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Table of Contents
  Introduction
 History
 Principles of public administration

public administration, the implementation of government policies. Today public administration

is often regarded as including also some responsibility for determining the policies and programs
of governments. Specifically, it is the planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and
controlling of government operations.

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Public administration is a feature of all nations, whatever their system of government. Within
nations public administration is practiced at the central, intermediate, and local levels. Indeed,
the relationships between different levels of government within a single nation constitute a
growing problem of public administration.

In most of the world the establishment of highly trained administrative, executive, or directive
classes has made public administration a distinct profession. The body of public administrators is
usually called the civil service. In the United States and a few other countries, the elitist class
connotation traditionally attached to the civil service has been either consciously abandoned or
avoided, with the result that professional recognition has come slowly and only partially.

Traditionally the civil service is contrasted with other bodies serving the state full time, such as
the military, the judiciary, and the police. Specialized services, sometimes referred to as
scientific or professional civil services, provide technical rather than general administrative
support. Traditionally, in most countries, a distinction is also made between the home civil
service and those persons engaged abroad on diplomatic duties. A civil servant, therefore, is one
of a body of persons who are directly employed in the administration of the internal affairs of the
state and whose role and status are not political, ministerial, military, or constabulary.

In most countries the civil service does not include local government or public corporations, such
as, in the United Kingdom, the National Coal Board. In some countries, however—particularly
those unitary states in which provincial administration is part of the central government—some
provincial staffs are civil servants. In the United States, all levels of government have their own
civil services, federal, state, and local, and a civil service is specifically that part of governmental
service entered by examination and offering permanent tenure.

Certain characteristics are common to all civil services. Senior civil servants are regarded as the
professional advisers to those who formulate state policy. In some countries entry requirements
for a career in the higher civil service stress qualifications in technical fields such as accounting,
economics, medicine, and engineering. In other countries legal training is deemed appropriate,
and in others no specific technical or academic discipline is required among candidates for senior
posts. Whatever their precise qualifications, senior civil servants are professional in the sense
that their experience of public affairs is thought to provide them with the knowledge of the limits
within which state policy can be made effective and of the probable administrative results of
different courses of action. Civil servants in every country are expected to advise, warn, and
assist those responsible for state policy and, when this has been decided, to provide the
organization for implementing it. The responsibility for policy decisions lies with the political
members of the executive (those members who have been elected or appointed to give political
direction to government and, customarily, career civil servants). By custom, civil servants are
protected from public blame or censure for their advice. The acts of their administration may,
however, be subject to special judicial controls from which no member of the executive can
defend them.

Civil services are organized upon standard hierarchical lines, in which a command structure rises
pyramid-fashion from the lowest offices to the highest. This command implies obedience to the
lawful orders of a superior, and in order to maintain this system the hierarchy of offices is
marked by fixed positions, with well-defined duties, specific powers, and salaries and privileges
objectively assessed. In some countries there may be direct appointment to higher office of
persons not previously employed by the service, but even then a recognized system of internal
promotion emphasizes the nature of the hierarchical pyramid.

This article discusses the growth of public administration through history as well as its
development under different political systems. Special attention is paid to the problems of
administrative law and bureaucratic structure. For discussion of a subject integral to public
administration, see government economic policy. For further discussion of the various regimes
under which public administration operates, see political system.

Frederick C. Mosher Brian Chapman Edward C. Page

History
Early systems
Public administration has ancient origins. In antiquity the Egyptians and Greeks organized public
affairs by office, and the principal officeholders were regarded as being principally responsible
for administering justice, maintaining law and order, and providing plenty. The Romans
developed a more sophisticated system under their empire, creating distinct administrative
hierarchies for justice, military affairs, finance and taxation, foreign affairs, and internal affairs,
each with its own principal officers of state. An elaborate administrative structure, later imitated
by the Roman Catholic Church, covered the entire empire, with a hierarchy of officers reporting
back through their superiors to the emperor. This sophisticated structure disappeared after the fall
of the Roman Empire in western Europe in the 5th century, but many of its practices continued in
the Byzantine Empire in the east, where civil service rule was reflected in the pejorative use of
the word Byzantinism.

