History of Public Administration
Antiquity to the 19th century
Dating back to Antiquity, Pharaohs, kings and emperors have required pages, treasurers,
and tax collectors to administer the practical business of government. Prior to the 19th century,
staffing of most public administrations was rife with nepotism, favoritism, and political
patronage, which was often referred to as a "spoils system". Public administrators have been the
"eyes and ears" of rulers until relatively recently. In medieval times, the abilities to read and
write, add and subtract were as dominated by the educated elite as public employment.
Consequently, the need for expert civil servants whose ability to read and write formed the basis
for developing expertise in such necessary activities as legal record-keeping, paying and feeding
armies and levying taxes. As the European Imperialist age progressed and the militarily powers
extended their hold over other continents and people, the need for a sophisticated public
administration grew.
The eighteenth-century noble, King Frederick William I of Prussia, created professorates
in Cameralism in an effort to train a new class of public administrators. The universities of
Frankfurt an der Oder and University of Halle were Prussian institutions emphasizing economic
and social disciplines, with the goal of societal reform. Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi was the
most well-known professor of Cameralism. Thus, from a Western European perspective, Classic,
Medieval, and Enlightenment-era scholars formed the foundation of the discipline that has come
to be called public administration.
Lorenz von Stein, an 1855 German professor from Vienna, is considered the founder of
the science of public administration in many parts of the world. In the time of Von Stein, public
administration was considered a form of administrative law, but Von Stein believed this concept
too restrictive. Von Stein taught that public administration relies on many prestablished
disciplines such as sociology, political science, administrative law and public finance. He called
public administration an integrating science, and stated that public administrators should be
concerned with both theory and practice. He argued that public administration is a science
because knowledge is generated and evaluated according to the scientific method.
Modern American public administration is an extension of democratic governance,
justified by classic and liberal philosophers of the western world ranging from Aristotle to John
Locke to Thomas Jefferson.
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 entitled
"The Study of Administration." He 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." Wilson was more influential to the science of public
administration than Von Stein, primarily due to an article Wilson wrote in 1887 in which he
advocated four concepts:
• Separation of politics and administration (Dichotomy of Public Administration and
Politics)
• 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
The separation of politics and administration has been the subject of lasting debate. The
different perspectives regarding this dichotomy contribute to differentiating characteristics of the
suggested generations of public administration.
By the 1920s, scholars of public administration had responded to Wilson's solicitation and
thus textbooks in this field were introduced. A few distinguished scholars of that period were,
Luther Gulick, Lyndall Urwick, Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor, and others. Frederick Taylor
(1856-1915), 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.
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.
Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system (approach): ‘It is only
through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and
working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty
of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management
alone.
US in the 1940s
The separation of politics and administration advocated by Wilson continues to play a
significant role in public administration today. However, the dominance of this dichotomy was
challenged by second generation scholars, beginning in the 1940s. Luther Gulick's fact-value
dichotomy was a key contender for Wilson's proposed politics-administration dichotomy. In
place of Wilson's first generation split, Gulick advocated a "seamless web of discretion and
interaction".
Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick are two second-generation scholars. Gulick,
Urwick, and the new generation of administrators built on the work of contemporary behavioral,
administrative, and organizational scholars including Henri Fayol, Fredrick Winslow Taylor,
Paul Appleby, Frank Goodnow, and Willam Willoughby. The new generation of organizational
theories no longer relied upon logical assumptions and generalizations about human nature like
classical and enlightened theorists.
Gulick developed a comprehensive, generic theory of organization that emphasized
the scientific method, efficiency, professionalism, structural reform, and executive control.
Gulick summarized the duties of administrators with an acronym; POSDCORB, which
stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. Fayol
developed a systematic, 14-point, treatment of private management. Second-generation theorists
drew upon private management practices for administrative sciences. A single, generic
management theory bleeding the borders between the private and the public sector was thought
to be possible. With the general theory, the administrative theory could be focused on
governmental organizations.
