 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2014) |
It's a movement that emerged in the 1970s to address the challenges and demands of the public sector. It emphasizes the need for public administrators to be more than just managers and to incorporate citizen participation and responsiveness into their work. It's all about making public administration more democratic and efficient.
Public administration is the term traditionally used to define the formal arrangements under which public organizations serve a government, ostensibly in the public interest. The development of the public administration model dating from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s was influenced primarily by Weber's theory of bureaucracy, Northcote and Trevelyan's recommendations relating to the establishment of a professional civil service in Britain, and Woodrow Wilson's ideas in the United States for the separation of policy from administration (Hughes, 1994). Other managerial theories and concepts over the years have been relevant including Taylor's scientific management and Simon's rational decision-making. Since the 1980s, the traditional model of public administration has been largely rejected by governments in favor of a more focused managerialist model based on private-sector practice, within the context of a market-based economic model of public organization. In more recent years, there have been attempts to balance the economic focus with a renewed emphasis on public organization creating public value. This contribution will first examine the traditional model of public administration including the conceptual and theoretical bases and how this affected organizational aspects. Second, it will explore how and why there has been a paradigm shift from public administration to public management. Third, it will consider future trends.
Public administration is the term used to define the formal procedural and organizational arrangements under which public employees serve a government, by implementing and advising on policy, and managing resources. Organizational aspects refer to both the overall structures as well as the relationships that occur within public administrations. This could include: The organizations that make up a civil service, sometimes referred to as the machinery of government; internal organizational arrangements; and/or organizational behavior. Thus, organizational aspects can be studied in a broad sense or within several defined fields. This contribution covers organizational aspects, widely interpreted.
Beyond public administration as a discrete body of knowledge, organizational aspects can be examined through other theories and practices relating to, for example, political science, public policy, sociology, economics, and management. In this sense, each area of study has its own theories and concepts. Furthermore, each state has its own history, organizational form, and approach, although there are many universal, common elements, which have developed through the international transfer of ideas. New governments, formal review processes, focused research, and events have often stimulated notable change. Therefore, the area of public administration is a difficult area to research, and over the years studies have been largely descriptive rather than empirical.
New Public Administration theory deals with the following issues:
First, a ‘new’ theory should start with the ideal of democratic citizenship. The public service derives its true meaning from its mandate to serve citizens to advance the public good. This is the raison d’être of the institution, the source of motivation and pride of all those who choose to make it their life, whether for a season or for an entire career.
These are:
1. Citizen's Empowerment:
One of the key components of New Public Management is citizen empowerment. NPM ensures the citizen's freedom of choice. It ensures quality services to citizens. Healthy competition in the service and product sectors allows citizens to choose their services and products according to their needs and choices.
2. Services for Managerial support:
The primary goal of managerial support services is to guarantee the level of service provided to citizens. The best talent available on the market is therefore attracted by attractive pay, incentives, and other benefits. NPM consistently recommends skill-improving programs to achieve the best results.
3. Structural Changes in Administration: the new public administration approach calls for small, flexible and less hierarchical structures In administration so that the citizens administration interface could become more flexible and comfortable. The organizational structure should be in with the socially relevant conditions.
4.Multi-disciplinary Nature of Public Administration: knowledge from several disciplines and not just one dominating paradigm build the discipline of public administration. The political, social, economic, management and human relation approaches are needed to ensure the growth of discipline.
5. Politics-Administration Dichotomy: since administrators today are involved in policy formulation and policy implementation at all the stages. Dichotomy meaning "a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different".
6. Awareness: Bring attention to the works of a public administration and the task that public administrators carry out for the community and for the government. Jobs of public administrators affect communities and large numbers of people. The importance of the job should be highlighted.