Early European administrative structures developed from the royal households of the medieval
period. Until the end of the 12th century official duties within the royal households were ill-
defined, frequently with multiple holders of the same post. Exceptions were the better-defined
positions of butler (responsible for the provision of wine), steward (responsible for feasting
arrangements), chamberlain (often charged with receiving and paying out money kept in the
royal sleeping chamber), and chancellor (usually a priest with responsibilities for writing and
applying the seal in the monarch’s name). With the 13th century a separation began between the
purely domestic functions of the royal household and the functions connected with governing the
state. The older household posts tended to disappear, become sinecures, or decline in importance.
The office of chancellor, which had always been concerned with matters of state, survived to
become the most important link between the old court offices and modern ministries, and the
development of the modern treasury or finance ministry can be traced back to the chamberlain’s
office in the royal household.

From the middle of the 13th century three institutions began to emerge as the major bodies for
handling affairs of state: the high court (evolving primarily from the chancellery), the exchequer,
and the collegial royal council. In England and France, however, it was not until the early 14th
century that such bodies emerged. In Brandenburg, which was governed by an elector (a prince
with a right to elect the Holy Roman emperor) and which later formed the basis of the Prussian
state, they became distinct entities only at the beginning of the 17th century.

Apart from justice and treasury departments, which originated in old court offices, modern
ministerial structures in Europe developed out of the royal councils, which were powerful bodies
of nobles appointed by the monarch. From the division of labour within these bodies the
monarchs’ secretaries, initially given low status within a council, emerged as perhaps the first
professional civil servants in Europe in the modern sense. The proximity of the secretaries to the
monarch gave them more knowledge of royal intentions, and their relative permanence gave
them greater expertise in particular matters of state than could be found among the more
transient nobles on the council. They were also assisted by staffs. The secretaries grew in
importance in the 15th and 16th centuries as they became more or less full members of the
council.

The distribution of functions among secretaries was initially based upon geography. In England
this geographical allocation—with, for example, a secretary of the North and a secretary of the
South—persisted until 1782, when the offices of home and foreign secretary were created. In
France a more complex allocation of territorial responsibilities among secretaries of state had
begun to give way to functional responsibilities by the end of the ancien régime in 1789.

The civil service in China was undoubtedly the longest lasting in history; it was first organized,
along with a centralized administration, during the Han dynasty (206 bc–ad 220) and improved
under the T’ang (618–907) and Sung (960–1279). The administration was organized so well that
the pattern stood until 1912. During the Sung dynasty there developed the full use of civil service
examinations. Candidates were subjected to successive elimination through written tests on three
levels, more than a hundred persons beginning the ordeal for each one who emerged successful.
Although there was strong emphasis on the Chinese Classics (because knowledge of the Classics
was thought to form the virtues of a good citizen), there was also an effort to devise objective
and meaningful tests for practical qualities, and there were always long contentions over subject
matter and testing methods. To preserve the anonymity of the candidate and to ensure fairness in
grading, examination papers were copied by clerks, examinees were identified by number only,
and three examiners read each paper. Higher officials were privileged to nominate junior
relatives for admission to the bureaucracy, but the great stress on examination grades in
promotion, the use of annual merit ratings, and the practice of recruiting many lower officials
from the ranks of the clerical service ensured a considerable freedom of opportunity.

Modern developments
Prussia
The foundations of modern public administration in Europe were laid in Prussia in the late 17th
and 18th centuries. The electors of Brandenburg (who from 1701 were the kings of Prussia)
considered a rigidly centralized government a means of ensuring stability and furthering dynastic
objectives. Their principal effort was devoted in the first instance to the suppression of the
autonomy of the cities and to the elimination of the feudal privileges of the aristocracy. Civil
servants were therefore appointed by the central government to administer the provinces, where
the management of crown lands and the organization of the military system were combined in a
Kriegs-und-Domänen-kammer (“Office of War and Crown Lands”). Subordinate to these offices
were the Steuerräte (“tax councillors”), who controlled the administration of the municipalities
and communes. These officials were all appointed by the central government and were
responsible to it. At the apex of the new machinery of government was the sovereign.

