective define the shift better. It concerns itself with
the decisions, outcomes and the political skill needed to perform a particular managerial job.

The Closed and Open Models of

Public Administration
The closed and open model approach to the study of public administration focuses on the organization
itself. One way to study complex organizations is to view them as an open or a closed system. Before we
try to understand the open and close system with respect to the study of public administration in general
and organizations in specific, let us make an effort to know what an open and a closed system are.
An open system is a system which interacts and exchanges matter with its environment, imagine a pond
while a closed system remains isolated from its environment; think an aquarium. While studying complex
organizations American sociologist James D Thompson published a book in 1967 called Organization in
Action in which he analyzed the behaviors of the complex organization as entities in action. He studied
the organization in the light of their technologies and environment and thus he came to identify the
meaning of a closed and open system within organizational context.

According to Thompson, an organization is called a close system when:

 The resources of an organization are employed in a functional manner

 Each component of the organization contributes to the logic of the system where controlled
mechanisms are employed to diminish uncertainties

The examples he gave of a closed system were Taylor and his Scientific Management, Weber’s concept
of beurocracy and Gulick and Urwick’s Administrative Management.

Thompson also defined an open system with respect to organizations, he said that: The complex
organization is a set of interdependent parts which together make up a whole because each
contributes something and receives something from the whole which in turn is interdependent
with some larger environment. So an open system is dynamic, full of surprises as well as uncertainties.
Systems keep evolving through a continuous process of development and strive to attain homeostasis or
the state of equilibrium.

An important case study was carried out by Philip Selznick in 1940s to study the open system approach
to organizational analysis. He conducted his research on the emerging Tennessee Valley Authority
entitled TVA and Grass Roots (1949). He focused his research on the aspects of decentralization and
involvement of already existing local and state agencies, with a view, to practice democratic planning. It
was during this case study that he defined an open system also known as the institutional approach,
about which we know from the previous chapter. According to Selznick, an organization is understood to
be a means to achieve goals but the members of the organization act more than just means; they
participate whole heartedly with each individual equipped with different skills, expertise, motivations and
desires. An organization also needs to interact with parties, interest groups and other agencies, which
communicate and influence the organization; and each other.

From the managerial context, an organization cannot take only one strict approach that is, either of an
open or a closed system, it needs to keep switching positions as and when need arises to achieve the
stability and certainty required to perform jobs and deliver goals.

Public Policy Approach to Public

Administration
We remember reading about the Wilsonian philosophy of public administration and the famous dichotomy
of politics and administration. After Wilson, there were many authors like Frank J Goodnow, L D White
and F. W. Willoughby who elaborated on the topic and reaffirmed the need to separate the political
functions and administrative functions of the government. Willoughby went to the extent of calling public
administration as the fourth branch of Government after legislative, executive and judiciary.

However, this politic-administration dichotomy theory lost it relevance after the Second World War. The
writers, authors, academicians and subject matter experts finally awakened to the fact that administration
of a government can never be free of political elements. They started protesting and writing against the
separation of politics and administration as they could clearly see that both were horribly intertwined with
one another and impossible to separate both in spirit and action.

After the Second World War, there was a renewed interest in the aspects of administration
because of the practical encounters and alliances formed during the war, creation of international
organizations and emergence of the developing countries. Also, after the war, the Government
reinvented itself from a peace keeper and provider of services to become a Welfare State. The public
expenditure in most parts of the world increased greatly after 1945 as the Governments started taking
more and more initiatives for the welfare of the society. A lot of reforms were carried out in areas not just
regarding the content of public policy but also the ways in which they were formulated.

This new approach gained momentum after 1970s when a lot of analysis started happening around the
way the government policies affected the people. The Vietnam War and Watergate scandal in US, the
Administrative Reforms Commission established in India in 1966, the initiative to reduce public
expenditure in order to reduce direct taxation under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the creation of the
Malaysian Administrative and Management Planning Unit in 1977 in Malaysia were to name a few.

With changing times, the needs of the society have also changed and so has the role of the government
and nature of its policies. The increase in the average age of the population has made the Government to
look into the pension policies in the developed countries while the young illiterate population of the
developing countries has forced their governments to come up with policies like Right to Education in
India.

The irony of this public policy approach is that it encompasses many aspects of government
functioning. The spectrum has become so broad that; to a student of public administration, it appears
confused and spread all over. The other approaches that have clear segregation between the politics and
administration were clearly distinguishable and easy to understand.

Many readers may also get dissuaded to realize that politics influence the policy making as well as the
administration aspects of the way a Government functions. However with increasing number of
stakeholders and pressure groups, the politics can be kept in check and the role of politician comes under
scanner to dissuade any kind of strategic policy making to benefit only a few.