Chapter 1: Introduction

I. Introduction:


i. Meaning, Scope and Significance of Public Administration;


ii. Private and Public Administration;


iii. Evolution of Public Administration as a discipline.


The Very first Point to discuss in the context of Public Administration is basically what is meant by Public Administration? To explain this better let us take the very first topic of Public Administration.


i. Meaning, Scope and Significance of Public Administration:






MEANING of PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION


The word Public Administration means the implementation of government policy and an academic discipline that studies this implementation and that prepares civil servants for this work. Its fundamental goal is to advance management and policies so that government can function properly. Public Administration may be defined as: "the management of public programs” or the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day" 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."

Public administration is concerned with the organization of government policies and programmes as well as the behavior of officials (usually non-elected) formally responsible for their conduct", Many unelected public servants can be considered to be public administrators, including police officers, municipal budget analysts, HR benefits administrators, city managers, Census analysts, and cabinet secretaries are few examples. Public administrators are public servants working in public departments and agencies, at all levels of government.

SCOPE or FUNCTIONS of PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION


· It is a cooperative group effort in a public setting.


· It covers all three branches Legislative, Executive and Judicial and their inter-relationships.


· It has an important role in the formulation of public policy, and is thus a part of the


· Political process.


· It is different in significant ways from private administration.


· It is closely associated with numerous private groups and individuals in providing services to the community.





SIGNIFICANCE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION






a. Promoting Publicness: In a democratic society, Public Administration has to be explicitly 'public' in terms of democratic values, power-sharing and openness. This calls for a new climate in the bureaucracy. Public Administration, in practice, has to absorb the principles of democracy as an overarching form of the government.


b. Policy Sensitivity: As governments are called upon to play increasingly active roles in times of rapid changes and social crisis, innovative and timely policy formulation becomes 'a prime necessity in the government.


c. Increased Capability of Government: Effective policy implementation, Goals have to be clearly set; planning, programming and projections have to be followed step by step; and project management in all its ramifications has to have top priority in government. The strength of Administration and the legitimacy of the government itself would depend more and more on the administration's capacity to deliver the goods in time and in response to the demands of the citizens.


d. Shared understanding of social reality: The capacity to cope with social and administrative complexity can be enhanced by a deliberate policy of organizational openness. The underlying assumption here is the administration needs to understand the diverse interests and influences. In today's complex administrative world, construction of administrative reality has to be based on the shared understanding of its actors such as the men at the top, the middle managers, the employees and the citizens. The centralized, insular bureaucracy does not fit in with the contemporaneous socio-administrative reality.


e. Administration as a learning experience: Shifting social reality and complex environmental conditions impose certain rigors on Public Administration today.










II. Private And public administration


· Private Administration: Private administration is the administration for the private sectors; is followed by a private company. The government is not controlling the administration of private sector but it examines the rules and regulation made by private sectors.


· Public Administration: Public Administration means the implementation of government policy and an academic discipline that studies this implementation and that prepares civil servants for this work. Its fundamental goal is to advance management and policies so that government can function properly.




Difference Between Private and Public Administration


Ø GOAL AND OBJECTIVE: The first and the foremost difference between the two sectors is their principles or goal. While private administration has a definite mission, which is the pursuit of profit or stability or growth of revenues, public administration, on the other hand, has ambiguous purposes.


Ø DECISION MAKING: Another fact that makes the public sector differ from the private is decision making. In public administration, the decision must be and should be pluralistic. While private administration's decision-making is much simpler it's monopolistic. This type of decision-making would avoid any major conflicts in interest.


Ø VISIBILITY: Visibility of public administrators is another notable difference between public and private sector. While a manager in a private business may work in relative obscurity, the public manager must operate in the public eye. His or her actions are constantly subjected to public scrutiny. (Denhardt) The publicness of the work of the public manager doesn't end in merely carrying out public policy, the public manager has to respond to the demands of the public.