This centralized system was strengthened by creating a special corps of civil servants. In the
beginning these civil servants—in a real sense servants of the crown—were sent out from Berlin
to deal with such purely military matters as recruiting, billeting, and victualing the troops, but in
the course of time they extended their supervision to civil matters as well. By 1713 there were
clearly recognizable administrative units dealing in civil affairs and staffed by crown civil
servants.

Special ordinances in 1722 and 1748 regulated recruitment to the civil service. Senior officials
were required to propose to the king the names of candidates suitable for appointment to the
higher posts, while the adjutant general proposed noncommissioned officers suitable for
subordinate administrative posts. Further steps were taken throughout the 18th century to
regularize the system of recruitment, promotion, and internal organization. All of these matters
were brought together in a single General Code promulgated in 1794. The merit system of
appointment covered all types of posts, and the general principle laid down was that “special
laws and instructions determine the appointing authority to different civil service rank, their
qualifications, and the preliminary examinations required from different branches and different
ranks.” Entry to the higher civil service required a university degree in cameralistics, which,
though strictly speaking the science of public finance, included also the study of administrative
law, police administration, estate management, and agricultural economics. After the degree
course, candidates for the higher civil service spent a further period of supervised practical
training in various branches of the administration, at the end of which they underwent a further
oral and written examination. The basic principles of modern civil services are to be found in this
General Code.

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Written by Edward C. Page

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Table of Contents

 Introduction
 History
 Principles of public administration

France
A fundamental change in the status of the civil servant came about as a result of the French
Revolution of 1789. The fall of the ancien régime and the creation of a republic meant that the
civil servant was seen as the servant no longer of the king but rather of the state—even though
rule by a king or emperor was soon brought back and continued in France for nearly another
century. The civil servant became an instrument of public power, not the agent of a person. This
depersonalization of the state encouraged a rapid growth in the field of public law concerned
with the organization, duties, and rights of “the public power,” of which civil servants were the
principal component. To the ordered structure of the Prussian bureaucracy there began to be
added the logical development of administrative law.

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This bureaucratization was greatly fostered by Napoleon I, who built up a new civil service
marked not only by some of the features of military organization but also by the principles of
rationality, logic, and universality that were the inheritance of the Enlightenment. There was a
clear chain of command and a firmly established hierarchy of officials, with duties clearly
apportioned between authorities. Authority was depersonalized and went to the office and not the
official—although Napoleon insisted that each official should be responsible for action taken in
the name of his office. France was divided into new territorial units: départements,
arrondissements, and communes. In each of these, state civil servants had a general responsibility
for maintaining public order, health, and morality. They were all linked in a chain to the national
Ministry of the Interior. A special school, the École Polytechnique, was set up to provide the
state with technical specialists in both the military and the civil fields—particularly in general
administration. In the field of general administration, the Conseil d’État (“Council of State”),
descended from the old Conseil du Roi (“Council of the King”), imposed an intellectual as well
as a judicial authority over the rest of the civil service; as the first major European administrative
court, it became the creator of a new type of administrative jurisprudence. The prestige of the
new French administrative organization and the logical arrangement of its internal structure
prompted many other European countries to copy its principal features. And the expansion of the
French Empire spread many of its features across the world.

In France under the Third Republic (1870–1940) there developed, however, considerable
political interference in some branches of the civil service; and much of its vitality was
diminished as its bureaucratic practices tended to become unwieldy and its personnel lethargic.
Not until 1946 was the system reformed—which involved overhauling the administrative
structure of the central government, centralizing personnel selection, creating a special ministry
for civil service affairs, and setting up a special school, the École National d’Administration, for
the training of senior civil servants. This school in particular has attracted worldwide attention
for its ability to instill in its graduates both specialist and generalist skills.

