Introduction to Public Administration

What Public Administration Means

Public administration is the machinery through which the decisions of a state become facts in the lives of its people. A law passed in Parliament is, until it is administered, only an intention. The distinctive claim of the discipline is that the gap between intention and effect is not a residual detail but a subject in its own right, with its own structures, behaviours and pathologies.

The field has never settled on one definition. Woodrow Wilson called it "the detailed and systematic execution of public law". Leonard D. White, whose Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (1926) was the first textbook in the field, defined it as consisting of "all those operations having for their purpose the fulfilment or enforcement of public policy". Luther Gulick located it as "that part of the science of administration which has to do with government, and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch". Felix Nigro and Lloyd Nigro offered the most inclusive formulation, treating it as cooperative group effort in a public setting that covers all three branches, has an important role in policy formulation, and is closely associated with numerous private groups and individuals.

Why the Definition Refuses to Settle

Dwight Waldo argued that a major difficulty in arriving at a precise and universally acceptable definition arises in part from the rapid growth of public administration through the twentieth century. As the state took on more, the discipline grew to cover it, until it seemed to become all-encompassing.

Frederick C. Mosher turned this from a weakness into a claim about the field's nature. The elusiveness of a disciplinary core, he suggested, is what gives the subject its strength and fascination. Perhaps it is best that public administration be not defined at all: it is more an area of interest than a discipline, more a focus than a separate science, and necessarily a cross-discipline.

Nicholas Henry resisted that dissolution and marked the boundaries instead. Public administration differs from political science in its emphasis on bureaucratic structure and behaviour and in its methodologies. It differs from administrative science in the evaluative techniques used by non-profit organisations, and because profit-seeking organisations are less constrained in considering the public interest in their decision-making structures and in the behaviour of their administrators.

For the examination this disagreement is itself the answer. A question asking what public administration is rewards an answer that treats the absence of consensus as a finding about a field sitting at the junction of politics, management and law, not as a failure of definition.

The Scope of Public Administration

The scope question asks whether public administration covers everything government does, or only the managerial part of it. Four positions dominate the literature: the Integral view, the Managerial view, the POSDCORB view and the Subject Matter view.

The Integral View

On the Integral view, public administration is the sum total of all the activities undertaken in pursuit of and in fulfilment of public policy. These activities include not only managerial and technical work but manual and clerical work as well. The activities of every person in an organisation, from top to bottom, constitute administration. Henri Fayol and L.D. White are the names usually attached to this position.

The consequence is that administration differs from one sphere to another depending on the subject matter. The administration of a public hospital is not the same activity as the administration of a revenue department, because the substantive work differs.

The Managerial View

On the Managerial view, only those activities concerned with the techniques of management count, and these are common to different kinds of organisation. It involves the skill of managers to organise and direct men and materials. Ordway Tead expressed it thus: administration is conceived as the necessary activities of those individuals, the executives, in an organisation who are charged with ordering, forwarding and facilitating the associated efforts of a group of individuals brought together to realise certain defined purposes. Herbert Simon, Donald Smithburg and Victor Thompson belong to this tradition, as does Luther Gulick.

M.P. Sharma put the contrast in its sharpest form. If we accept the Integral view, we have to regard the work of every one of those who work in an organisation as part of administration, and perhaps call every one of them an administrator. If instead we look at things from the managerial theory, then the work of only the manager, the heads of departments, and the foremen and supervisors would be called administration, and what the labourers, clerks and messengers do would be excluded.

The two views diverge on portability as well. On the Integral view administration varies with subject matter. On the Managerial view it is identified with managerial techniques common to all fields, which is precisely what makes a general science of administration conceivable.

The POSDCORB View

Luther Gulick, in the Papers on the Science of Administration (1937) edited with Lyndall Urwick, gave the managerial view its most famous compression. The work of the chief executive is captured in the acronym POSDCORB, each letter naming a technique.

