Pa Dichotomy

Paul C. Light’s (2006) article, “The Tides of Reform Revisited: Patterns in Making Government Work, 1945-2002”, has revealed to the readers how the current landscape of administrative reorganization is and how the sphere is gradually being dominated by four major competing ideas, viz. scientific management, the war on waste, the watchful eye, and liberation management. Light (2006), has explained how at the very heart of the American reform policies lays the four tides of reform ingrained with four philosophies. Light (2006) has stated that “the Constitution contains harbingers of all four “tides,” or philosophies, of administrative reform that populate the federal statute books today. It spoke to the logical of scientific management by creating a single executive with tight day-to-day control over the officers and departments of government. It laid basis for future wars on waste by requiring an annual accounting of expenditures and revenue while reserving the appropriation power for Congress.” Light (2006) has also stated that, the Constitution also “emphasized the need for a watchful eye on government excess through an elegant system of checks and balances. And it invented future efforts to liberate government from excessive regulation by vesting all executive powers in the president.” It is noteworthy that, Light (2006) has tried to make the readers understand how in the recent decades, all the four tides have accelerated in pace and intensity and how such acceleration

The increased of industrialization in American cities brought a new social demand to public officials who were unprepared to target the existing issues of society. Administrative officers started to gaining power to conduct intervention programs or institutions. However, people started to distrust public administrators and institutions for their inefficiency and incapacity they gave to the treatment of social issues. The author

Public administration tradition in American society is full of ideals on scientific and efficiency orientation of the organization but in relation with affirmative action paradigm in public administration, the value – based practices has been emphasized and gave rise democracy, representativeness, moral and ethical neutrality and equity. The 19th century public personnel reform encouraged the public administrators to formulate new policy with new direction and advocates for change. Social equity is another added feature of the new public administration towards social and political advantages. However, the social equity in practice may somehow result in differential treatment depending upon the needs and interests of different people. The affirmative action in public administration has been supported with the concepts of responsive and representative government through the composition of Civil Service Commission (Galeton, W. 2002).

On a macro level, public administration and business management are similar in their overall functions. “At the broadest level, some organizational theorists contend that administration is administration whatever its setting, and that the problems of organizing people, leading them and supplying them with resources to do their jobs are always the same (Kettl, 2012, p. 38).” In his paper, “Public and Private Management: Are They Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?,” Graham T. Allison explains that in comparing public and administration and business management, “it is possible to identify a set of general management functions (Allison, 2012, p. 4).” Regardless of their end goal, each administration must form strategies by setting goals, priorities and creating procedures. Public and private organizations must manage internal components by organizing staff, defining job responsibilities, hiring and managing personnel and creating budgets. Furthermore, they must manage external constituencies such as other agencies, the press and public (Allison, 2012, p. 5). His observations stem from Wallace Sayre’s famous words, “public and private management are fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects (DiIlulio, 1993).”

Stillman, II, Richard, J. (2005). Public administrationconcepts and cases (8th ed). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin co. pp 132 -

Nothing is more central in thinking about public administration than the nature and interrelations of politics and administration. Nor are the nature and interrelations of politics and administration matters only for academic theorizing. What is more important in the day-to-day, year-to-year, decade-to-decade operation of government than the ways in which politics and administration are conceptualized, rationalized, and related one to the other. (Waldo, 1987) Woodrow Wilson 's groundbreaking article "The Study of Administration" sought to define the relationship of politics and

The discipline that results from those forces, and how that affects all levels of management, does not naturally exist in government. The book has done a good job of offering the different perspectives to date, but I hope to see more discussion on how to combine the best of both worlds. It is telling that the essays discussing the role of the private sector in delivering public services are NOT part of this discussion, but found in a separate section of the book. My only comment on those chapters would be to suggest that our procurement processes need to evolve to better understand what is being asked for in terms of private delivery of services, why, and what limits there need to be. I hope to see more analysis comparing both theory and practice in this regard.

Zajac-Sannerholm argues that the major problems facing public administration agencies is what he considered to be a rule of law deficit which is why the promotion of rule of law and public administration reforms should stop being treated as separate projects by the international community, and instead be brought together. Currently, the former is approached on the basis of qualitative standards while the latter is centred on quantitative matters.

By discussing some of the advantages and disadvantages of administration and politics dichotomy, an opinion of whether it is useful or impossible will be made. Wilson’s politics administration dichotomy refers to the idea that administrative decisions need to be made without political influence. One argument to this is that politics has transformed, let’s say, the role of a city manager from a neutral expert to a problem solver and dichotomy should be replaced with an expanded base of professional values for them.

Since Woodrow Wilson (1889) published the article, “a study of public administration”, the main question in the field of public administration is how to govern a democratic and political entity. Given public administration conventionally concerns about civil servants and agencies in the executive branch, one among diverse and essential subfields is bureaucracy and organizational theory. In general, the development of studies on bureaucracy and organizational theory has gone through the period of classical theory to modern theory, and from modern theory to the advent of post-modernism and post-positivism. After historically reviewing the growth of knowledge on this subfield, forces behind the progress are the product of countless and

“Wilson (1887) argued that political science should concentrate on how governments are administered, focusing not only on personnel problems, but also on the organization and management in general. How then did Wilson define PA and why did he believe it was so vital to the future of the United States? Briefly discusses the theoretical development and arguments put forth by earlier scholars on the general approaches of management techniques in public administration since Wilson’s seminal piece; and briefly discuss whether Wilson’s basic rationale and values are still valid.

Traditionally political scientists would consider public policy by the processes involved, it is fairly recent that leadership has been considered within the public service. Though private and public sectors facing many of the same challenges, they each face very unique challenges and often strive for different goals. In many public sector organizations the bottom line is of a lot less concern as opposed to the private sector where the majority of decisions are based on profit maximization. There is also far greater restrictions on the funds available for additional employee compensation.

Max Weber went on to define administration as legal rationale, as actions in pursuit of conscious purpose of an organized system of affairs and applying operational efficiency to making them happen as one wanted (Stillman, 2010). Marshall Dimock made two common observations made about public administrations depending on the type of work one was responsible for which included the managerial views and the integral view. The managerial view suggested that only managerial responsibilities were included in public administration. The view on integral suggested that public administration incorporated managerial, technical, clerical, and manual responsibilities consisting of employees of all levels.

It is becoming increasingly evident that hierarchical public administration is inconsistent with the demands of civil society. And the reason for this dissatisfaction is not fiscal nor political, but as Huntington (1968) suggested is also administrative. Although economic and political resources are scarce, this limitation may be overcome by efficient use by the state. Hence the managerial public administration emerged as an answer to the crisis of the state. By using a strategy of administration the managerialist approach makes the delivery of the huge services offered by the state less expensive and more efficient. In addition it tries to protect public patrimony against corruption.

The transition from old to new Public administration is the largest transition in governmental public administration. From municipalities to nationally run organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency, the transition from the highly structured Weberian hierarchy to a more open, communicative environment is clearly apparent from old to new public administration. Further, the transition from measuring output and efficiency to working with people and the adoption of vulgar ethics clearly shape American history from Jacksonian era politics and gilded era spoils system to the reformation of federal government towards more merit-based policies. Throughout this transition, some civil servants began to be viewed more positively overall.