Discuss the contributions to the academic field of public administration made by the following individuals: Woodrow Wilson, Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick, Herbert Simon and Alan Altshuler.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN AMERICA by George J. Gordon and Michael E. Milakovich, Sixth Edition, Bedford/St. Martin’s

ESSAY QUESTIONS, SET A

Identify the key features of intergovernmental relations in contemporary American politics and discuss their significance. What major themes may be said to exist in contemporary intergovernmental relations?

Discuss the similarities between the Weberian bureaucratic model, scientific management, and the “principles” approach to studying public organizations. Describe the basis of each theory and its impact on the development of American public administration.

Briefly describe the principal “roles” of leadership. Which of these do you consider the most important? Which is the most difficult to carry out? The easiest? Explain your choices?

What are the traditional elements of public personnel administration? How do you think they differ from the private sector counterparts?

Define, compare and contrast incremental budget making, line item budgeting, performance budgeting, planning-programming-budgeting (PPB) and zero-base budgeting (ZBB). What are the features, advantages and disadvantages of each?

What are the basic democratic values that underlie our society? How have they changed in recent years? How have these changes affected public attitudes toward public administration?

What are the “crisis of confidence” and “crisis of legitimacy” in government? Is there anyway to resolve these crises? If so, how? If not, what are the implications fro the future of democratic government?

Discuss the contributions to the academic field of public administration made by the following individuals: Woodrow Wilson, Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick, Herbert Simon and Alan Altshuler.

In the earlier period of the late 1800 and early 1900 public administration was viewed as distinct and separate from politics, more of a business type field. During this era Woodrow Wilson’s contributes to the academic field of public administration in his essay The Study of Administration. In this essay, Woodrow Wilson states that the administration “is removed from the hurry and strife of politics…. Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate administrative offices.” (Page 22) This distinction between politics and public administration is widely accepted during the early 1900’s, in part because of Woodrow Wilson’s writings.

Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick wrote the Papers on the Science of Administration. These papers, published in 1937, defined seven principles that have become important characteristics of the public administration discipline. These principles are: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting and budgeting. Gulick and Urwick placed emphasize on the importance of these seven principles within any human organization, and stressed the stated efficiency that was the underlying goal for any administrative science.

World War II demanding a greater pledge of government commitment increased the turmoil. Academics went back to their postwar campuses and changed their approach to what to teach about public administration. These changes directly geared to the political process and public administration’s part in the making of public policy.

The field of public administration had many critics. One more prominent during this era was Herbert Simon. Soon after the war Simon attacked, the principles set out by Gulick and Urwick as being logically inconsistent with each other. The Proverbs of Administration, Simon likened the principles to contradictory proverbs or paired opposites. For example, Simon pointed out that, while “Look before you leap” is a useful proverb, as well is “He who hesitates is lost.” Both these proverbs are memorable, often applicable and mutually exclusive, without any hint of how to choose between them. Simon argued that the principles behind these proverbs were very similar, they were interesting, but of little practical value in defining administrative process (pg. 23.) Simon’s book Administrative Behavior (1947) developed this argument further and contributed to the weakening of the principles approach.

During the period 1933-1945 three major developments occurred: (1) a “drastic expansion in the public conception of the obligations and responsibilities of government in social and economic affairs,” (2) the emergence of an “enduring emphasis upon presidential leadership,” and (3) a change in the nature of the federal system, with a shift to “the national scene of the responsibility for most of the important policy decisions” in the economy and society at large. According to political scientist Alan Altshuler, Roosevelt had demonstrated “ that patronage might be of great value in aiding a vigorous President to push through programs of social and economic reform (pg. 23).”

Alan Altshuler pointed out that the problem with public administration in the “behavioral” era was that many functions and processes of administration do not lend themselves to the same sort of quantitative research, as do legislative voting patterns, election data or public opinion surveys. This is due to the fact that many public administrative decisions are made informal and in partial or total secrecy. Altshuler goes further by explaining how the exact values of administrators and the alternatives they consider are difficult to identify and analyze and that the traditional emphasis on efficiency contrasts sharply with the core concerns of modern political science. Alan Altshuler states, that public administration became, a “rather peripheral sub field of political science” (pg. 24.), with many questioning its place in the larger discipline.