Letter	Function	What it covers
P	Planning	Working out in broad outline the things to be done and the methods to be adopted for accomplishing the purpose in hand
O	Organising	Building up the structure of authority through which the entire work is arranged into well-defined subdivisions and coordinated
S	Staffing	Appointing suitable persons to posts, training personnel, and maintaining a favourable work atmosphere: the whole of personnel management
D	Directing	Making decisions and issuing orders and instructions embodying those decisions for the guidance of staff
Co	Coordinating	Interrelating the various parts of the work so that they pull together rather than against each other
R	Reporting	Keeping those to whom the executive is responsible informed, and keeping the executive and subordinates informed through records, research and inspection
B	Budgeting	Fiscal planning, accounting and control

The attraction of POSDCORB is that it makes administration teachable and transferable. If the chief executive's job is the same seven things everywhere, then a science of administration is possible and a trained administrator can move between departments.

Criticisms of POSDCORB

• It omits the substance. POSDCORB describes techniques and says nothing about the subject matter to which they are applied. Administering public health and administering the police differ in ways the acronym cannot register.
• It ignores policy. By confining itself to execution, POSDCORB carries the politics-administration dichotomy inside it and inherits that dichotomy's problems.
• Herbert Simon attacked the wider principles movement of which POSDCORB is part, arguing in Administrative Behaviour (1947) that such principles are no better than proverbs: they come in contradictory pairs, and nothing in them tells you which member of the pair applies to the case in front of you.
• The human element is absent. The techniques describe an organisation of positions rather than of people, a gap the human relations school would move into.

The Subject Matter View

The Subject Matter view takes the opposite tack and defines the field by its substantive content: defence, law and order, public health, education, agriculture, public works, social security. On this view, what an administrator needs is command of the sector, and the techniques are secondary to knowledge of the domain. The practical form of the argument appears in every debate about whether the higher civil service should be staffed by generalists or by specialists.

Woodrow Wilson and the Founding of the Discipline

The conventional starting point of the discipline is Woodrow Wilson's essay The Study of Administration, published in the Political Science Quarterly in 1887. Wilson is regarded as the father of the discipline, and he presented the politics-administration dichotomy that dominated the field for roughly a quarter of a century.

The Context

The setting was American, and it was one of rampant corruption in public administration. Reform of the administration was felt to require proper study of it, and the problems were concentrated in the cities, where most government was, where most problems were, and where the services of public administrators could most demonstrably be made more effective, more honest and less costly. The spoils system had made public office a currency of party loyalty. The Pendleton Act of 1883, passed four years before Wilson's essay, had begun the move to a merit-based civil service.

The Core Argument

Wilson's opening move was to separate the question of what government should do from the question of how it should do it. It is getting harder to run a constitution, he argued, than to frame one. The study of administration asks how administrative functions are to be performed and how government can perform its functions efficiently, successfully and at the least possible cost.

He held that administration was pre-eminently a science, and indeed the latest fruit of the study of the science of politics. He was critical that little scientific method was discernible in American administrative practice, and that there was no clear concept in America of what constituted good administration. Administrative science had first been developed in Europe, by French and German academies, and had grown to meet the requirements of compact states and centralised forms of government. The European advantage had two roots: governments there were independent of popular assent, so there was more governance; and the desire to keep government a monopoly made the monopolists interested in discovering the least irritating means of governing.

Popular Sovereignty as an Obstacle

Wilson identified popular sovereignty as a cause of the slow progress of administrative science in America. It is harder to organise administration in a democracy than in a monarchy, because administration in a democracy has to be continuously responsive to what he called the multitudinous monarch, public opinion. He added that unless a nation stopped tinkering with its constitution it would find it very difficult to concentrate on administration, since governments preoccupied with constitutional alteration will ignore administrative detail.

Borrowing Without Importing

Wilson argued for the comparative method, on the ground that one can never learn the weaknesses or virtues or peculiarities of any system without comparing it with other systems. To the objection that comparison would lead to the import of foreign and autocratic systems, he replied with his best-known image: "If I see a murderous fellow sharpening the knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it." One can learn from European autocracies and their more efficient administrative methods without importing their autocratic spirit and ends.

