Trace the movements in American Public Administration Theory (pat) from the Progressive Era to contemporary times, paying special attention to the on-going themes/paradoxes that have existed in Public Administration over time

Wilson’s original essay disappeared from the literature until it was republished in Political Science Quarterly in 1941. This caused argument in academia regarding the legitimate influence Wilson’s writing had on the early development of the field since the article didn’t have a wide impact until the 1940’s.

Frank Goodnow is considered the second intellectual ancestor of the politics-administration dichotomy. In 1900 he published Politics and Administration: A Study of Government. In this work, Goodnow advocated that the theory of politics-administration dichotomy was justified to promote efficiency and effectiveness. Goodnow criticized the constitutional separation of power between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and suggested instead a two-part division between politics and administration. His system would free up administration from political interference, allowing administrators wide discretion to regulate the complex modern economy without interference from politicians. Goodnow believed that politics was polluted and full of bias, whereas administration was all about the pursuit of truth. In his argument he said, “The great complexity of political conditions makes it practically impossible for the same governmental organ to be entrusted in equal degree with the discharge of both politics and administration.” He called for a powerful, central bureaucracy, insulated from political control and equipped with expert authority to enact and enforce regulations.

Frederick Taylor, a mechanical engineer by trade, was the next Progressive Era intellectual leader who continued the efficiency movement. Taylor was searching for a way to improve industrial efficiency and was the first to turn the focus inward toward to the management class. He shifted Public Administration theory to focus on the managing and organizing within the public (as well as the private) sector. He is considered the father of Scientific Management. Taylor recognized the need for labor-management cooperation, for controlling costs, and analyzing work methods. In 1911, he published The Principles of Scientific Management. The application of science to business problems, and the use of time-study methods in standard setting and the planning of work, was pioneered by Taylor. Taylor worked with factory managers and from the success of these discussions wrote several works proposing the use of wage-contingent performance standards based on scientific time study. At its most basic level time studies involved breaking down each job into component parts, timing each part and rearranging the parts into the most efficient method of working. By counting and calculating, Taylor wanted to transform management, which was essentially an oral tradition, into a set of calculated and written techniques. This also became known as Taylor’s Principle or Taylorism.

Taylor placed emphasis on the content of a fair day’s work, and sought to maximize productivity irrespective of the physiological cost to the worker. For example, Taylor thought unproductive time usage to be the deliberate attempt of workers to promote their best interests and to keep employers ignorant of how fast work could be carried out. This instrumental view of human behavior by Taylor prepared the path for human relations to supersede scientific management in terms of literary success and managerial application. This began to see application later in Public Administration and included Taylor’s theory of “one best way.” He believed that his methods of scientific analysis would lead to the discovery of the ‘one best way’ to do things and /or carrying out an operation.

In 1922, Max Weber, a German historian and sociologist, argued that all institutions have fallen under the control of large bureaucracies whose expertise is essential to the management of contemporary affairs. To Weber, bureaucracy constitutes the most efficient and rational way in which human activity can be organized, and that systematic processes and organized hierarchies were necessary to maintain order, maximize efficiency, and eliminate favoritism. Weber defines an ideal for bureaucracy, characterized by an elaborate hierarchical division of labor directed by explicit rules impersonally applied, staffed by fulltime, lifetime, professionals, who do not in any sense own the means of administration, or their jobs, or the sources of their funds, and live off a salary, not from income derived directly from the performance of their job.

Through his study, Weber developed the Central Tenets of Bureaucracy. This list of standards dictates how a bureaucracy should function.

1. 
   Regular activities required in a bureaucracy are distributed in a fixed way as official duties.
   
2. 
   Authority to give commands is distributed in a stable way and is delimited by rules.
   
3. 
   There are principles of hierarchy and levels of graduated authority.
   
4. 
   The management of the office is based on written documents.
   
5. 
   Office management presupposes expert training.
   
6. 
   Official activity demands the full attention of the official.
   
7. 
   There are stable rules that can be learned on how to manage the office.
   
8. 
   Knowledge of the rules represents a special technical learning.
   

Weber’s work was not translated and made available in the US until 1947.

While these previous theorists started to bring attention to Public Administration as an academic discipline, Luther Gulick was the first to codify it as a self-contained discipline with its own separate values, rules, and methods. Gulick believed that adherence to a core set of management principles would help organizations achieve optimum performance in working toward their goals. He developed six facets of an effective organization: 1. Division of work 2. Coordination of Work 3. Organizational patterns 4. Interrelation of systems of departmentalization. 5. Coordination by ideas. 6. Change. These principles of coordination morphed into what we know today as POSDCORB (planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting). This list was designed to call attention to the various functional elements of work of a chief executive.