Post–World War II to the 1970s
The mid-1940s theorists challenged Wilson and Gulick. The politics-administration
dichotomy remained the center of criticism. In the 1960s and 1970s, government itself came
under fire as ineffective, inefficient, and largely a wasted effort. The costly American
intervention in Vietnam along with domestic scandals including the bugging of Democratic party
headquarters (the 1974 Watergate scandal) are two examples of self-destructive government
behavior that alienated citizens.
There was a call by citizens for efficient administration to replace ineffective, wasteful
bureaucracy. Public administration would have to distance itself from politics to answer this call
and remain effective. Elected officials supported these reforms. The Hoover Commission,
chaired by University of Chicago professor Louis Brownlow, to examine reorganization of
government.
Concurrently, after World War II, the whole concept of public administration expanded
to include policy-making and analysis, thus the study of ‘administrative policy making and
analysis’ was introduced and enhanced into the government decision-making bodies. Later on,
the human factor became a predominant concern and emphasis in the study of Public
Administration. This period witnessed the development and inclusion of other social sciences
knowledge, predominantly, psychology, anthropology, and sociology, into the study of public
administration. Henceforth, the emergence of scholars such as, Fritz Morstein Marx with his
book ‘The Elements of Public Administration’ (1946), Paul H. Appleby ‘Policy and
Administration’ (1952), Frank Marini ‘Towards a New Public Administration’ (1971), and
others that have contributed positively in these endeavors.
1980s–1990s
In the late 1980s, yet another generation of public administration theorists began to
displace the last. The new theory, which came to be called New Public Management, 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.
Some modern authors define NPM as a combination of splitting large bureaucracies into
smaller, more fragmented agencies, encouraging competition between different public agencies,
and encouraging competition between public agencies and private firms and using economic
incentives lines (e.g., performance pay for senior executives or user-pay models). NPM treats
individuals as "customers" or "clients" (in the private sector sense), rather than as citizens.
Late 1990s–2000
In the late 1990s, Janet and Robert Denhardt 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).One example of this is openforum.com.au, an Australian non-for-profit
eDemocracy project which invites politicians, senior public servants, academics, business people
and other key stakeholders to engage in high-level policy debate.
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.
Core branches
In academia, the field of public administration consists of a number of sub-fields. Scholars
have proposed a number of different sets of sub-fields. One of the proposed models uses five
"pillars":
• Human resource management is an in-house structure that ensures that public service
staffing is done in an unbiased, ethical and values-based manner. The basic functions of
the HR system are employee benefits, employee health care, compensation, etc.
• Organizational Theory in Public Administration is the study of the structure of
governmental entities and the many particulars inculcated in them.
• Ethics in public administration serves as a normative approach to decision making.
• Policy analysis serves as an empirical approach to decision making.
• Public budgeting is the activity within a government that seeks to allocate scarce
resources among unlimited demands.
Ethics in the public sector
In general, ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address morality. In the public
sector, ethics addresses the fundamental premise of a public administrators duty as a "steward" to
the public. In other words, it is the moral justification and consideration for decisions and actions
made during the completion of daily duties when working to provide the general services of
government and nonprofit organizations. Ethics are an accountability standard by which the
public will scrutinize the work being conducted by the members of these organizations.
Decisions are based upon ethical principles, which are the perception of what the general
public would view as correct. Having such a distinction ensures that public administrators are not
acting on an internal set of ethical principles without first questioning whether those principles
would hold to public scrutiny. It also has placed an additional burden upon public administrators
regarding the conduct of their personal lives. Public sector ethics is an attempt to create a more
open atmosphere within governmental operations.
In the Philippines, Public Officials and Employees were guided by RA6713.
Normative Foundation of Public Administration
A normative approach in public administration calls for enhanced citizen participation in
public decisions. However, this approach overlooks the environment that shapes administrative
behavior, an oversight likely to hamper reform efforts targeted at achieving the normative goals
of participation. The administrative perspective is important because public managers shape
participation forums and determine whether public input has an impact on decisions. In
organizing participation, administrators are likely to be guided by an instrumental view of
relative costs and benefits. In this case, public managers perceived administrative costs to be low
relative to instrumental benefits, such as the quality of public input and a need to increase
governmental legitimacy. They also applied innovative participation technologies to reduce
administrative costs and raise instrumental benefits, reinvigorating the frequently criticized
public hearing.