Fred Riggs later read a limit into this. Riggs believed that Wilson gave his highest loyalty to democratic government and would never have approved the export of administrative technology to non-democratic countries; he would have recommended concentrating first on political development in the sense of promoting democratic reform. The point matters because it makes Wilson an early witness in the later argument about whether administrative capacity can be transferred to states without democratic politics, which is the central question of Comparative Public Administration.

Delegation, Discretion and Accountability

Wilson held that the study of administration involved the proper distribution of constitutional authority. It should produce ways of delegating authority among public officials so that officials perform efficiently, public affairs run smoothly, and trust holds between the people and the public servants. For a responsible and efficient administration, public officials had to be assigned large powers and wide discretion. Where power is delegated in small measures, he argued, it tends towards obscurity, and obscurity defeats responsibility: you cannot hold to account an official whose share of a decision cannot be identified.

The Politics-Administration Dichotomy

The dichotomy is the proposition that politics and administration are distinct functions which can and should be separated, politics settling what is to be done and administration executing it.

Frank J. Goodnow gave the doctrine its firmest statement in Politics and Administration (1900), strengthening it by relating it to a corresponding value-fact dichotomy. He distinguished the two functions of government: "Politics has to do with policies or expressions of the State Will", while "Administration has to do with the execution of these policies". He also located them institutionally. Politics belongs to the legislature and the higher echelons of government where major policy decisions are made; administration belongs to the executive arm, the bureaucracy.

Leonard D. White's textbook of 1926 carried the doctrine into teaching. Its premises were that politics and administration were to be kept separate, and that efficiency and economy were the watchwords of public administration.

Did Wilson Actually Hold It?

This is the most productive controversy in the topic, and the one that separates a good answer from a recited one. Wilson seems to have vacillated between the separability and the inseparability of administration from politics, which is why later scholars read him so differently.

• Frederick Mosher holds that Wilson made the most powerful statement of the politics-administration dichotomy.
• Fred Riggs reads him the other way: for Wilson, not only are politics and administration closely intertwined, but administrative action is scarcely conceivable except as the implementation of general policies formulated by political means. On this reading Wilson was under no illusion that administrative development could occur in a political vacuum.
• Buechner argues that the basic premise of Wilson's argument was that the affairs of public administration were synonymous with those of private administration, and that the importance of the essay lies in its claim that the study of public administration should be akin to the central concerns of business administration, namely economy, efficiency and effectiveness.

The practical invalidity of the dichotomy did not trouble the thinkers of the first period. That it was empirically false, since administrators plainly make policy through rule-making, discretion and advice, became the charge that opened the next phase of the discipline.

Why the Dichotomy Debate Is Still Alive

As a description of how government works, the dichotomy was discredited by the late 1940s. Paul Appleby, in Policy and Administration (1949), argued that administration is itself policy making, and Simon's attack on the fact-value split removed its philosophical base. Yet the debate keeps returning, because the question beneath it has not been settled: how a permanent, expert administration can be subordinate to elected politicians and still be protected from them.

• As a norm. The dichotomy survives as the principle of a neutral, merit-based service that serves any elected government with equal loyalty and is neither rewarded nor punished for its politics. Indian service conduct rules bar officers from membership of political parties and from political activity, and Article 311 protects civil servants against arbitrary dismissal.
• In New Public Management. NPM revived the separation in structural form: policy ministries were split from executive agencies that deliver services under performance targets, as in Britain after the Next Steps report (1988) and in New Zealand's reforms. Osborne and Gaebler's steering and rowing restate Goodnow's politics and administration.
• As complementarity. James Svara, in his dichotomy-duality model (1985) and in "The Myth of the Dichotomy" (2001), argued that elected officials and administrators share the work. Elected officials dominate the definition of mission, administrators dominate management, and the two share policy and administration. The relationship is one of complementarity, in which politicians respect administrative competence and administrators accept political control.
• As images of roles. Aberbach, Putnam and Rockman, in Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies (1981), traced four images of the relationship: policy and administration strictly separated, a division between facts supplied by bureaucrats and interests represented by politicians, a division of energy and equilibrium in which both engage in politics, and a pure hybrid in which the roles merge.