The key features of intergovernmental relations in contemporary American politics are the steadily increasing intergovernmental aid and joint efforts that became more important components of public policy making. Thus, for example, national government grants for rural highway construction and maintenance became more numerous; grants for urban renewal became more widespread; and direct aid to urban governments for airport construction and other transportation purposes also appeared on the scene (pg. 85.) After the Great Depression, federally funded state and local social welfare, along with farm supports and public assistance, bureaucracies, gradually replaced voluntary sources for aiding those in need. This expansion of the national government increased in the 1940’s through the 1950’s and into the 1960’s with programs such as President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society.

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The increasing development of social programs has been followed with mandates from federal government agencies requiring local, state and sub-state agencies to follow certain restrictions and guidelines set forth by the National Government. These mandates, some funded and some not, have become a source of complaints from many political figures and elected officials. Many people also believe that this increase of power given to the national government has weakened the control citizen’s have on their daily life. These increasing mandates have also taken away power from the state and local government and given it to the federal government. Until 1995 when the, “Unfunded Mandates” Act was passed. The government mandates caused a major problem for local and state agencies, how to fund them. This problem led to fiscal intergovernmental fiscal relations between the different levels of government. This intergovernmental fiscal relation was in the form of grants-in-aid from the federal government to the local and state governments. In 1961 there was only forty-five separate grant programs in existence. By 1968, only eight years later, there were around 400 grant programs. The number of dollars spent on grants has increased from $7 billion in 1960 to approximately $230 billion in 1996.

There are several principle themes that stand out in the new developing relations in intergovernmental relations. Functional alliances between organizations have become dominant on today’s public administration landscape. Second principle is the growing political and managerial struggle between elected officials and administrative/functional specialists for control over major IGR program directions. The third principle is the tension arising between those individuals in government that prefer centralization and those that prefer de-centralization. Since the early 1980’s a main focus of many government officials is the decentralization of government functions in order to have more control over their activity. All of these themes have fiscal, administrative and political dimensions.

Max Weber (1864-1920) termed this organizational form a "rational-legal system" - its structure and processes expressly designed to achieve certain goals. The bureaucracy is rationally designed for optimum functional performance and every part (depts. levels, posts) contributes to the whole (unity of purpose). The bureaucracy is legal. Authority is exercised via rule and procedural systems & the offices people occupy.

Organizational members and clients accept (conform to) its authority because the rules are defined and administered fairly. Rights & privileges protect individuals from organizational (officer) injustice - equity prevails regardless of who you are. Rules include policies and standard procedures for implementing these. They are solutions to past problems demanding known responses (we avoid reinventing the wheel). Rules guide behavior-ensuring consistency at every level. Nine out of ten problems encountered are covered by regular procedures. This is a risk minimizing, consistent apparatus.

Many feel that bureaucracy is synonymous with inefficiency, an emphasis on red tape and excessive writing and recording - especially public administration. For Weber - the organization is technically the most efficient form of structure possible.

The similarities between Max Weber’s bureaucratic model and Frederick Taylor’s scientific model are; both men emphasized formal structure and rules, both dealt hardly at all with customers or with employees’ working environment and directly or indirectly equated the control needs of those at the top of the hierarchy with the needs of the organization as a whole. The “principles” approach of administration is an offshoot of the scientific approach to administration. The “principles” approach is believed that there existed certain permanent principles of administration that if they could be discovered and applied, could transform the performance of administrative tasks.

Max Weber’s bureaucratic model consisted of five key elements.