Gulick was also an early writer on the subjects of human relations and leadership. In his 1937 seminal article “The Papers of Administration” he says that governments are made of human beings, run by human beings and their main job is helping, controlling and serving human beings. He considers human beings as the major and essential variables for understanding the nature of Public Administration today and into the future. In this same article, he also talks about the theme of leadership saying that management of the future looks more like leadership and less like authority as the primary means of coordination. Much of Gulick’s work was featured in the Brownlow Commission of 1937 that promoted economy and efficiency.

These five authors comprise what is known as classical public administration. Next we move into the behavioral approach to public administration and the hierarchical model. The Behavioral approach studied the actual behavior of people in organizations; is multidisciplinary; and uses scientific methods to describe intent. Follet, Mayo and Barnard are early theorists of this movement and Simon built upon their works.

Mary Parker Follet was the first to advocate a different viewpoint regarding empowerment of the worker. She is well known is organizational theory literature and was part of the early movement away from the positivist paradigm in public administration. In her work, she highlights the importance of two-way communication and respect to the effectiveness of meeting organizational goals. This helped her to develop a management philosophy based on individual motivation and group problem solving.

Constructive conflict was one of the theories discussed in Follet’s 1924 book, Creative Experience. Follet believed that collective bargaining was a divisive process that emphasizes differences, rather than common purpose, and one that ultimately results in compromise, rather than an integrative solution focused on that common purpose and goals. She conceptualized effective management to be "power with" rather than "power over" others as the key to social progress and business success. Follett advocated employee empowerment, constructive use of conflict in labor–management relations, and flatter organizational structures. Follett believed that harmony could be achieved from the proper use of conflict (a theory that was politically incorrect for in its era and even incomprehensible in an era dominated by men who believed the purpose of conflict was to vanquish the other party). She believed there were four means of conflict resolution: voluntary submission of one party; struggle and victory of one party over another; compromise; and her favored "integration," which in involved finding a solution that satisfied both parties without compromise or domination.

Elton Mayo (1933) is known as the founder of the human relations movement and was most famous for his work on the Hawthorne Studies at the Western Electric Company where he examined the relationship between work environment and productivity. He carried out a number of investigations to look at ways of improving productivity, for example changing lighting conditions in the workplace. What he found however was that employees worked harder if they received added attention, if they thought that the managers cared about their welfare, and if supervisors paid special attention to them and their work. Where norms of cooperation and higher output were established because of a feeling of importance, Mayo found that physical conditions or financial incentives had little motivational value. He concluded that people's work performance is dependent on both social issues and job content. Organizations that do not pay sufficient attention to people and cultural variables are consistently less successful than those that do. He also coined the term “Hawthorne Effect” which is the confounding that occurs if individuals alter their behavior because they know they are being studied.

The systems approach to organizational theory was created in 1938 by Charles Barnard in his work The Functions of the Executive. In it he proposed that organizations were cooperative systems in which the functions of the executive were to maintain a balance between the needs of the organization and the needs of the individual. Barnard believed it was of critical importance to have willing cooperation in organizations. He is credited with three contributions to the literature of organizational theory: 1. Organizations are systems and need to be studied as systems 2. Organizations by their nature are cooperative structures with both formal and informal structure. 3. The leader of an organization needs to establish a ‘moral code’ and to referee disputes. Barnard also formulated two interesting theories: one of authority and the other of incentives. Both are seen in the context of a communication system.

Post World War II Public Administration was reshaped by Herbert Simon through his writing on crisis decision making. He was one of the most influential social scientists of the 20^th century. With a background in cognitive psychology, Simon paid particular attention to how people make decisions. In 1946 Simon attacked the principles approach to management as often being inconsistent and inapplicable in his article, The Proverbs of Administration, namely, Gulick’s idea of POSDCORB. In this paper, Simon says that for almost every principle one can find an equally plausible and acceptable contradictory principle. These proverbs suggested the best ways of organizing and structuring large government agencies.

In his classic Administrative Behavior from 1947, Simon again criticized the principles approach to management. Like Barnard, Simon advocated a systems approach to administration and the study of decision making. He encouraged managers to abandon a single-minded focus structure and replace it with concern for behavior of individuals and groups. Employees who would agree with these new goals would have better rate of success. This led to Simon’s theory of bounded rationality. This hypothesis said that people are nearly, but not fully, rational, so that they cannot examine every possible choice available to them, but instead use simple rules of thumb to sort among the alternatives that happen to occur to them.

In 1948, Dwight Waldo published The Administrative State. In it, Waldo argued that administrators were underpinned by professional and political bureaucracies and that scientific management and efficiency were not the core functions of a legitimate government bureaucracy, but rather it should be service to the public. Waldo’s central themes of participation, decentralization, and representative bureaucracy showed that it was less a science, and more a political theory. Waldo also took the politics-administration dichotomy to task saying that public servants hold political positions that require more than merely implementing policy most efficient means of achieving set by elected officials.

