One scholar claims that public administration has no generally
accepted definition, because the scope of the subject is so great and so
debatable that it is easier to explain than define. There is much disagreement
about whether the study of public administration can properly be called a
discipline, largely because of the debate over whether public administration is
a subfield of political science or a subfield of administrative science
(Kenneth 2012)[1].From the academic perspective, the National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES) in the United States defines the study of public
administration as "A program that prepares individuals to serve as
managers in the executive arm of local, state, and federal government and that
focuses on the systematic study of executive organization and management.
Includes instruction in the roles, development, and principles of public
administration; the management of public policy; executive-legislative
relations; public budgetary processes and financial management; administrative
law; public personnel management; professional ethics; and research methods.
Therefore, Public administration houses the implementation of government policy and an academic
discipline that studies this implementation and that prepares civil servants
for this work.As a field of inquiry with a diverse scope its fundamental
goal... is to advance management and policies so that government can function (Rabin, Hildreth, and Miller
1989). Some of the various
definitions which have been offered for the term are: the management of public
programs (Denhardt 2009), the translation of politics into the reality that
citizens see every day (Donald and Fessler 2009) and the study of government decision making, the analysis of the
policies themselves, the various inputs that have produced them, and the inputs
necessary to produce alternative policies ( McKinney and Howard 1998)
Brief history:
In the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson is considered the
father of public administration. He first formally recognized public
administration in an 1887 article entitledThe
Study of Administration. The future president wrote that it is the object
of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and
successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the
utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of
energy (Wilson1887).
He advocated four concepts:
·
Separation of
politics and administration
·
Comparative
analysis of political and private organizations
·
Improving
efficiency with business-like practices and attitudes toward daily operations
·
Improving the
effectiveness of public service through management and by training civil
servants, merit-based assessment
Frederick Taylor, another prominent scholar in the field of
administration and management also published a book entitled ‘The Principles of Scientific Management’
(1911). He believed that scientific analysis would lead to the discovery of the
‘one best way’ to do things and /or carrying out an operation. This, according
to him could help save cost and time. Taylor’s technique was later introduced
to private industrialists, and later into the various government organizations
(Jeong, 2007).
Taylor's approach is often referred to as Taylor's Principles,
and/or Taylorism. Taylor's scientific management consisted of main four
principles (Frederick W. Taylor, 1911):
·
Replace
rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the
tasks.
·
Scientifically
select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to
train themselves.
·
Provide
‘Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that
worker's discrete task’ (Montgomery 1997: 250).
·
Divide work
nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply
scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually
perform the tasks.
In 1980s and 1990s there was a rise of New Public Management
(NPM), was proposed by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler in their book Reinventing Government. The new model
advocated the use of private sector-style models, organizational ideas and
values to improve the efficiency and service-orientation of the public sector.
NPM's rise seems to belinked with four other administrative
'megatrends', namely:
(i)
attempts to
slow down or reverse govemment growth in terms of overt public spending and
staffing (Dunsire and Hood 1989);
(ii)
the shift
toward privatization and quasi-privatization and away from core govemment
institutions, with renewed emphasis on 'subsidiarity' in service provision (cf.
Hood and Schuppert 1988; Dunleavy 1989).
(iii)
the development
of automation, particularly in information technology, in the production and
distribution of public services;
(iv)
the development
of a more intemational agenda, increasingly focused on general issues of public
management, policy design, decision styles and intergovernmental cooperation,
on top of the older tradition of individual country specialisms in public
administration.
(Hood 1990b)
In late 1990s and 2000sJanet and Robert Denhardt(2000) proposed a
new public service model in response to the dominance of NPM.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).
Anthropology and public administration:
The major field to which anthropologists have contributed directly
is that of the administration of dependent peoples, either in a colonial
context or in a situation such as that of the North American Indians.
Anthropologists have been widely used as resources of expert knowledge about
the workings of cultures and societies and have been hired to provide the
information and analysis which government officials have used to form policy
and design procedures for its implementation. The post of “Government
Anthropologist” was a standard one in the British colonies; the French
established research centres which sponsored fieldwork with applied
implicationsl governments in Canada and the United States have had
anthropologists on staff or as consultants; and in at least one instance, that
of the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, anthropologists
were assigned direct administrative responsibility for the implementation of
policies based upon their own cultural analysis.
In post war scenario the role of anthropologists in public
administration is increasingly becoming prominent and inevitable. As the
differences between administration and politics is apparent and more scientific
tools are being used for policy making there is a rising demand of
anthropologists to gather baseline data on populations to be governed and
administered. The catchy phrases like “Needs Assessment”, “impact assessments”
which are expected to deliver inputs in policy implications, failures and felt
changes are increasingly becoming fields for anthropologists. As scholars like
Fenno (1990) argues for the needs of gathering anthropological knowledge on
politicians’ lifeworlds and their modes of decision making newer avenues for
anthropologists are opening. Today anthropologists are playing different roles
in public administrations these roles range from doing research for betterment
of public service delivery to actually catering public services to the people.
Following is a list of positions anthropologists occupy in and
around the domain of Public Administration:
1. Policy research.
2. Programme evaluator and designer
3. Needs assessor
4. Impact assessor
5. Planner
6. Advocator
7. Advisor
8. Consultant
To make anthropological knowledge and methodology more effective
there are several new methods for doing policy analysis which helps in
betterment of public administration. Methods like Participatory Rural Appraisal
(PRA), principally advocated by Robert Chambers, where local people are asked
to make active participation for quick understanding of problems and
possibilities are highly practiced. The use of Ethnographic sensitivity in
understanding the local needs have become an art of doing anthropology. Other
methods like Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) are also increasingly used.
Participatory ethnography in organizations to assess the
organizational effectiveness for betterment of the service delivery system with
further suggestions, coupling of participation and change management have make
the discipline of public administration more rich.
[1]Kernaghan, Kenneth. "Public administration" in The Canadian
Encyclopedia. Available online at:http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0006540
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