7. Case Studies: Case studies help public administrators highlight situations and events where policies were not carried out as they should be. They set an example for what to do and what not to do. Case studies are a basic way to break down events in order to learn from other people's mistakes and the effects those mistakes have had on the community. With public administration being a job devoted to the people; it is an obvious way to see the reality of the work you do in the community. While there are many cases where policies were not carried out as planned. There are also plenty of examples of executed policies that have benefited communities, and those are important to look at as well.
8. Structure Change: Public Administration is moving in many different directions, it is more often called Public Management now. This is because the job is moving towards a direction of not only implementing policy to people but also managing policies as it trickles down through the law process, so that it is realistic for communities and the people in them.
9. Jack of All Trades: the best public administrators tend to be someone who has knowledge in politics and law, but also has a hand in community functions. This allows for a smooth transition from policy to implementation.
10. Change: With the changes in the world, the job of public administration has changed. The job may be the same, but titles like Public Manager and Public Adviser have replaced the title Public Administrator.
NPA provides solutions for achieving these goals, popularly called 4 D's i.e. Decentralisation, Debureaucratisation, Delegation and Democratisation.
Though New Public Administration brought public administration closer to political science, it was criticized as anti-theoretic and anti-management. Robert T. Golembiewski describes it as radicalism in words and status quo in skills and technologies. Further, it must be counted as only a cruel reminder of the gap in the field between aspiration and performance. Golembiewski considers it as a temporary and transitional phenomena. [2] In other words, we can say that the solutions for achieving the goals and anti-goals were not provided by the NPA scholars explicitly. Secondly, how much one should decentralize or delegate or debureaucratize or democratize in order to achieve the goals? On this front NPA is totally silent.
As said in A New Synthesis of Public Administration, governments have always been called upon to make difficult decisions, undertake complicated initiatives and face complex problems characteristical of the period. This is not in dispute. Nonetheless, the current circumstances is to determine what can be handled in the traditional way and what must be done differently. [3]
Governments have always been called upon to face difficult problems. Setting priorities and making choices have always been difficult. For example, eliminating a sizable deficit is “merely” a difficult problem, although it is hard to believe when one is in the middle of such a heart-wrenching exercise. This entails making choices among equally deserving public purposes and making tough decisions about what should be preserved for the future. It requires reconciling future needs with what could garner a sufficient degree of public support in the short term to move forward. Academic public administration has lagged considerably behind practicing public administration. Improved curricula and a refocusing of emphasis upon the policy dynamics of government administration will be important factors in enticing more students to study of public administration. It is more important to increase the number and improving the geographic spread of universities with public affairs programs, integrating public affairs components into the curricula of other graduate and professional programs, developing many more in-service, mid-career educational programs for public servants, and utilizing existing resources to strengthen public affairs programs. [3]
The motives behind the promotion of New Public Administration is also in question in the case of Hong Kong. As Anthony Cheung argues, officials often employed the rhetoric of New Public Administration to roll back public expenditure and decrease welfare provision in the 1990s. [4] Governors at that time used the excuse of administrative efficiency to curtail the power of the bureaucracy. [5]
Felix and Lloyd Nigro observe that New Public Administration has seriously jolted the traditional concepts and outlook of the discipline and enriched the subject by imparting a wider perspective by linking it closely to the society. [6] The overall focus in NPA movement seems to be to make administration to be less "generic" and more "public", less "descriptive" and more "prescriptive", less "institution-oriented" and more "client-oriented", less "neutral" and more "normative" but should be no less scientific all the same.
Management is the administration of organizations, whether they are a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administration respectively. It is the process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organizations.
Red tape is an idiom referring to regulations or conformity to formal rules or standards which are claimed to be excessive, rigid or redundant, or to bureaucracy claimed to hinder or prevent action or decision-making. It is usually applied to governments, corporations, and other large organizations. Things often described as "red tape" include filling out paperwork, obtaining licenses, having multiple people or committees approve a decision and various low-level rules that make conducting one's affairs slower, more difficult, or both. Red tape has been found to hamper organizational performance and employee wellbeing across countries and contexts by a meta-analysis and meta-regression in 2021, and especially internal red tape imposed by the organization itself on its employees was identified as particularly harmful. A related concept, administrative burden, refers to the costs citizens may experience in their interaction with government even if bureaucratic regulations or procedures serve legitimate purposes.
