Education
Public Administration's Century in a Quandary
Shandong University Postgraduate of Public Administration200310598 Zhang Hui
This chapter reviews the successive definitional crises of Public administration----that is how the public administration has developed in the past. The author suggests that public administration is unique, that it differs significantly from both political science (public administration's "mother discipline") and management (public administration's traditional alter ego).
Public administration has developed as an academic field through a succession of five overlapping paradigms. Each phase may be characterized according to whether it has locus or focus. Locus is the institutional "where" of the field. A recurring locus of public administration is the government bureaucracy. Focus is the specialized "what" of the field, its body of knowledge and expertise. One focus of public administration has been the study of certain principle of administration, but again, the foci of the discipline have altered with the changing paradigms of public administration.
Another commonality among the paradigms is that positions stiffen as the paradigm wends its way.
The Beginning Woodrow Wilson largely set the tone for the early study of public administration in an essay titled, "The study of administration," published in the Political Science Quarterly in 1887. In reality Wilson himself seemed ambivalent about what public administration really was. Wilson failed "to amplify what the study of administration actually entails, what the proper relationship should be between the administration and political realms, and whether or not administrative study could ever become an abstract science ask in to the natural sciences. Nevertheless, Wilson's seminal article posited one unambiguous thesis in his article and Political scientists would later create the first identifiable paradigm of public administration around Wilson's...
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