(Public Administration Assignment)

Name – B. Mohita
Course – B. A. (Hons). Political Science
Roll no. – 2019/6/070

Explain the process of 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 the discipline of Public Administration, as an
academic discourse has developed through the
succession of largely six paradigms- that is, how the field
has seen itself in the past and present.

The Beginning
In 1887, Woodrow Wilson largely set the tone for the
early study of American public administration in an essay
titled “The Study of Administration.” Wilson’s article 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. He called for the bringing of more
intellectual resources to bear in the management of the
state. Wilson was vague on issues that later would fire
blazing academoc debates, but he unquestionably
posited one unambiguous thesis that has had a lasting
impact on the field : Public administration is worth
studying.
Another development of the period that led to the
planting of public administration’s intellectual roots in
practical ground was the reformist ‘public service
movement'. It was one of the major factors in John D.
Rockfeller's decision in 1906 to found and fund the New
York Bureau of Municipal Research, a prototype of what
we know as “think tanks” today. In 1911, the Bureau
established its Training School for Public Service, the
nation’s first school of public administration, which
produced the nation's first trained corps of public
administrators.

Paradigm 1 : The Politics/ Administration dichotomy,

1900 -1926
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 . In his book Politics and Administration, he also
draws a functional distinction between politics and
administration.
Goodnow contended that there were “two distinct
functions of government,” which he identified with the
title of his book. “Politics”, wrote Goodnow, “has to do
with policies or expressions of the state will,” while
administration “has to do with the execution of these
policies. Goodnow's point – that elected politicians and
appointed administrators do different things – eventually
was labeled by academics as the politics/administration
dichotomy.
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).

Paradigm 2 : Principles of Public Administration, 1927-

1937
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.
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. 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 by 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.

1938-1950
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.
Finally, as a result of these experiences, now the attempt
was reintroduce a focus on the broader social, moral,
and political theoretical effectiveness to challenge the
dogma of managerial effectiveness.
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 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’.

Paradigm 3 : Public Administration as Political Science,

1950-1970
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. Political Science- the
presumptive “mother discipline” of public
administration, has had profound effect on the character
of the field. Political Science provided the field with the
democratic values of pluralistic polity, political
participation, equality and due process of of law which
continue to hold a bedrock position in public
administration.

Paradigm 4 : Public administration as management

Because of their estrangement within the political
science departments, a few public administrators began
searching for an alternative in management, sometimes
called administrative science or generic management.
Management had some distinct and beneficial influence
on public administration. Among them was it’s pressure
on public administration to develop new methodologies
of management that worked where traditional, private
sector methods could not. But an unambiguously clear
impact of the management paradigm was that it pished
public administration school into rethinking what the
“public ” in public administration really meant.

Paradigm 5 & 6 : Public Administration as Public

Administration and Governance & other new
developments
“Public administration as public administration” refers to
the successful break with both political science and
practice management, and its emergence as an
autonomous field of study and practice.
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
1986: 22). 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.

Public administration and Globalisation

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. 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
socioeconomic–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.

Conclusion
Thus, public administration has undergone a sea change
in response to new inputs from the contemporary
socioeconomic 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
1. Meaning, Dimensions and Significance of the
Discipline, Nicholas Henry, Public Administration and
Public Affairs
2. Evolution of Public administration as a discipline ,
Public Administration in a Globalising World, Bidyut
Chakrabarty