Autonomy and Control

The administrator needs autonomy and discretion because expertise, continuity and the impartial application of law cannot be exercised under day-to-day political direction. The politician needs control and intervention because he answers to the legislature and the electorate for what the administration does. Each need is legitimate, and the danger lies at the extremes: too much autonomy produces the unaccountable bureaucracy Weber feared, and too much control produces a politicised service. The Supreme Court has sought the balance. Prakash Singh v Union of India (2006) directed minimum tenure for senior police officers and bodies to insulate postings from political interference, and T.S.R. Subramanian v Union of India (2013) called for civil services boards to handle transfers, fixed tenure, and the recording of oral instructions from political superiors. The dichotomy remains alive because these arrangements still have to be defended.

Public and Private Administration

Whether public administration is a species of administration in general, or something different in kind, determines whether business techniques can simply be imported into government. It is therefore the theoretical question underneath every managerial reform from the 1930s to New Public Management.

Points of Similarity

• Common techniques. Purchases, disposals, stocking, filing, accounting and personnel routines are common to both.
• Common skills. An engineer does the same kind of work whether employed in a government department or a private company, which is why retired civil servants in India are re-employed by large business enterprises, and why there is considerable exchange of personnel between the public and private sectors in the United States and Japan.
• Administrative set-up. The kind of organisational structure and hierarchy is much the same. The responsibility of a public official and of an official in a private enterprise are similar, in that each aims at results in an assigned field by getting things done through the efforts of other people and with the material resources available.
• Research. Improvement of procedures and techniques is a continuing process in both.
• Public relations. Both know that contact with the people is necessary to know their needs.
• Institutional convergence. Since the state entered business and industry, public administration has drawn heavily on the knowledge and experience of private administration, and public corporations display a close affinity with private administration. In several countries, institutions now train administrators from both together.

Points of Difference

Dimension	Public administration	Private administration
Motive	Public interest and service	Largely governed by profit
Accountability	Subject to public scrutiny and public outcry; departure from accepted norms embarrasses the government	Largely not accountable to the people or their representatives
Political direction	Subject to political direction in policy matters; must carry out the policy laid down by the political executive and cannot change it	Not subject to political direction except in emergencies
Range of functions	Comprehensive: police and fire services, education, public works, sanitation, and services that are monopolistic by law	Mostly confined to the economic needs of life
Measure of efficiency	Effectiveness against specific policy goals	Input-output relationship in resource use, reinforced by the hire and fire system
Legal framework	Functions strictly within the law of the land	Bound by law but with far wider managerial latitude

Paul H. Appleby gave the classic statement of difference: "Government administration differs from all other administrative work by virtue of its public nature, the way in which it is subject to public scrutiny and public outcry." The distinctive feature is not the technique but the goldfish bowl in which the technique is practised.

Two qualifications belong in any answer. First, the distinction between the sectors is largely influenced by the political philosophy of a nation, so the line moves as that philosophy moves. Second, the gap is narrowing, through the use of private contractors and companies by government and the flow of private funds into public institutions. That narrowing is the ground on which New Public Management would later stand.

Sayre's Dictum and Allison's Test

The sharpest formulation of the difference is a joke. Wallace S. Sayre, of Columbia University, observed in 1953 that public and private organisations are "fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects". The similarities that the convergence argument collects, filing, accounting, purchasing, hierarchy, are real, and they are trivial; what differs is everything that matters.

Graham T. Allison took Sayre's line as the title of a paper, Public and Private Management: Are They Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?, first presented in 1979, and tested it by comparing the functions of a public and a private manager under the headings of strategy, internal management and external constituencies. His conclusion was blunt: the notion that there is any significant body of private management practice and skill transferable directly to public management tasks, in a way that produces significant improvement, is wrong.