Public administration or public policy and administration is the implementation of public policy, administration of government establishment, and management of non-profit establishment. It is also a sub-field of political science taught in public policy schools that studies this implements and prepares civil servants in administrative positions primarily for work in the public sector. People with public administration knowledge may also be employed in a voluntary sector, or some other industries in the private sector dealing with government relations, regulatory affairs, legislative assistance, corporate social responsibilities (CSR), environmental, social, governance (ESG), public procurement (PP), public-private partnerships (P3), and business-to-government marketing/sales (B2G). They might also occupy positions at think tanks, non-profit organizations, consulting firms, trade associations, or other organizations that benefit from the skillsets found in public administration.
Governance is the process of making and enforcing decisions within an organization or society. It encompasses decision-making, rule-setting, and enforcement mechanisms to guide the functioning of an organization or society. Effective governance is essential for maintaining order, achieving objectives, and addressing the needs of the community or members within the organization. Furthermore, effective governance promotes transparency, fosters trust among stakeholders, and adapts to changing circumstances, ensuring the organization or society remains responsive and resilient in achieving its goals. It is the process of interactions through the laws, social norms, power or language as structured in communication of an organized society over a social system. It is done by the government of a state, by a market, or by a network. It is the process of choosing the right course among the actors involved in a collective problem that leads to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of acceptable conduct and social order". In lay terms, it could be described as the processes that exist in and between formal institutions.
New Public Management (NPM) is an approach to running public service organizations that is used in government and public service institutions and agencies, at both sub-national and national levels. The term was first introduced by academics in the UK and Australia to describe approaches that were developed during the 1980s as part of an effort to make the public service more "businesslike" and to improve its efficiency by using private sector management models.
Capacity building is the improvement in an individual's or organization's facility "to produce, perform or deploy". The terms capacity building and capacity development have often been used interchangeably, although a publication by OECD-DAC stated in 2006 that capacity development was the preferable term. Since the 1950s, international organizations, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and communities use the concept of capacity building as part of "social and economic development" in national and subnational plans. The United Nations Development Programme defines itself by "capacity development" in the sense of "'how UNDP works" to fulfill its mission. The UN system applies it in almost every sector, including several of the Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030. For example, the Sustainable Development Goal 17 advocates for enhanced international support for capacity building in developing countries to support national plans to implement the 2030 Agenda.
The Administrative State is Dwight Waldo's classic public administration text based on a dissertation written at Yale University. In the book, Waldo argues that democratic states are underpinned by professional and political bureaucracies and that scientific management and efficiency is not the core idea of government bureaucracy, but rather it is service to the public. The work has contributed to the structure and theory of government bureaucracies the world over and is one of the defining works of public administration and political science written in the last 75 years.
Public administration theory refers to the study and analysis of the principles, concepts, and models that guide the practice of public administration. It provides a framework for understanding the complexities and challenges of managing public organizations and implementing public policies.
David H. Rosenbloom is a scholar in the field of Public Administration. He is the Distinguished Professor of Public Administration at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. An authority on issues related to administrative law and constitutional aspects of public sector personnel policies, Rosenbloom is known for his approach emphasizing understanding American public administration from the three perspectives associated with the constitutional separation of powers: law, politics and management. He advocates establishing "constitutional competence" as a basic standard for public service professionals.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:
Managerialism is the reliance on professional managers and organizational strategies to run an organisation. It may be justified in terms of efficiency, or characterized as an ideology. It is a belief system that requires little or no evidence to justify itself. Thomas Diefenbach associates managerialism with a belief in hierarchy. Other scholars have linked managerialism to control, accountability, measurement, strategic planning and a belief in the importance of tightly-managed organizations.