Division of labor and functional specialization: work is divided according to type and purpose, with clear areas of jurisdiction marked out for each working unit and an emphasis on elimination of overlapping a duplication of functions. (Page 118)

Hierarchy: a clear vertical chain of command in which each unit is subordinate to the one above it and superior to the one below it. (Page 118)

Formal framework of rules and procedures: designed to ensure stability, predictability and impersonality in bureaucratic operations (and thus equal treatment for all who deal with the organization), as well as reliability of performance. (Page 118)
Maintenance of files and other record: to ensure that actions taken are both appropriate to the situation and consistent with past actions in similar circumstances. (Page 118)

Professionalization: employees who are (a) appointed (not elected on the basis of their qualifications and job-related skills, (b) full-time and career-oriented civil service, and (c) paid a regular salary and provided with benefits such as health insurance and a retirement pension. (Page 118)

In addition to these five principles, Weber believed that it is important for the government bureaucracy to have the legal and political authority to function effectively. Weber understood that this form of government was an idealistic belief of organizations coming to fruition in the late nineteenth century. Weber’s model of government is an incomplete model because it lacks informal lines of authority, internal communication, customer feedback, concern for individual behavior and motivation in the bureaucracy. Weber himself stated that the model could only be utilized in certain organizations.

The impact Weber’s model of government has had on the development of American public administration is a sharing of several key aspects. Those similarities are: the operation within a formal framework of vertical hierarchy; extensive division of labor and specialization; specific rules, procedures and routines; a high degree of professionalization, complete with extensive merit systems, career emphasis and salary and fringe benefits.

The scientific model was designed for accountability and equity and not efficiency. The model has divided lines of authority and limited discretionary power dictated by the constitution and existing political culture. The scientific model was originally developed to assist private-sector management in adapting production practices to the needs of an emerging industrial economy in the early 1900’s. The scientific method rested on four values:

Efficiency in production: obtaining the maximum benefits or gains possible from a given investment of resources. (Page 121)

Rationality in work procedures: arrangement of work in the most direct relationship to objectives. (Page 121)

Productivity: maintaining the highest production levels possible. (Page 121)

Profit: Ultimate objective of everyone within the organization. (Page 121)

There are several other critical assumptions that the scientific method makes. It views the organizational authority as highly centralized at top management levels. It assumed a hierarchy of midlevel managers and supervisors through which top management conveyed orders to those below. It also believes that at each level of the organization, responsibility and authority were fixed at a central point. The model also believes there is one best way to perform and particular task and that this way can be discovered through scientific research. The model believes that this ideal method for performing a certain task could be taught to workers responsible for that task and that scientific selection of workers for their capabilities in performing the tasks. This would be the best and most effective way to achieve the organization’s overall objectives.

Taylor, the creator of the scientific model, believed management needed to do three things to increase productivity. Firs, the most efficient tools and procedures had to be developed. Second, in teaching the new techniques to workers, emphasis was to be placed on standardizing the procedures in order to enable workers to discharge their responsibilities routinely yet efficiently. Third, criteria that emphasized task-related capabilities needed to be developed for and applied to the worker selection process.

The “principles” of public administration was influenced greatly by Taylor in believing that organizational effective management procedures could be studied effectively to discover the best method. There are six major themes that are the basis of the “principle” model:

Unity of command: direction by a single individual at each level of an organization and at the top of the structure. (Page 123)

Hierarchy: the vertical ordering of superior-subordinate relations in an organization, with a clearly defined chain of command. (Page 123)

Functional specialization: division of labor and subject matter specialization as a main contributor to work efficiency. (Page 123)

Narrow span of control: each supervisor having responsibility for the activities of a limited number of subordinates. (Page 123)

Authority parallel with responsibility: each responsible official endowed with the authority necessary to direct operations in the particular organizational unit. (Page 123)

Rational organizational arrangement: plan the organization according to function or purpose, geographic area, process performed or people served. (Page 123)

Briefly describe the principal “roles” of leadership. Which of these do you consider the most important? Which is the most difficult to carry out? The easiest? Explain your choices?

Leader as director: In this role the leader brings understanding to the multiple activities within an organization. This is done by done by persuading and convincing those in charge of various activities to emphasize the part of their work that are aimed toward organizational objectives. This means that the leader defines the problems to be dealt with. This leadership continues toward motivation of individuals to do what is best for the organizations. Leaders in public organizations should think like coaches, teachers or facilitators of change.