Allison's finding is the standing objection to New Public Management, and it is the argument to reach for whenever a question asks whether business techniques can be imported into government. The public manager's ends are set by statute rather than chosen, the performance measure is contested rather than given, and the constituencies, legislature, press, courts, citizens, are participants in the management task rather than an environment around it.

The Evolution of the Discipline

Robert Golembiewski proposed that each phase of the discipline can be characterised by whether it has a locus or a focus. Locus is the institutional "where" of the field; a recurring locus is the government bureaucracy, though it has not always been so. Focus is the specialised "what" of the field, such as the study of certain principles. The history of the discipline is a sequence in which one is held firm while the other is surrendered.

Stage I: Politics-Administration Dichotomy (1887 to 1926)

Opened by Wilson's essay, consolidated by Goodnow in 1900 and by White's textbook in 1926. The American Political Science Association published a report in 1914 discussing the objectives of teaching political science, one of which was to "prepare specialists for government positions", and public administration was thereby recognised as an important sub-area of political science. The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, established in 1924, developed the first graduate programme in public administration in the United States. The defining feature of the period was a passionate belief in the dichotomy, untroubled by its practical invalidity. The locus was clear, the focus was not.

Stage II: Principles of Administration (1927 to 1937)

The search shifted to principles of administration held to be universal and applicable to any setting. The period culminates in Gulick and Urwick's Papers on the Science of Administration (1937) and POSDCORB. Here the focus was strong and the locus dissolved: if the principles are universal, the government setting stops mattering. This is the high point of the discipline's confidence in itself as a science.

Stage III: The Era of Challenge (1938 to 1947)

Both pillars came under attack. Chester Barnard's The Functions of the Executive (1938) recast the organisation as a cooperative system resting on informal authority. Herbert Simon's Administrative Behaviour (1947) demolished the principles as proverbs and rejected the fact-value dichotomy that had sustained the politics-administration split. Robert Dahl questioned whether a science of administration was possible at all given the problems of values, individual personality and the social framework. Dwight Waldo's The Administrative State (1948) showed that the apparently technical principles carried a political theory inside them.

Stage IV: Crisis of Identity (1948 to 1970)

Having lost both its focus and its claim to a distinct locus, the field faced a question about what it was. Two routes were taken: a return to political science, which risked the discipline becoming a sub-field again, and a move towards administrative science and management, which risked losing the public. Comparative and development administration grew in this period, and with them the beginnings of a distinct body of theory.

Stage V: The Public Policy Perspective (from 1971)

Public administration reasserted a claim of its own by taking policy as its subject: not merely how policy is executed but how it is made, analysed and evaluated. The locus returned to the public sphere while the focus became policy analysis.

Stage VI: Paradigmatic Shifts (from the 1980s)

Economy and efficiency, administrative management, POSDCORB, performance budgeting, work measurement, human relations, cost-benefit analysis, productivity, management by objectives, the new federalism, affirmative action, organisation development, policy analysis and the systems approach are all by now part of the repertoire of public administration. The 1980s added the market-oriented reform agenda of New Public Management, and the 1990s the counter-current of governance and public value.

Nicholas Henry's Five Paradigms

Nicholas Henry, in "Paradigms of Public Administration" (Public Administration Review, 1975) and in his textbook Public Administration and Public Affairs, organised the history of the discipline into five overlapping paradigms, each defined by Golembiewski's test of locus and focus.

