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Public Administration Thinkers

Approaches of Public Administration

Theories of Public Administration

History of Public Administration

Definition of Public Administration

 

L.D. White " According to him, public administration “consists of all those operations having for their purpose the fulfillment of enforcement of public policies as declared by the competent authority"

Luther Gulick defined public administration in these words, “Administration has to do with getting things done … Public. Administration is that part of science of administration which has to do with the government and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch where the work of the government is done, though there are obviously problems also in connecting with the legislative and judicial branches”.

Percy McQueen “Public Administration is administration related to the operations of government whether local or central”.

Pfiffner – thought that public administration “consists of getting the work of government done by coordinating the efforts of the people so that they can work together to accomplish their set tasks. Administration embraces the activities which may be highly technical or specialized such as public health and building of bridges… It also involves managing, directing and supervising the activities of thousands, even millions of workers so that some order and efficiency may result from their efforts…..”

H. Simon "by Public Administration is meant in common usage of the activities of the executive branches of the national, States and local governments"

What is Public Administraiton

Public administration houses the implementation of government policy and an academic discipline that studies this implementation and that prepares civil servants for this work.[1] As a "field of inquiry with a diverse scope" its "fundamental goal... is to advance management and policies so that government can function."[2] Some of the various definitions which have been offered for the term are: "the management of public programs";[3] the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day";[4] 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."[5] Public administration is "centrally concerned with the organization of government policies and programmes as well as the behavior of officials (usually non-elected) formally responsible for their conduct"[6] Many unelected public servants can be considered to be public administrators, including heads of city, county, regional, state and federal departments such as municipal budget directors, human resources (H.R.) administrators, city managers, census managers, state [mental health] directors, and cabinet secretaries.[4] Public administrators are public servants working in public departments and agencies, at all levels of government.[4] In the US, civil servants and academics such as Woodrow Wilson promoted American civil service reform in the 1880s, moving public administration into academia.[7] However, "until the mid-20th century and the dissemination of the German sociologist Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy" there was not "much interest in a theory of public administration."[8] The field is multidisciplinary in character; one of the various proposals for public administration's sub-fields sets out six pillars, including human resources, organizational theory, policy analysis and statistics, budgeting, and ethics.[9]