The British Empire

The first attempts by Great Britain to create efficient administrative machinery arose from its
commitment to govern India and to avoid in that country the periodic scandals that marked some
of the rule of the East India Company. Robert Clive, appointed governor of Bengal for the
second time in 1764, introduced a code of practice that prohibited servants of the company from
trading on their own account or accepting gifts from native traders. Subsequent governors
strengthened the ban, compensating for the loss of benefits by substantially increasing salaries,
introducing promotion by seniority, and reorganizing the higher echelons of administration.
Recruitment was carried on by the company in London, and after 1813 entrants to the civil
service had to study the history, language, and laws of India for a period of four terms at
Haileybury College, England, and to obtain a certificate of good conduct before taking up their
posts. As a result of advocacy by Thomas Macaulay, secretary to the board of control,
examination rather than patronage was adopted as a recruitment method. New rules from 1833
stipulated that four candidates had to be nominated for each vacancy and that they were to
compete with one another in “an examination in such branches of knowledge and by such
examinations as the Board of the Company shall direct.”

There was further criticism of the way India was run, however, and in 1853 another legislative
reform of the administration was proposed. The experience of the Indian Civil Service influenced
the foundation of the modern civil service in the United Kingdom. A report was published in
1854 on the organization of the Permanent Civil Service in Britain. Its principal author, Sir
Charles Trevelyan, had acquired a reputation for searching out corruption in the Indian Civil
Service during 14 years of service there. The report of 1854 recommended the abolition of
patronage and recruitment by open competitive examination. It further recommended (1) the
establishment of an autonomous semijudicial body of civil service commissioners to ensure the
proper administration of recruitment to official posts, (2) the division of the work of the civil
service into intellectual and routine work, the two sets of offices to have separate forms of
recruitment, and (3) the selection of higher civil servants more decidedly on the basis of general
intellectual attainment than specialized knowledge. The Civil Service Commission was
established in 1855, and during the next 30 years patronage was gradually eliminated. The two
original classes were increased to four, and some specialized branches were amalgamated to
become the Scientific Civil Service. The new civil service managed to attract to its senior levels
highly capable, discreet, and self-effacing university graduates. Graduates of Oxford and
Cambridge became—and remain to the present—especially prominent in the ranks of senior civil
servants in Britain.

The United States

In the United States patronage remained the norm for considerably longer than in Britain. From
the early days of the federation two principles were firmly held. First, there was antipathy to the
notion of a cadre of permanent civil servants; President Jackson clearly dismissed this notion of a
highly professional caste when he said, in 1829, that “the duties of all public officers are . . . so
plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.”
As a consequence, he said, “I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of
men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. No one man has any more
intrinsic right to official station than another.” The second principle—that as far as possible
public office should be elective—followed more or less automatically. But because this principle
could not be practically applied to the subordinate levels of administration, there developed the
“spoils system,” in which public office became a perquisite of political victory, being widely
used to reward political support. This system was susceptible to persistent, blatant, and
ultimately unacceptable degrees of inefficiency, corruption, and partisanship. These particular
faults were strongly felt after the Civil War (1861–65), during the period of rapid economic and
social development. Under considerable pressure, the federal government accepted a restricted
principle of entry by competitive open examination, and in 1883 the U.S. Civil Service
Commission was established to control entry to office in the federal service. The work of the
commission was mainly restricted to the lower grades of employment, and it was not until the
first 20 years of the 20th century that the merit system of recruitment was expanded to cover half
the posts in the federal service. After that period the commission’s control gradually increased,
mainly over the lower, middle, and managerial offices in the federal service. After 1978 the
functions of the commission were divided between the Office of Personnel Management and the
Merit Systems Protection Board. Principal policy-making posts, numbering some 2,000, remain
outside the jurisdiction of these two bodies, being filled instead by presidential nomination.

