1. Lecture 3 Understanding Public Bureaucracy
Introduction to
Public Personnel Administration
Spring 2014 1 1

2. Today’s Learning Objectives
The general overview of the field
Sectoral distinction: public vs. private administration
Introducing public bureaucracy: The nature and characteristics of public bureaucracy 2

3. Defining Public Administration
Defining public administration: what government and its partner do to formulate, implement, and evaluate, and improve public programs.
ex. Public health, garbage collection, street cleaning, and airport management, as well as other implementations of law
Four frames for defining public administration (Kettl Ch 2)
a. Political: political nature
b. Legal: the implementation of the laws
c. Managerial: emphasis on managerial values
d. Occupational: one of occupational fields

4. Private vs. Public Administration
The blurring of the sectors
“The public and private sectors overlap and interrelate in a number of ways, and that this blurring and entwining of the sectors has advanced in recent years” (Cooper, 2003, p.11; Rainey, 2003, p.59).
Agencies and enterprises as points on a continuum
Can we run government like a business?

5. Essential Distinctions
Distinct differences remain between public administration and private administration.
1) Public organizations do the public’s business/ governmental affairs by administering law.
- The primary responsibility of administration is faithful execution of laws.

6. Essential Distinctions
2) Public organizations have fundamentally different systems and processes from those of private organizations
Different legal framework: Additional constraints as result
Different goals and processes
3) Public organizations operate in a different environment.
- Political context of public administration: separation of politics and administration?

7. Public Organizations and the Law
The fundamental distinction between public and private organizations is their relationship to the rule of law.
Public administration exists to implement the law/public authority.
Example: the federal Antideficiency Act forbids government officials from spending money for any purpose not explicitly authorized by law.

8. Goals: Efficiency vs. equity
Conflicting views on the Administrative state:
efficiency (administrative discretion) vs.
accountability (political control over public bureaucracy)
Government can run like a business?
Key issue—administrative responsibility: efficient program implementation with accountability to elected officials and the people

9. Processes: Public vs. Private Organizations
Public employment: Civil services
Performance measures: Lack of any direct way of evaluating an organization’s outputs in relation to the cost of the inputs to make them
Competing standards: efficiency vs. equity (Conflicting goals)
Public scrutiny: strong external influences
Oversight: public administrators' exposure to public scrutiny

10. Public Organizations and the Profit Motive
Public and private activities can be distinguished by profit motive.
Private, nongovernmental organizations can be nonprofits and advance a social agenda.

11. Public Administration: The Study of Public Bureaucracy
Defining public bureaucracy
Public bureaucracy refers to public organizations or the formal, rational system of relations among persons vested with administrative authority to carry out public programs
Negative images of public bureaucracy
Too inefficient to accomplish much of anything
Reluctant to change
Abusing its power over users

12. Public Bureaucracy: a necessary evil?
President Carter and President Reagan’s bureaucracy bashing and President Clinton and President Bush’s downsizing government
Bureaucracy and red tape are necessary evils that should be abolished?

13. Issue 1: Everyone hates public bureaucracy?
Waldo coined the term “administrative state” to emphasize government’s growing size post–World War II. In what ways has this development created a government bureaucracy that is inefficient? Too big to control?? What are your experiences with public bureaucracy?

14. Politics and Administration Dichotomy
In the early twentieth century, scholars separated policy or the political work of making policy from administration.
Why? For what?
The generation of scholars rejected this politics/administration dichotomy because it is now obvious that administrative staffs share in the policy formation function.
Yet, the motivations and behaviors of policymakers and public administrators are very different (a KEY issue for public administration).

15. Politics/Administration Dichotomy
Wilson (1887): “Administrative questions are not political questions. Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics.” “Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices.”
Goodnow (1900): Two distinct functions of government – politics and administration: the exercise of all the powers and duties of government, both general and local, which are neither judicial nor legislative; execution of policy.
Weber: His ideal bureaucracy would be insolated from politics and politically neutral.
Gulick and Taylor: Administrative management school and scientific management both emphasized a rational and scientific approach to management that served to buttress the dichotomy.

16. Rejection of the Dichotomy
Waldo (1948): Critical of a value-free and politically neutral science of administration driven by the pursuit of efficiency. PA should be in harmony with democracy and democratic values (democratization of bureaucracy).
Schick (1975): The dichotomy provided for the ascendancy of the administrative over the political (efficiency over representation, rationality over self-interest). Politics is an essential imperative of PA—it defines the administrative enterprise.
Stillman (1999): The powerful postwar attacks on POSDCORB and the dichotomy brought about an end to orthodoxy and ushered in a period of heterodoxy (multiple approaches to PA).
Rosenbloom (1993): Wilson’s dichotomy was untenable, yet it continues to pervade American administrative thought for political reasons

17. Issue 2: Politics/administration dichotomy
What are the various identity crises facing the scholarly study of public administration? Does public administration emphasize “means and not ends”; efficiency or efficiency plus equity; administration or administration plus politics?
Did public administration’s entrance into policy formation drag politics into administration?