Paradigm	Period	Locus and focus	Landmarks
1. The politics-administration dichotomy	1900 to 1926	Locus in the government bureaucracy, focus left undefined	Goodnow's Politics and Administration (1900), White's Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (1926)
2. The principles of administration	1927 to 1937	Focus on universal principles, locus anywhere, since the principles were held to apply to every organisation	Willoughby's Principles of Public Administration (1927), Gulick and Urwick's Papers on the Science of Administration (1937)
3. Public administration as political science	1950 to 1970	Locus regained in the bureaucracy, focus lost, the field reduced to a sub-field of political science	Followed the challenge of 1938 to 1947 by Barnard, Simon, Dahl and Waldo
4. Public administration as management	1956 to 1970	Focus on organisation theory and management science, locus lost, since the public setting was no longer treated as distinctive	The founding of Administrative Science Quarterly (1956)
5. Public administration as public administration	From 1970	Focus on organisation theory, management science and public policy, locus in public affairs and the public interest	The founding of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) in 1970

The sequence shows a discipline that repeatedly gained one element by losing the other. The first paradigm knew where it worked but not what it knew. The second knew what it knew but held that where did not matter. The third returned to government as its home and lost a distinctive body of knowledge. The fourth found management techniques and lost the public. Only the fifth claimed both, and the separation of public administration programmes from political science departments, organised through NASPAA, was its institutional sign. Henry's scheme is the standard answer to questions on the evolution of the discipline because it explains why crises of identity recur: each paradigm settled one question by abandoning the other.

New Public Administration

The 1960s and early 1970s were a period of turbulence, instability and confusion in the West, particularly in the United States, and public administration, like psychology, sociology and political science, was shaken by it. Dwight Waldo's article Public Administration in a Time of Turbulence (1971) recorded the state of the discipline: neither the study nor the practice of public administration, he observed, was responding in appropriate measure to mounting turbulence and critical problems. Robert T. Golembiewski described the 1960s as a period of war for public administrationists.

Why It Emerged

Traditional public administration had shown its weakness in understanding the agony of the existing social crisis. Its apparent remoteness could not meet the demands arising from social and economic crisis. It had nothing to say about the fear of the nuclear bomb, the war in Vietnam that violated the moral conscience of the world, population growth, environmental pollution, dissensions of racial and economic origin, and rising social conflict. Younger intellectuals in the United States grew restless because neither the established centres of government nor the traditional citadels of knowledge were responding adequately.

The traditional thinking had been that policy formulation belonged to political leaders and the administrator's job was simply to implement. That position had become untenable, since administrators are involved in both the formulation of policy and its implementation at every stage.

Minnowbrook I (1968)

The movement was first expressed at the Minnowbrook Conference of 1968, held by young teachers and practitioners of public administration at the Minnowbrook Conference Center on the north shore of Blue Mountain Lake, New York. Two volumes published in 1971 gave the concept currency: Towards a New Public Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective, edited by Frank Marini, and Public Administration in a Time of Turbulence, edited by Dwight Waldo.

The contrast with what went before was deliberate. Old Public Administration gave significance to "administration" rather than to "public"; it emphasised principles and procedures rather than values and philosophy, and efficiency and economy rather than effectiveness and service. NPA made the values and ethics of public officials a critical issue, which the earlier approach had not.

The Four Goals

New Public Administration set out four goals for itself: relevance, values, equity and change.

• Relevance. Public administration had been interested traditionally in efficiency and economy, and the movement found that the discipline had little to say about contemporary problems. The management-oriented curriculum was judged irrelevant, and the demand was that the discipline deal explicitly with the political and normative implications of administrative action. Behind it lay the question of knowledge for what: whether the purpose of administrative knowledge is to facilitate the perpetuation of political power.
• Values. NPA scholars argued against value neutrality in research and practice. Value neutrality was held to be a disguise: an administration that claims no values in fact serves the values of the existing distribution. Administration must be human-oriented and its approach value-based.
• Social equity. The traditional goals of efficiency and economy were found to be inadequate and incomplete goals of administrative activity. Human beings are the focal point of all administrative activity and cannot be subjected to a mechanical test of efficiency. As Felix A. Nigro and Lloyd G. Nigro observed, while there is no doctrine to which all persons associated with the new public administration subscribe, most emphasise the principle of social equity, whose realisation they feel should be the purpose of public administration.
• Change. Administration should bring about internal and external changes so that it remains relevant to its social, economic, political and technical environment, adapting organisations and systems to environmental change and promoting citizen involvement in the administrative process.