The development of civil service in U.S. local government varied among states, counties, and
cities. The adoption of a merit system can usually be dated from the early 20th century, during
the reform period of the muckrakers. In some states the merit system became well established,
with a central personnel office that included a civil service commission or board similar to the
federal model. At the other extreme there was simply a central personnel office headed by a
single personnel director with no advisory board. At the municipal level, by the mid-20th
century, most large cities in the United States had developed some sort of merit system; in
smaller cities, however, merit systems were correspondingly less common. In the counties, the
majority of which were rural and had relatively few public employees, formally established merit
systems were rare.
The Soviet Union
In Russia the Revolution of 1917 swept away the tsarist civil service. The Communist Party at
first held that a strong administrative organization was bound to damage the revolution by
dampening spontaneity and other revolutionary virtues. But it soon became clear that a regime
dedicated to social engineering, economic planning, and world revolution needed trained
administrators. The party fell back, albeit reluctantly, upon the expertise of the more reliable
tsarist civil servants. It did, however, surround the new civil service with elaborate controls in an
attempt to ensure that its members remained loyal to party directives.

As the Communist Party itself became bureaucratized and as the more enthusiastic revolutionary
leaders were eliminated, special industrial academies were set up for party members who had
shown administrative talent. With the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) the status of civil servants
was improved, and their conditions of service were made less rigid, even though the party never
relaxed its tight system of control over all branches of the state apparatus. In 1935 the State
Commission on the Civil Service was created and attached to the Commissariat of Finance with
responsibility for ensuring general control of personnel practice. This commission laid down
formal patterns of administrative structure, reformed existing bureaucratic practices, fixed levels
of staffing, standardized systems of job classification, and eliminated unnecessary functions and
staff. The inspectorate of the Ministry of Finance ensured that the commission’s general policies
were carried out in the ministries. The commission itself remained under the close supervision of
the Council of People’s Commissars to ensure that it complied with party directives, and the
commission’s members were appointed directly by the council.

The Soviet commission, unlike those in such countries as Great Britain and the United States,
was given no jurisdiction over the recruitment of civil servants, which remained the function of
the ministries and agencies. The highest administrative and technical staff members were
recruited by each ministry. Each branch of industry and administration had its own training
schools, from which it selected qualified students with satisfactory records. On appointment, the
student was bonded for a minimum of three years and liable to criminal proceedings if he refused
or subsequently relinquished his assignment. At the lower levels of administration, recruitment
and job placement were the responsibility of the Commissariat of Labour Reserves.

The Communist Party made determined attempts to recruit higher civil servants as party
members. These drives, which followed periodically after the 1930s, went a long way toward
transforming the party itself into an administrative and managerial elite and uniting the party and
the state administration. The highest levels of the civil service came to constitute an influential
apparatus and power centre in their own right. The internal structure of the civil service,
moreover, had been fashioned along classic French and German lines; and titles, ranks, insignia,
and uniforms officially appeared in various parts of the public services.
  Developing nations
Less-developed countries have had to face the opposite problem with their civil services. After
World War II many such countries became independent before they had developed effective
administrative structures or bodies of trained civil servants. Few of the colonial powers had
trained indigenous administrators sufficiently. The British left a viable administrative structure in
India and a partly Indianized civil service, but the newly independent Pakistan had few
experienced civil servants. The Belgians left the Congo without any trained administrative or
technical staff, and for some years there was near anarchy.

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Even when they inherited reasonably efficient administrative organizations, the newly
independent countries’ politicians frequently proved incapable of fulfilling their supporters’
expectations. Civil servants from the old colonial powers who remained behind often found
radical policies and new masters uncongenial. The resulting exodus of many such civil servants
worsened matters, for indigenous civil servants were seldom an adequate substitute.