Waldo was the first theorist to insist that analysts see administration in terms of its environment because it enables us to understand differences in administration between different societies which would be inexplicable if we were limited to viewing administration analytically in terms of the universals of administration itself. In other words, similar administrative acts can be performed differently in different cultures. The central theme of Waldo’s work is the importance of history with the most important lesson being the techniques of administration are at the center of the political-government evolution.

Charles Lindblom’s most influential work was his 1959 essay “The Science of Muddling Through.” In it, he attacked the rational models of decision making in government and discussed the incremental nature of public administration. This work highlights the challenges faced with reforming government, in that incremental adjustments are the best option for outcomes, and the most efficient means of achieving these outcomes for government as a whole. Lindblom suggested that planning should be incremental, opportunistic, and pragmatic. Planning in the real world is not rational and comprehensive but disjointed and incremental. This means that problems are solved through a series of policies at different points in time, rather than all at once.

Aaron Wildavsky was a noted scholar on budgeting. He is associated with the idea of incrementalism in budgeting, meaning that the most important predictor of a future political budget is the prior one; not a rational economic or decision process undertaken by the state. To manage risk, you need a dual approach of anticipation and resilience. His book Politics of the Budgetary Process (1964) highlighted the extent to which budgeting was a political and economic process rather than a mechanical one.

The writings of these three scholars led to the next paradigm shift, New Public Administration. Under the direction of Waldo, young scholars gathered at the Minnowbrook Conference in 1968 to critique American Public Administration for ignoring values and social equity and accepting the status quo. This is where the term New Public Administration was coined. This movement was designed to help public administrators cope with social turmoil of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It injected a new value into the profession, social equity. The basis of New Public Administration is the rejection of neutrality of the administrator and the professional role of the administrator based on professional standards and as the advocate for the disenfranchised. The three most well-known writers from this era are Waldo, Lindblom and Wildavsky. Writers of New Public Administration criticized value neutral, efficiency oriented, and descriptive features of behaviorism and pursued democratic values (from functionalism) such as social equity and being customer oriented.

Michael Lipsky’s 1980 work on the street level bureaucrat was a bottom-up perspective for organizational theory, public policy, and public administration. Lipsky looked at how certain public employees make policy judgments during transactional events with the citizen base. The important role of this person, who is at the bottom of the hierarchy, should not be overlooked according to Lipsky because often he/she had the most intimate knowledge of the clients, potential problems/fixes, and was the heart of the bureaucracy.

The 1980’s saw another paradigmatic shift in the field of public administration with the creation of New Public Management. NPM had five key elements.

1. 
   Small government through downsizing personnel, budget, and organizations.
   
2. 
   Deregulation through using the market mechanism in providing services.
   
3. 
   Outcome oriented evaluation to increase competition between sectors.
   
4. 
   A customer oriented approach by treating the citizens as clientele.
   
5. 
   Empowerment, responsibility, and openness.
   

Guy Peters wrote about six shared values of New Public Management which included analytic techniques, policy and decision making, contracting out, limiting the scope and reach of the government, renewed emphasis on public choice goals of economy and efficiency, and entrepreneurship. Peters’ was critical of New Public Management because he felt it failed to acknowledge political and sociopolitical values such as democracy and ethics. To him, citizens should be separate from government. People who consume services, not decide how they should be administered.

During this time period we also see the evolution of Public Choice Theory. Borrowing from neoconservative economic theory, this attempted to use economic tools to solve political problems. Its claim was that voters, politicians, and bureaucrats were mainly self-interested. Public administration was wasteful and inefficient and private means needed to be replace government through privatization of all government activities. This was the basic principle of Reaganomics.

In 1993 the National Performance Review (a Clinton initiative aimed at making bureaucracy more responsive) prompted the Reinventing Government movement. It emphasized empowerment and decentralization to enhance performance of government agencies by reducing red tape, putting customers first, and eliminating wasteful spending. Contracting out through public-private partnerships saw a rise in popularity during this period, but only where it cost less and performed better according to Osborne and Gaebler. In 1993 David Osborne and Ted Gaebler published Reinventing Government in an attempt to empower government officials to bring business techniques to public service. They believed that a civil society couldn’t function effectively without an effective government. This bureaucratic reform adopted by the Clinton administration, emphasized empowerment and decentralization to enhance performance of government agencies.

There are many intersections in the literature between ethics, management, and leadership. One of the most obvious is the role of managers (leaders) and workers (followers).

Most discussions of leadership focus on the desired characteristics and behaviors of the individual who sits at the top of an organization and leads its articulation of a mission, and sets the goals to be achieved to fulfill the mission. Institutional leadership is important to the success of any organization in fulfilling its mission and achieving its goals; through the expression of individual leadership an organization finds its direction and moves forward.

