Public administration
[3] It is also a subfield of political science where studies of policy processes and the structures, functions, and behavior of public institutions and their relationships with broader society take place.
The mid-twentieth century saw the rise of German sociologist Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy, bringing about a substantive interest in the theoretical aspects of public administration.
The 1968 Minnowbrook Conference, which convened at Syracuse University under the leadership of Dwight Waldo, gave rise to the concept of New Public Administration, a pivotal movement within the discipline today.
Public administrators play a significant role in devising and executing policies, managing shared resources, and ensuring the efficient functioning of government agencies and programs.
This implies that it must relate itself to concepts of justice, liberty, and fuller economic opportunity for human beings and is thus concerned with "people, with ideas, and with things".
"[9] More recently, scholars claim that "public administration has no generally accepted definition" because the "scope of the subject is so great and so debatable that it is easier to explain than define.
[16] However, the presence of complex civilization and public facilities such as granaries and bathhouses, along with the existence of large cities, indicates the likelihood of centralized governance.
Although speculation regarding social hierarchies and class structures is plausible, the absence of discernible elite burial sites also suggests that most citizens were almost equal in status.
Dating back to antiquity, states have required officials like pages, treasurers, and tax collectors to administer the practical business of government.
Consequently, the need for expert civil servants whose ability to read and write formed the basis for developing expertise in such necessary activities as legal record-keeping, paying and feeding armies, and levying taxes.
As the European imperialist age progressed and the military powers extended their hold over other continents and people, the need for a sophisticated public administration grew.
[18] The field of management may have originated in ancient China,[19] including, possibly, the first highly centralized bureaucratic state, and the earliest (by the second century BC) example of an meritocracy based on civil service tests.
[26] In the 18th century, King Frederick William I of Prussia created professoriates in Cameralism in order to train a new class of public administrators.
Lorenz von Stein, an 1855 German professor from Vienna, is considered the founder of the science of public administration in many parts of the world.
Gulick developed a comprehensive, generic theory of organization that emphasized the scientific method, efficiency, professionalism, structural reform, and executive control.
Gulick summarized the duties of administrators with an acronym; POSDCORB, which stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting.
This period witnessed the development and inclusion of other social sciences knowledge, predominantly, psychology, anthropology, and sociology, into the study of public administration (Jeong, 2007).
The new theory, which came to be called New Public Management, was proposed by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler in their book Reinventing Government.
[citation needed] In the late 1990s, Janet and Robert Denhardt proposed a new public services model in response to the dominance of NPM.
One example of the deployment of DEG is openforum.com.au, an Australian not-for-profit e-Democracy project that invites politicians, senior public servants, academics, business people, and other key stakeholders to engage in high-level policy debate.
[50] During the 19th century upper-class women in the United States and Europe organized voluntary associations that worked to mitigate the excesses of urbanization and industrialization in their towns.
[51][56][57][58] Reforms that emerged from the New Deal (e.g., income for the old, unemployment insurance, aid for dependent children and the disabled, child labor prohibitions and limits on hours worked, etc.)
Richard Stillman [59] credits Jane Addams, a key leader of the Settlement movement and a pioneer of public administration with "conceiving and spawning" the modern welfare state.
The alternative model of Public Administration was invisible or buried for about 100 years until Camilla Stivers published Bureau Men and Settlement Women in 2000.
[64] The Settlement movement and its leaders such as Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelley were instrumental in crafting the alternative, feminine inspired, model of public administration.
One of the proposed models uses five "pillars":[71] Examines the role of IT in enhancing public sector operations, including e-governance and digital service delivery.
At several universities undergraduate-level public administration and non-profit management education is packaged together (along with international relations and security studies) in a degree in political science.
Another body, the International Committee of the US-based Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA), has developed several relationships around the world.
A contrast is drawn with the study of public administration, which emphasizes the social and cultural drivers of government that many contend (e.g., Graham T. Allison and Charles Goodsell) makes it different from the private sector.
[83] Negative approach as: "Fiction, whose aim is the possibility of temporal or permanent appropriation of public goods for the implementation of the particular interests of a narrow social group".