Leader as motivator: The purpose of the leader as a motivator is for the leader to provide incentives and conditions appropriate to the interests of those doing the work. Research has shown that great attention should be paid to incentives such as offering attractive salaries, fringe benefits and working conditions; creating positive social interaction among groups of workers and making the work as interesting and challenging as possible. The leader must consider that different things motivate different people. Individual motivation factors must be considered when dealing with people. Other aspects of the motivation factor are a strong interaction between them and their first line supervisor. This relationship is important in individual job satisfaction.

Leader as coordinator/integrator: A function of growing importance for leaders in complex organizations have been coordinating and integrating the varied functions and tasks of increasingly specialized staffs members. Leaders, who are not as competent as their subordinates in the individual technical specialties, must rely on competence by their subordinates even as they attempt to organize the efforts of staff members into a coherent whole. This coordination and integration is a very important aspect of the leadership principles. The subordinates understand the importance of their function, but many times do not understand the importance of the other employee’s functions. It is up to the manager to coordinate these functions and insure coordination is properly carried out.

Leaders as catalyst/innovator: This is the conception of a leader as a spark plug, as the “one who makes it happen,” which is widespread in the conventional wisdom about groups and organizations, appears to have some validity. But the particular conditions prevailing in the group situation may strongly affect a leader’s opportunities to stimulate group action. The best opportunities occur when the leader has influence in the group, informal support and a relatively well-structured task at hand-when “ the group is ready to be directed, and the members expect to be told what to do. To be an effective catalyst/innovator it is important for the leader to put confidence in their subordinates by delegating authority. The leader must also ensure that decisions that reflect change in the organization must be introduced to subordinates as necessary in the best interests of the entire organization.

Leader as external spokesperson and gladiator: This role is the role of a public affairs agent. This leadership type involves articulating and representing the formal organizational positions to those outside the organization. Normally this role also includes and advocacy role when the organization seeks to secure additional resources or to maintain resources it has. This role of spokesperson has become more important as organizations have become more complex and is particularly so as organizations begin to deal with other organizations. The external spokesperson is also important in bestowing praise publicly on his organization.

Leader as manager of crisis in the organization: This is the aspect of the manager dealing with the serious problems or difficulties that arise in their units or that affects on of their clienteles. These leaders must deal with another increasingly new problem, resource scarcity. With resources decreasing, the leader must learn how to adapt and deal with these financial difficulties. The leader within the crisis organization must learn to adapt to the problems of dwindling resources and ensure that his organization remains as effective, even though the resources are limited.

The easiest one of these principles to carry out is the leader as the spokesperson and gladiator. If you believe in your organization and its goals, it should be easy to articulate those goals and the importance of obtaining those goals to outside agencies. The most difficult one of these principles is the leader as crisis management. To effectively carry-out this role you must be quick on your feet and good at decision making. You never know what crisis might arise, so you cannot plan for all crises. Since these crises are often unpredictable, you must be able to adapt and respond quickly to be an effective leader in this aspect.

What are the traditional elements of public personnel administration? How do you think they differ from the private sector counterparts?

When two men cooperate to roll a stone that neither could have moved alone, the rudiments of administration have appeared. This simple act has the two basic characteristics of what has come to be called administration. There is a purpose--moving the stone--and there is cooperative action--several persons using combined strength to accomplish something that could not have been done without such a combination. In its broadest sense, administration can be defined as the activities of groups cooperating to accomplish common goals.

The tasks of personnel administration have traditionally included position classification, recruitment, examination, selection and compensation. More recently, as management of complex organizations has become more challenging, administrators (including personnel administrators) have had to become better grounded in human resources planning, employee training, counseling, motivating employees, labor relations, interpersonal skills, social and behavioral psychology, disciplining employees and dealing with legal constraints.