Street-level bureaucracy is the subset of a public agency or government institution where the civil servants work who have direct contact with members of the general public. Street-level civil servants carry out and/or enforce the actions required by a government's laws and public policies, in areas ranging from safety and security to education and social services. A few examples include police officers, border guards, social workers and public school teachers. These civil servants have direct contact with members of the general public, in contrast with civil servants who do policy analysis or economic analysis, who do not meet the public. Street-level bureaucrats act as liaisons between government policy-makers and citizens and these civil servants implement policy decisions made by senior officials in the public service and/or by elected officials.
Arts administration is a field in the arts sector that facilitates programming within cultural organizations. Arts administrators are responsible for facilitating the day-to-day operations of the organization as well as the long term goals by and fulfilling its vision, mission and mandate. Arts management became present in the arts and culture sector in the 1960s. Organizations include professional non-profit entities. For examples theaters, museums, symphony orchestras, concert bands, jazz organizations, opera houses, ballet companies and many smaller professional and non-professional for-profit arts-related organizations. The duties of an arts administrator can include staff management, marketing, budget management, public relations, fundraising, program development evaluation, community engagement, strategic planning, and board relations.
Governance is a broader concept than government and also includes the roles played by the community sector and the private sector in managing and planning countries, regions and cities. Collaborative governance involves the government, community and private sectors communicating with each other and working together to achieve more than any one sector could achieve on its own. Ansell and Gash (2008) have explored the conditions required for effective collaborative governance. They say "The ultimate goal is to develop a contingency approach of collaboration that can highlight conditions under which collaborative governance will be more or less effective as an approach to policy making and public management" Collaborative governance covers both the informal and formal relationships in problem solving and decision-making. Conventional government policy processes can be embedded in wider policy processes by facilitating collaboration between the public, private and community sectors. Collaborative Governance requires three things, namely: support; leadership; and a forum. The support identifies the policy problem to be fixed. The leadership gathers the sectors into a forum. Then, the members of the forum collaborate to develop policies, solutions and answers.
Social equity is concerned with justice and fairness of social policy. Since the 1960s, the concept of social equity has been used in a variety of institutional contexts, including education and public administration.
POSDCORB is an acronym widely used in the field of management and public administration that reflects the classic view of organizational theory. It appeared most prominently in a 1937 paper by Luther Gulick. However, he first presented the concept in 1935. Initially, POSDCORB was envisioned in an effort to develop public service professionals. In Gulick's own words, the elements are as follows: Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Co-Ordinating, Reporting and Budgeting.
Public Service Motivation (PSM) is an attribute of government and non-governmental organization (NGO) employment that explains why individuals have a desire to serve the public and link their personal actions with the overall public interest. Understanding the theory and practice of PSM is important in determining the motivations of individuals who choose careers in the government and non-profit sectors despite the potential for more financially lucrative careers in the private sector.
"The Study of Administration" is an 1887 article by Woodrow Wilson in Political Science Quarterly. It is widely considered a foundational article in the field of public administration, making Wilson one of the field's founding fathers, along with Max Weber and Frederick Winslow Taylor.
As stated by political scientist Samuel Krislov, representative bureaucracy is a notion that "broad social groups should have spokesman and officeholders in administrative as well as political positions". With this notion, representative bureaucracy is a form of representation that captures most or all aspects of a society's population in the governing body of the state. An experimental study shows that representative bureaucracy can enhance perceived performance and fairness. This study finds that in a “no representation” scenario, respondents reported the lowest perceived performance and fairness, while in scenarios such as “proper representation” or “over representation” of women, they reported higher perceived performance and fairness.
Gender has historically played an important role in public administration. Gender perception and other factors influence the ways in which people think about public administration and bureaucracy. In today's society, public administration remains widely segregated in regard to gender, though it has become commonplace to advocate for greater numbers of equality and non-discrimination policies.