Unit 8

Managerial, Economic, Legal, Political, and Technological Approaches to

Public Administration

MANAGERIAL, POLITICAL, AND LEGAL APPROACHES

TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Public administration involves a number of complex concerns and functions. It is not surprising, therefore, that as an academic discipline or theory, public administration lacks coherence.

Some scholars view it as a managerial endeavor, similar to practices in the private sector. Others emphasize its political aspects. Still others view it as a distinctively legal discipline, noting the importance of constitutions and regulations in public administration.

Those who define public administration in managerial terms view public administration essentially the same as a big business. They believe that public administration ought to be run according to the same managerial principles. They promoted the bureaucratic organizational structure of public administration. Bureaucracy requires a highly specialized division of labor which enables each worker to become an expert at what he or she does. Then, specialization requires coordination and hierarchy, that creates a chain of authority to manage and coordinate the work. Data are gathered and statistically analyzed. The selection of public servants is recommended to be based according to their efficiency and performance. They believe that public employees should be prohibited from taking an active part in politics as “administrative questions are not political questions”, and to become businesslike they have to become nonpolitical. Law is deemphasized by them: as Leonard White (1923) stressed, “the study of administration should start from the base of management rather than the foundation of law”. In making decisions public administrators were to choose most cost-effective.

The managerial approach tends to minimize the distinction between public and private administration.

Yet public administration differs from private administration in many significant ways, such as:

1. Separation of powers, that is their division into chief executives, legislature, and courts, helps to avoid different political pressures and save people from autocracy. At the same time it may frustrate coordination between them (не понятен antecedent) that often creates a very complex environment for contemporary public administration. This situation is not observed in the private sector.

2. Constitutional concerns frequently run counter the values of private management.

3. The profit motive is not central to the public sector. The governmental obligation to promote the public interest distinguishes public administration from private administration and management.

4. Public agencies do not face free, competitive markets in which their services are done. This remoteness makes it difficult to evaluate the efficiency of public administrators. If government agencies manufacture a product that is not sold freely in open markets, then it is hard to determine what the product is worth.

5. The actions of public administrators have the force of law while the private sector must turn the public sector’s courts and police power for the enforcement of contracts.

Public administration is also viewed as an issue in political theory and then it is placed? (assigned? И изменить немного фразу?) a different set of values: representativeness, political responsiveness, and accountability of elected officials to the citizens. They (who? What?) stress political pluralism within public administration. Public administration is to reflect public choice, which may or may not coincide with generalizations that are scientifically derived.

The legal approach emphasizes the rule of law and views public administration as applying and enforcing the law in concrete circumstances to protect an individual from malicious, arbitrary, erroneous, or unconstitutional deprivation of life or administrative action.

In contemporary public administration the elements of all the three approaches can be found. В тексте нет ничего про информационные технологии…

(On the basis of Rosenbloom, 15-32)

Developing Reading and Speaking Activities

Ex. 1. Read the text about the relationship of economics and public administration. Then work with a partner to fill in the information gap about differences between the two fields.

Student A presents the information about public administration.

Student B adds some comparable information about economics. Exchange the roles.

Economics and public administration

Public administration has always overlapped economics. Efficiency was the holy grail of the progressive officials and academics who created the modern discipline of public administration. They sought to place public affairs on a strict business basis, directed by men skilled in business management and economics.

Economics permeates each and every sector of human activity. It is about how limited resources are used to create wealth. In the contemporary world, public administration plays a critical role of providing direction in terms of how that wealth should be distributed, although its involvement in the economy differs from one country to another depending on a particular economic system at play. The public administrators are therefore faced with the challenges of taking decisions within the context of economic realities of their communities. They often make decisions in the face of limited resources. This is a fundamental economic challenge. A sound knowledge of the fundamentals of economics is, therefore, essential for all public administrators and policy makers in the business of government.

There are several differences between public administration and economics.

Public administration	Economics
1. First of all, public administration is concerned with prescription – the identification of normative rules for decision makers that would lead them to make decisions that are optimal from the standpoint of the citizenry as a whole. Public administrators solve problems.	1. Economics is concerned with prediction – the identification of rules decision makers are likely to follow, given their incentives. Economists explain choices.
2. Second, morality ought to play an important role in the conduct of the public’s business. Economic theory is useful to public administrators when it provides them with concepts they can use to diagnose problems accurately and to prescribe effective solutions to those problems – i.e., concepts like opportunity costs, incentives, or capitalization that can be profitably applied to an array of problems frequently encountered by public administrators. (может, немного уменьшить предложение? Уводит от темы…) But real-world problem solving also frequently raises questions of value and of right and wrong.	2. Economists often have trouble accounting for this simple fact of morality. Economic logic recognizes no good but efficiency, no evil aside from inefficiency.
3. Thirdly, public administration is concerned with “pragmatic reform.” Public administrators deal with messy, real-world problems.	3. Economics is a theoretical discipline. Economists build elegant, logically consistent deductive models.
4. And then, public administration is not economics. In public administration there is no connection between revenue and expenditure. The public services are spending money only; the insignificant income derived from special sources (for example, the sale of printed matter by the Government Printing Office) is more or less accidental. The revenue derived from customs and taxes is not “produced” by the administrative apparatus. Its source is the law, not the activities of customs officers and tax collectors. It is not the merit of a collector of internal revenue that the residents of his district are richer and pay higher taxes than those of another district. The time and effort required for the administrative handling of an income tax return are not in proportion to the amount of the taxable income it concerns. In public administration there is no market price for achievements. This makes it indispensable to operate public offices according to principles entirely different from those applied under the profit motive.	… . (Continue playing your role after having listened to the arguments of your partner.)

Ex. 2. Read the text about the recent technological reforms in public administration and speak about the e-government implementation results:

E-government as a Reliable