INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Following Max Weber, the elemental features of public administration include:
(1) some basis of formal authority with claims to obedience;
(2) intentionally established laws and rules, which apply to all;
(3) specific spheres of individual competence, which include task differentiation, specialization, expertise, and/or professionalization;
(4) the organization of persons into groups or categories according to specialization;
(5) coordination by hierarchy;
(6) continuity through rules and records;
(7) the organization as distinct from the persons holding positions or offices in it; and
(8) the development of particular and specific organizational Technologies.

All the great human events in history were probably achieved by what we today would call public administration.

The validity or usefulness of any theory depends on its capacity to describe, to explain, and to predict.

In public administration, the descriptive features of theory help us see; the explanatory features of theory help us understand.

At a loose and almost casual level, theory is simply an orientation, framework, technique, or approach.

Theory in the social sciences and in public administration means the ordering of factual material (history, events, cases, stories, measures of opinion, observation) so as to present evidence through definitions, concepts, and metaphors that promote understanding. This theory is based on the rigorous and intuitive observation of social behavior, organizational behavior, institutional dynamics, political systems and behavior, patterns of communication, and culture.

Organization and management practices in collective or public settings are certainly as old as civilization, and significant changes in those practices tend to accompany historical shifts in mass-scale social organization and operation. For example, the transition from feudal society to the extended nation-state was made possible by the centralization of policy, on the one hand, and the decentralization of policy implementation, on the other.

Although the practice of public administration is very old, the formal study of public administration and the elaboration of public administration theory are very new. As a separate self-conscious or self-aware academic and intellectual thing— a body of knowledge, a field of professional practice, an academic subject, a form of politics, a social construction of reality—public administration is young.

Following Max Weber, the elemental features of public administration include:

(1) some basis of formal authority with claims to obedience;

(2) intentionally established laws and rules, which

apply to all;

(3) specific spheres of individual competence, which include task differentiation, specialization, expertise, and/or professionalization;

(4) the organization of persons into groups or categories according to specialization; 

(5) coordination by hierarchy;

(6) continuity through rules and records;

(7) the organization as distinct from the per- sons holding positions or offices in it; and

(8) the development of particular and specific organizational Technologies.

A theory, to be useful, should accurately describe or depict a real-world event or phenomenon. Most theories do this at some level of abstraction. Most important public administration phenomena are complex, and therefore description is an abstract representation of phenomena. All descriptions require that the analyst decide which elements in a complex phenomenon to emphasize. All descriptions are distortions of reality and are relative to the circumstances prevailing at the time of the description. Descriptions are often like a still photo or a series of still photos—and often fuzzy photos at that. Description is less often like a videotape.

At a loose and almost casual level, theory is simply an orientation, framework, technique, or approach. 

Second, theory in the social sciences and in public administration means the ordering of factual material (history, events, cases, stories, measures of opinion, observation) so as to present evidence through definitions, concepts, and metaphors that promote understanding.

In the 1960s, at the time of the so-called behavioral revolution in political science, there were essentially two positions regarding the prospects for a rigorous empirically based theory or set of theories to explain political behavior.

Furthermore, in issues of collective human purposes wisdom, intuition, and judgment are of surpassing importance, but they are difficult to measure and classify.

By contrast, the behaviorists’ argument takes the positivist position that collective human behavior exhibits enough order to justify a rigorous search, measurement, classification, and depiction of that order. This can be done either by separating facts from values—logical positivism—and theorizing about the facts or by explicitly dealing with the value implications of factually derived theory. As for issues of ethics, morality, wisdom, and other fuzzy concepts, the behaviorist position is that such variables are not beyond the reach of empirically derived theory.

Weber  was a social scientist in the positivist tradition who argued that human behavior, particularly bureaucratic behavior, exhibits observable and describable patterns that can be scientifically verified. But he also argued that social reality is composed of the ideas and beliefs of social actors.

Public administration theory derived from historical analyses, institutional study, and philosophy is now understood to be as legitimate as public administration theory derived from statistical analysis and mathematical models.

In the 1960s, at the time of the so-called behavioral revolution in political science, there were essentially two positions regarding the prospects for a rigorous empirically based theory or set of theories to explain political behavior.
These two positions were the classical, or traditional, and the scientific, or behavioral.

In the natural and physical sciences, theory means a rigorous testing of predictive theorems or hypotheses using observable and comparable data. These hypotheses, once tested and verified, form the basis of theories, assertions, or representations of reality.

Weber was a social scientist in the positivist tradition who argued that human behavior, particularly bureaucratic behavior, exhibits observable and describable patterns that can be scientifically verified. But he also argued that social reality is composed of the ideas and beliefs of social actors. The task of social science must therefore be the interpretation of action in terms of subjective meaning.

Traditionalists argue that by being more scientific, public administration shies away from the big questions of right and wrong. The tidy models of the behavioral theorist, they argue, can lend a specious air of authority to such work.