The lack of qualified personnel sometimes led to not only a reduction in efficiency but also a
decline in administrative morality. Nepotism, tribalism, and corruption as well as inefficiency in
the civil service were difficulties often added to the other trials of independence. In many
countries the incapacity of the civil service was a factor leading to military rule, as were the
political failings of the elected leaders. Military regimes have frequently been the last resort of a
country where the civil power has failed to cope with the problems of independence.
Consequently, the United Nations (UN), in conjunction with the governments of advanced
countries, began to develop training programs for civil servants from underdeveloped countries.
The first request came from Latin America, which led to the founding of a school of public
administration in Brazil, followed in 1953 by an Advanced School of Public Administration for
Central America. Various other international organizations, including the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank, supported institutions for the
training of administrators in the less-developed countries. Such institutions included the Arab
Planning Institute in Kuwait, the Arab Organization of Administrative Sciences in Jordan, and
the Inter-American School of Public Administration in Brazil. Civil servants from the less-
developed nations also studied administration at such places as the Institute of Social Studies in
The Hague, Neth., the Institute of Local Government Studies in Birmingham, Eng., and the
International Institute of Public Administration in Paris.

After the 1970s the international agencies gave less help toward training, on the assumption—
often unrealized—that the less-developed nations would take on greater responsibility
themselves. Training also tended to be generalist and academic, leading to acute shortages of
trained administrators in specialized fields such as finance and planning. However, organizations
such as the British Council began in the early 1980s to remedy some of these deficiencies.

Brian Chapman Edward C. Page

Principles of public administration

The classical definition
Throughout the 20th century the study and practice of public administration has been essentially
pragmatic and normative rather than theoretical and value free. This may explain why public
administration, unlike some social sciences, developed without much concern about an
encompassing theory. Not until the mid-20th century and the dissemination of the German
sociologist Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy was there much interest in a theory of public
administration. Most recent bureaucratic theory, however, has been addressed to the private
sector, and there has been little effort to relate organizational to political theory.

A prominent principle of public administration has been economy and efficiency, that is, the
provision of public services at the minimum cost. This has usually been the stated objective of
administrative reform. Despite growing concern about other kinds of values, such as
responsiveness to public needs, justice and equal treatment, and citizen involvement in
government decisions, efficiency continues to be a major goal.

In its concern with efficiency and improvement, public administration has focused frequently on
questions of formal organization. It is generally held that administrative ills can be at least partly
corrected by reorganization. Many organizational principles originated with the military, a few
from private business. They include, for example: (1) organizing departments, ministries, and
agencies on the basis of common or closely related purposes, (2) grouping like activities in single
units, (3) equating responsibility with authority, (4) ensuring unity of command (only one
supervisor for each group of employees), (5) limiting the number of subordinates reporting to a
single supervisor, (6) differentiating line (operating or end-purpose) activities from staff
(advisory, consultative, or support) activities, (7) employing the principle of management by
exception (only the unusual problem or case is brought to the top), and (8) having a clear-cut
chain of command downward and of responsibility upward.

Some critics have maintained that these and other principles of public administration are useful
only as rough criteria for given organizational situations. They believe that organizational
problems differ and that the applicability of rules to various situations also differs. Nonetheless,
and despite much more sophisticated analyses of organizational behaviour in recent decades,
such principles as those enumerated above continue to carry force.

Public administration has also laid stress upon personnel. In most countries administrative
reform has involved civil service reform. Historically, the direction has been toward
“meritocracy”—the best individual for each job, competitive examinations for entry, and
selection and promotion on the basis of merit. Attention has increasingly been given to factors
other than intellectual merit, including personal attitudes, incentives, personality, personal
relationships, and collective bargaining.

In addition, the budget has developed as a principal tool in planning future programs, deciding
priorities, managing current programs, linking executive with legislature, and developing control
and accountability. The contest for control over budgets, particularly in the Western world,
began centuries ago and at times was the main relationship between monarchs and their subjects.
The modern executive budget system in which the executive recommends, the legislature
appropriates, and the executive oversees expenditures originated in 19th-century Britain. In the
United States during the 20th century, the budget became the principal vehicle for legislative
surveillance of administration, executive control of departments, and departmental control of
subordinate programs. It has been assuming a similar role in many of the developing countries of
the world

Recent interpretations
The classical approach to public administration described above probably reached its fullest
development in the United States during the 1930s, although since that time, through educational
and training programs, technical assistance, and the work of international organizations, it has
also become standard doctrine in many countries. However, some of its elements have been
resisted by governments with British or continental-legal perspectives, and even during the
1930s it was being challenged from several quarters. Since that time study of the subject has
greatly developed. It has also become somewhat confused as a result of certain inconsistencies in
approach.

