The Nature and Meaning

of Public Administration
Dr. Perla E. Legaspi
The Nature of Public Administration
 Concerned with the conduct of public
affairs
 Management of the public’s business
 Includes anything that can be
construed as the community’s
response to social problems which
require collective not individual
resolution through some form of
public intervention
 Nature of Public Administration
 Its practice is an art; its study is a
science
 Distinguishes between theory and
practice, between study and
application
 Borrows from and lends to other
disciplines, some of which overlap in
subject matter
 Meaning of Public Administration
 How people organize themselves as a
public, as a collectivity in which they
recognize mutual obligations and duties,
to handle their common problems and
achieve common goals constitutes the
subject matter of public administration
 Public administration should not be
considered administration of the public but
administration for the public
 The Peculiarities of Public
Administration
 It is unavoidable
 It expects obedience

 It has priority

 It has exceptional size

 Its top management is political

 Its performance is extraordinarily difficult

to measure
 More is expected of public administration
 Approaches to Identify the
Discipline
 Identification of governmental administration
 Identification of public organizations grounded in
public law, financed by public money, and staffed
by career public servants
 Study of publicly oriented administrative attitudes
 Unique features of the processes employed in
activating public policy
 Publicness – it seeks a meaning separate from
the advocacy of the public interest, absence of
profit motive, and acceptance of public
accountability and political control
 The Identity Crisis
 Martin Landau – would center public
administration on decision-making following
Herbert Simon and Dwight Waldo (one type of
rational human cooperation calculated to realize
given goals or public goals)
 Vincent Ostrom – suggests that the theory of
bureaucracy should be replaced as the central
concept with the theory of public goods
 George Frederickson – public administration is an
interdisciplinary field, drawing on any relevant
discipline needed to prepare students for public
service or to understand public problems or to
improve governmental administration and public
sector performance
 Continuation
 Both sides agree that they focus on
the public domain, the public arena,
communal goals, collective purposes
and social objectives and both agree
that such things deserve
independent study and thought