Social Equity and H. George Frederickson

H. George Frederickson is the figure most closely identified with social equity as the third pillar of public administration, standing beside economy and efficiency rather than beneath them. The argument is that a service delivered efficiently and economically but unequally is an administrative failure even when the ledger is clean, because public administration is answerable for the distribution of what it delivers and not only for its cost. A programme that reaches the articulate and the accessible while missing the poor and the remote is not a well-administered programme.

The Three Anti-Goals

• Anti-technical. Giving more importance to human beings than to structure: NPA wanted bureaucracy to be humane.
• Anti-positivist. Positivism states things as they are, on the basis of facts, and prefers value neutrality. NPA preferred the normative question of what ought to be, and a value-based bureaucracy is in that sense anti-positivist.
• Anti-bureaucratic. Bureaucracy stood for red tape, inefficiency and cost overruns, and NPA thinkers were against it.

Minnowbrook II (1988)

The second Minnowbrook Conference met at Syracuse University on 4 September 1988, exactly twenty years after the first, funded by Syracuse University, the University of Kansas and the University of Akron. Sixty scholars and practitioners took part, drawn from policy sciences, history, economics, sociology, political science and public administration.

Frederickson's own comparison is the one worth carrying into an answer: Minnowbrook I was contentious, confrontational and revolutionary, while Minnowbrook II, twenty years later, was more civil and practical. Both conferences were theoretical, but where the 1968 dialogue was decidedly anti-behavioural, the 1988 conference acknowledged the contributions of the social and behavioural sciences to public administration. The movement had been absorbed rather than defeated.

Minnowbrook III (2008)

The third conference, coordinated by Rosemary O'Leary, met from 3 to 7 September 2008, forty years after the first. It ran in two parts: a pre-conference workshop for fifty-six new scholars at the original site at Blue Mountain Lake, and a larger conference open to the world at Lake Placid, New York. Around two hundred scholars and practitioners from thirteen countries took part.

The theme was the future of public administration, public management and public service around the world, and the shift from 1968 is visible in that title. Minnowbrook I was a conference about the United States in crisis; Minnowbrook III was explicitly global and comparative, and took up academic-practitioner relations, democratic performance management and globalisation, with an emphasis on action research and methodological pluralism. What carried across all three, on the participants' own account, was the question of the relevance of what the discipline does, and the wish that the field make a concrete positive difference.

Criticisms of New Public Administration

• It was strong on what it opposed and weak on what it proposed. The anti-goals are sharper than the goals, and the movement produced no distinctive administrative technique of its own.
• Social equity is difficult to operationalise. Efficiency can be measured; equity requires a prior political judgement about who is owed what, which administrators are not obviously authorised to make.
• If administrators are to act on their own values rather than implement the policies of elected representatives, the question of democratic accountability becomes acute. A value-driven bureaucracy that overrides the political executive is a different problem, not a solution.
• Its concerns were those of the United States in a specific decade, and the movement did not develop a comparative or a developing-country dimension despite addressing questions that bore directly on both.
• The revolution in tone outran the revolution in practice: administrative systems changed far less than the literature about them.

The Significance of Public Administration

The growth of the discipline tracked the growth of the state. As government moved from maintaining order to delivering welfare, planning economies and regulating industry, the administrative apparatus became the part of the state that citizens actually encounter. In a developing country the claim is stronger still: the administration is not merely the instrument of development policy but frequently its author, since the capacity to formulate and to implement is concentrated in the same permanent machinery.

Public administration also carries a distinctive democratic burden. It is the point at which abstract rights become concrete entitlements, and the point at which the failure of a state is first experienced as an unanswered application, an unpaid pension or an absent teacher. That is why the discipline's recurring questions, the dichotomy, the search for principles, the demand for equity, are not academic refinements but arguments about how a state keeps its promises.