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The orthodox doctrine rested on the premise that administration was simply the implementation
of public policies determined by others. According to this view, administrators should seek
maximum efficiency but should be otherwise neutral about values and goals. During the Great
Depression of the 1930s, and even more so during World War II, however, it became
increasingly evident that many new policies originated within the administration, that policy and
value judgments were implicit in most significant administrative decisions, that many
administrative officials worked on nothing except policy, and that, insofar as public policies
were controversial, such work inevitably involved administrators in politics. The supposed
independence of administration from policy and politics was seen to be illusory. Since the 1930s
there has thus been increasing concern with policy formation and the development of techniques
to improve policy decisions. Although the concept of a value-free, neutral administration is
regarded by many as no longer tenable, no fully satisfactory substitute has been offered. How to
ensure that responsible and responsive policy decisions are made by career administrators, and
how to coordinate their work with the policies of politically elected or appointive officials,
remain key preoccupations, especially in democratic states.

It was with governmental efforts to combat the Depression that new informational devices were
introduced, including national income accounting and the scrutiny of gross national product as a
major index of economic health. The applied techniques of fiscal and monetary policy have
become established specializations of public administration. Economists occupy key posts in the
administrations of most nations, and many other administrators must have at least elementary
knowledge of the economic implications of government operations. France, Sweden and other
Scandinavian nations, Great Britain, and the United States were among the leaders in developing
economic planning techniques. Such planning has become a dominating concern of public
administration in many of the developing countries.

Responses to incrementalism
As economic and social intervention by governments has increased, the limitations of
“incrementalism” as a public administration practice have become increasingly apparent.
Incrementalism is the tendency of government to tinker with policies rather than to question the
value of continuing them. A number of techniques have been introduced to make decisions more
rational. One such technique, widely applied, is cost–benefit analysis. This involves identifying,
quantifying, and comparing the costs and benefits of alternative proposals. Another, less
successful, technique was the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS),
introduced into the U.S. Department of Defense in 1961 and extended to the federal budget in
1965. According to PPBS, the objectives of government programs were to be identified, and then
alternative means of achieving these objectives were to be compared according to their costs and
benefits. In practice, PPBS made little difference in federal budgeting, partly because the
objectives of governmental programs were difficult to specify and partly because comprehensive
evaluation took too long. PPBS was abandoned in 1971, and similar attempts, such as
Management by Objectives and Zero-Base Budgeting, both introduced in the 1970s, were
equally short-lived and ineffective. Comparable schemes in western Europe, such as the method
called “rationalization of budgetary choice” introduced into France in the late 1960s and the so-
called Programme Analysis and Review in Great Britain in the 1970s, were likewise
unsuccessful.

Quantitative economic measurement is useful up to a certain point, but the value of human life,
of freedom from sickness and pain, of safety on the streets, of clean air, and of opportunity for
achievement are hardly measurable in monetary terms. Public administration has thus
increasingly concerned itself with developing better social indicators, quantitative and
qualitative—that is, better indexes of the effects of public programs and new techniques of social
analysis.

Another development has been an increasing emphasis on human relations. This originated in the
1930s when what became known as the Hawthorne research, involving the workers and
management of an industrial plant near Chicago, brought out the importance to productivity of
social or informal organization, good communications, individual and group behaviour, and
attitudes (as distinct from aptitudes).

Awareness of the importance of human relations influenced the conduct of public administration.
Many shibboleths of administration (hierarchy, directive leadership, set duties, treatment of
employees as impersonal “units” of production, and monetary incentives) were challenged.

