Managerial, political, and legal approaches

TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

 

Public administration involves a number of complex concerns and functions. It is not surprising, therefore, that as an academic discipline or theory, public administration lacks coherence.

Some of scholars viewed it as a managerial endeavor, similar to practices in the private sector. Others emphasized its political aspects. Still others viewed it as a distinctively legal discipline, noting the importance of constitutions and regulations in public administration.

Those who defined public administration in managerial terms, viewed public administration essentially the same as big business and accordingly ought to be run according to the same managerial principles. They promoted the bureaucratic organizational structure of public administration. Bureaucracy requires a highly specialized division of labor which enables each worker to become an expert at what he or she does. Then, specialization requires coordination and hierarchy, that creates a chain of authority to manage and coordinate the work. Data were gathered and statistically analyzed. The selection of public servants was recommended to be based according to their efficiency and performance. They believed that public employees should be prohibited from taking an active part in politics as “administrative questions are not political questions”, and to become businesslike they had to be come nonpolitical. Law was deemphasized: as Leonard White (1923) stressed, “the study of administration should start from the base of management rather than the foundation of law”. In making decisions public administrators were to choose most cost-effective.

The managerial approach tends to minimize the distinction between public and private administration.

Public administration differs from private administration in many significant ways, such as:

1. Separation of powers, that is their division into chief executives, legislature, and courts, helps to avoid different political pressures and to save people from autocracy. At the same time it may frustrate coordination between them that often creates a very complex environment for contemporary public administration. This situation is not observed in the private sector.

2. Constitutional concerns frequently run counter the values of private management.

3. The profit motive is not central to the public sector. The governmental obligation to promote the public interest distinguishes public administration from private administration and management.

4. Public agencies do not face free, competitive markets in which their services done. This remoteness makes it difficult to evaluate the efficiency of public administrators. If government agencies produce a product that is not sold freely in open markets, then it is hard to determine what the product is worth.

5. The actions of public administrators have the force of law while the private sector must turn the public sector’s courts and police power for the enforcement of contracts.

Public administration viewed as a problem in political theory placed a different set of values: representativeness, political responsiveness, and accountability of elected officials to the citizens. They stress political pluralism within public administration. Public administration is to reflect public choice, which may or may not coincide with generalizations that are scientifically derived.

The legal approach emphasizes the rule of law and views public administration as applying and enforcing the law in concrete circumstances to protect an individual from malicious, arbitrary, erroneous, or unconstitutional deprivation of life or administrative action.

In contemporary public administration the elements of all the three approaches can be found.

(On the basis of Rosenbloom, 15-32)

 

F. Discussion

 

Ex. 1. Express your viewpoint on the following statements:

1) "Public organizations are more dependent on government allocations, more constrained by law, more exposed to political influences, and more difficult to evaluate than business organizations".

2) "The New Public Administration reasserted the importance of normative values, particularly social justice".

3) "Citizens, students and scholars all round the world have come to understand the enormous impact of public administration on all of us".

 

Ex. 2. Speak on the following problems:

1) Successful business can (can't) be seen as the model for the proper management of government.

2) Public administration is (is not) equal to business management.

 

G. Writing