This notion is the core of James MacGregor Burns’ (1978) classic definition of leadership. Leaders induce followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations—the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations—of both leaders and followers. Successful leadership inspires the members of the organization to embrace shared values and to move together toward shared objectives.

The first time we start to see followership pop up in the literature is from Mary Parker Follet in 1930 and Charles Barnard in 1968. They challenged the approach of the top down leadership model.

Selznick 1957

In 1961 Douglas McGregor wrote The Human Side of Enterprise. In it he proposed his Theory X and Theory Y relating to leadership. Theory X was McGregor’s traditional view of management whereby it assumed that workers generally dislike work and must be forced to do their jobs (this later relates to Burns’ transactional leadership). Theory Y was a philosophy of management suggesting that under the right circumstances, people are fully capable of working productively and accepting responsibility for their work. This assumes people have a need to work and seek achievement and responsibility.

In 1978 James MacGregor Burns’ developed his classic definition of leadership. Leaders induce followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations, the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations, of both leaders and followers. In Leadership Burns introduced the concepts of transactional and transformational leadership.

Transactional leadership exhibits leaders who exchange tangible rewards for the work and loyalty of followers. Leadership is responsive and works within the organizational culture. Employees achieve objectives through rewards and punishments set by the leader. This motivates followers by appealing to their own self-interest. It works because of economic exchange and establishes value of work.

Transformational leadership exhibits leaders who engage with followers, focus on higher order, intrinsic needs, and raise consciousness about the significance of specific outcomes and new ways in which those outcomes may be achieved. Leadership is proactive and works to change the organizational culture. Employees achieve objectives through higher ideals and moral values. Leadership motivates by encouraging the organizational culture to put group interests first. Transformational leadership is able to change the culture by thinking about the future. It emphasizes vision, mission, empowerment, trust and participation. It uplifts the follower to seek universal principles of liberty, justice, and equality.

There are four facets of transformational leadership.

1. 
   Idealized influence which establishes positive attitudes in employees toward each other, work, and themselves. There is charisma and risk-taking. The leader is a role-model.
   
2. 
   Intellectual stimulation, where leaders challenge their own assumptions and encourage new approaches.
   
3. 
   Inspirational motivation where leaders present clear vision which is creates a desirable future for employees.
   
4. 
   Individualized consideration where leaders consider each individual’s needs and abilities while supporting development and mentoring.
   

To Fred Fiedler (1987), stress is a key determinant of leader effectiveness. In stressful situations, leaders dwell on the stressful relations with others and cannot focus their intellectual abilities on the job. Thus, intelligence is more effective and used more often in stress-free situations. Fiedler concludes that experience impairs performance in low-stress conditions but contributes to performance under high-stress conditions. As with other situational factors, for stressful situations Fiedler recommends altering or engineering the leadership situation to capitalize on the leader’s strengths. Fiedler’s situational contingency theory holds that group effectiveness depends on an appropriate match between a leader’s style (essentially a trait measure) and the demands of the situation. Fiedler considers situational control the extent to which a leader can determine what their group is going to do to be the primary contingency factor in determining the effectiveness of leader behavior. Fiedler’s contingency model is a dynamic model where the personal characteristics and motivation of the leader are said to interact with the current situation that the group faces. Thus, the contingency model marks a shift away from the tendency to attribute leadership effectiveness to personality alone.

This relates a few years later to Douglas Kiel’s writing (1994) on chaos theory. Chaos is there and leaders need chaos and the observation of it to take action. The key is to look for underlying order and focus on it. He defines new leadership in relation to orientation and behavior saying that new leaders will be optimists, risk takers, and mission driven. New leaders will be able to handle multiple scenarios, constant evaluation, and focus on short term plans.

In 1988 Robert Behn published Leadership Counts: Lessons for Public Managers. Behn’s analysis spans the spectrum of managerial tasks and examines elements of leadership, creating successful programs, and putting theory into practice. Leadership requires an idea of what you want to accomplish and a sense of how you plan to accomplish it.

David Carnevale in 1995 wrote about the trustworthiness of leaders. He said that ethical behavior is the creator of trust. Trust and ethics are both acts and are linked in the quality of individuals. Trust is about the attempt to be ethical. It must be observable and outsiders must know that if you have a job to do, you will do it. Trust is the basis of relationships with citizens, superiors, and peers and it holds an organization together. The problem with trust that is the general population doesn’t trust public organizations. The attempt to restore trust faces several barriers.

Joanne Ciulla (2002) believed in empowerment through sincerity, truth, and as a reciprocal moral agreement. She created the three facets of leadership in her book Ethics: The Heart of Leadership. The included:

1. 
   The ethics of means (the moral relationship between leaders and followers)
   
2. 
   The ethics of person (self-interest)
   
3. 
   The ethics of ends (doing what will serve the greatest good)