By the late 1930s the human relations approach had developed into a concept known as
“organization development.” Its primary goal was to change the attitudes, values, and structures
of organizations so that they could meet new demands. Trained consultants, usually from outside
the organization, undertook intensive interviewing of senior and junior staff, and sensitivity
training and confrontation meetings were also held. Unlike the rationalistic PPBS approach,
organization development stressed the identification of personal with organizational goals, the
“self-actualization” of workers and managers, effective interpersonal communication, and broad
participation in decision making. Its direct use within governmental agencies has been limited
and has not always been successful, but it has had considerable indirect influence upon
administrators.

Another modern movement in public administration has been the greater participation of citizens
in government. It was stimulated during the 1950s and ’60s by a growing feeling that
governments were not responding to the needs of their citizens, particularly minority groups and
the poor. A variety of experiments to involve citizens or their representatives in making
governmental decisions were begun in the 1960s. These involved the delegation of decision
making from central to local offices and, at the local level, the sharing of authority with citizen
groups.

Public policy approach

From the early 1970s increasing analysis of the way government policies affected the public
resulted in a concept called the “public policy approach” to administration. This examines to
what extent each stage in devising and executing a policy affects the overall shape and impact of
the policy. According to the concept, the way a problem is conceived in the first place influences
the range of remedies considered. The nature of the decision-making process may determine
whether a course of action is merely incremental or truly radical. Indeed, it has been argued that
the nature of the decision-making process shapes the outcome of the decision itself, particularly
when the process is dominated by a powerful interest group. Moreover, the willingness of the
government to evaluate programs, and modify them if necessary, affects the outcome. Many
supporters of the public policy approach regard the concept as an important tool for constructing
a body of knowledge on which recommendations can be based.

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Until World War II there was relatively little exchange among nations of ideas about public
administration. As early as 1910, however, a professional organization, which eventually became
the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS), had been established. At first its
membership consisted principally of scholars and practitioners of administrative law in the
countries of continental Europe. By the late 1980s the IIAS had a membership drawn from some
70 countries. Its triennial congresses have covered all aspects of the field.

Since World War II international interest in administrative systems has grown, precipitated by
the necessity of cooperation during the war, by the formation of international organizations, by
the occupation of conquered nations and the administration of economic recovery programs for
Europe and the Far East, and by aid programs for developing countries. One by-product of aid
programs was a renewed appreciation of how crucial effective administration is to national
development. It has also become apparent how parochial and culture-bound styles of public
administration have often remained within individual countries.

Another effect of this international communication and sharing of experiences has been the
realization that development is not exclusive to the so-called underdeveloped countries. All
countries have continued to develop, and public administration has increasingly been perceived
as the administration of planned change in societies that themselves have undergone rapid
change, not all of it planned. Government has no longer been merely the keeper of the peace and
the provider of basic services: in the postindustrial era government has become a principal
innovator, a determinant of social and economic priorities, and an entrepreneur on a major scale.
On virtually every significant problem or challenge—from unemployment to clean air—people
have looked to the government for solutions or assistance. The tasks of planning, organizing,
coordinating, managing, and evaluating modern government have likewise become awesome in
both dimension and importance.

Education and training

European universities have traditionally produced administrative lawyers for their governments,
but legal skills alone are hardly adequate for handling contemporary problems. U.S. universities
began graduate programs in the early years of the 20th century, and by the late 1980s there were
more than 300 university programs in public administration. Nevertheless, very few of the
scientists and other specialists who become administrators in their fields attend such programs.

Training programs have particularly flourished since World War II, many of them with
government help. Some are attached to universities. In establishing the École Nationale
d’Administration as one of its civil service reforms of 1946–47, France provided an extensive
course for recruits to the higher civil service. It was not until 1969 that Britain established a Civil
Service College under the new Civil Service Department. In the United States the government
established a variety of educational and training programs during the 1960s, including the
Federal Executive Institute and the Executive Seminar Centers. Many less-advanced countries
have since established centres for the training of public administrators.
EVOLUTION OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS A
DISCIPLINE AND ITS PRESENT STATUS
August 21, 2010 by blessan

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.