Ø POLITICAL ASPECT: Political aspect is more important in the public administration than in the private administration. Policy decisions normally affect companies directly and indirectly, through laws, regulations and financial support. The public sector is at least formally controlled by elected politicians. The link between this governance dimension and funding of current expenses of the activities implies a very strong link between ownership and control on the one hand and the growth strategies of the subsidiary organizations.




III. evolution of public administration as a discipline


Public administration is as old as society and state themselves. It evolved as the agency of state which runs the administration of the country. However, conscious theorizing about it is, perhaps, less than a century old. According to Woodrow Wilson the late evolution of public administration was due to the fact that the Governments had passed through three Stages-the period of absolute rulers, the period of struggle for constitutionalism and popular control; and the period when on winning political battles, people started thinking about freedom and perfect machinery for democratic administration. The first systematic writer on public administration was the American president Woodrow Wilson whose article entitled “The study of public administration” in the political science quarterly in 1887 set the ball rolling for the study of public administration as a separate discipline.


In 1900 Frank Goodnow in his influential work ‘Politics and Administration’, put forth the thesis that the fields of politics and administration were separate areas of public life and hence the two must be separate and public administration must study only the field of administration and the study of politics to political science which resulted in the development of permanent civil Service free from political influence.


Many later writers have attempted to reduce the scope of public administration in an attempt to provide focus to the study of modalities of policy implementation rather than policy formation. ” Introduction to the study of public administration “, by L.D White published in 1926 focused on the study of various principles of public administration and promoted further development public administration in the U.S. A. White has defined public administration as consisting of all those operations having for their purpose the fulfillment or enforcement of public policy. The emphasis here is on the activities of the executive branch of the government and the classic work L.D. White had the effect of directing the study of public administration towards the executive branch. Other prominent scholars like Luther Gullick and Herbert Simon also had the same opinion.


By 1939 public administration had made great strides in its development in to a science and in that year the American society for public administration was formed with its quarterly journal, the Public Administration Review. The American society of Public administration provided a forum for the scholars and practitioners to meet together and exchange views which helped in the spread of theories, ideas and led to the development of science of public administration. This development in the U.S.A was also aided by some management scholars who developed the scientific management movement in the country. The ‘father’ of the scientific Management Movement in the U.S.A was F. W. Taylor. The Human Relations school of Elton mayo (to which school Herbert Simon belonged) contributed a human dimension to public administration which emphasized on the individual and his behavior in organizations. This development turned public administration from purely a mechanical study of the process of policy implementation as projected by Willoughby in to a human subject interested in the role of the individual in the organization and in devising means to get the best out of the individuals manning the administration.


In the post war years, public administration changed its character and there was a change in its scope and methods of investigation. Till the end of the World War II, the development of the science of public administration was confined to the U S A and Europe and most of the scholars and practitioners in the field studied the administrative systems of the USA or Europe and arrived at generalizations which they tried to apply to in all countries. After World War II came to an end, there came about the independence of the colonies and the need for development of administrative systems suited to these colonies arose. Scholars, therefore, found the need to arrive at generalizations in the field of public administration which would be applicable in these countries with diverse political economic and social systems. Led by scholars like F.W. Riggs, Ferrel Heady, Gabriel A. Almond and others, the comparative public Administration came in to being and it started the comparative study of systems of public administration, comparing the systems of different countries, developed, underdeveloped, and arriving at principles applicable across a broad range of countries. The comparative public administration movement greatly broadened the study of public administration by emphasizing the development of principles of administration applicable across the board in different situations. It was a timely extension in the scope of the subject because it greatly helped the process of economic development in the developing countries of Asia and Africa and made the study of public administration truly universal. The contribution of Ferrel Heady and F.W. Riggs in this area is important, because they provided the impetus needed for the extension of the scope of public administration. This led to the development of the comparative administration movement and the rise of Development Administration as an important part of the public administration. The modern view of public administration is that it is government-in-action.