There are various ways that public personnel administration differs from its private sector counterparts. One way that the private and public sector differs is the job security. In the public sector an individual’s job is more secured than in the private sector, where the fluctuation of the economy might affect job security. A second difference is the promotion to higher levels of responsibility. In the public sector you are many times promoted because of seniority of a job and not on performance. An example of this is the military, where time in rank is used as an argument for who should get what job. If two individuals of the same rank are considered for a position, they will consider the time they have spent in that rank when deciding who gets the position. This “time in rank” sometimes holds more weight than performance. Another difference in employment between private and public sector is the public sector’s utilization of inscriptive criteria in employee selection. In the public sector, program’s like affirmative action plays a large role in selection processes. Although, the public sector considers different aspects of an applicant than the private sector, as the public sector begins to shape into a more market based structure, the hiring practices of private and public sector will begin to look similar.

Incremental budget making: Is the idea that the budget will increase in fixed increments every so often and these incremental increases are figured in when developing the budget. The advantages of the incremental budget making is that the increases are known well in advance and it is easy to predict how much money each program or organization will have from year to year. The problem with this budgeting type is that increases might be made where cuts should be made, or the increases are not enough.

Line-item budgeting: The earliest approach to modern executive budget making, emphasizing control of expenditures through careful accounting for all money spent in public programs; facilitated central control of purchasing and hiring, along with completeness and honesty in fiscal accounting. The advantages of line item budgeting are the control of expenditures with emphasis on accounting for all money spent in public programs. This gives the public more confidence in the way money is being spent, because its focus is accounting for every penny and eliminating fraud, waste and abuse. This budget is focusing on how money is spent within individual organizations and ensuring that fiscal responsibility is maintained. The disadvantages of this type of budgeting are that it is a very tedious and difficult task to develop these budgets. By paying close attention to every penny being spent and ensuring that fraud, waste and abuse is eliminated, you must spend numerous hours ensuring that the budget is correct.

Performance budgeting: An approach to modern executive budget making that gained currency in the 1930’s, emphasizing not only resources acquired by an agency but also what it did with them; geared to promoting effective management of government programs in a time of growing programmatic complexity. This type of budgeting was established to measure the performance level of government programs by focusing on developing workload and unit-cost measures of activities. Although performance budgeting was very good at measuring efficiency of government programs, it did little or nothing to measure effectiveness.

Planning-programming-budgeting: An instrument of executive budgeting designed to alter processes, outcomes and impacts of government budgeting in significant ways. This budgeting was aimed at improving the planning in advance of program development and before budgetary allocations were made. It was designed to allow budget decisions to be made on the basis of previously formulated plans and was intended to make programs, not agencies, the central focus of budget making. Many believe that PPB would reform budgeting in the national government so as to bring about greater rationality, less “politics” and better and more informed decisions. PPB never made it very far because of resistance from Congress. This resistance was due to the member’s of Congress not wanting to lose their influence and understanding of the budget. The federal bureaucracy never went with 100% PBB format; congress would also request the budget in the old format. Although PBB might be lost, it brought about four components that remain today:

A basic focus on information (Page 317)

Concern with the impact of programs (Page 317)

Emphasis on goal definition (Page 317)

A planning perspective (Page 317)

Zero based budgeting: involved three basic procedural elements within each administrative entity. (1) identification of decision units, the lowest entities in a bureaucracy for which budgets are prepared. (2) Analysis of these decision units and formulation of decision packages by an identifiable manager with authority to establish priorities and prepare budgets for all activities within the administrative entity. The analysis began with administrators providing estimates of agency output at various funding levels and assessing the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of the unit; it then proceeded to formulation of decision packages by each administrator. (3) Ranking of decision packages from highest to lowest priority. Advantages of ZBB are the ability to see the expenditures of government agencies at the lowest levels and the ability to prioritize the different components of the budget. The disadvantages of the budget is in theory you would have to re-examine each item in the budget periodically, this could prove to be very tedious work.

What are the basic democratic values that underlie our society? How have they changed in recent years? How have these changes affected public attitudes toward public administration?

The underlying values of our society are democracy, equality, freedom of speech and religious expression, and the belief that America has a special moral responsibility internationally, has remained constant through decades of social change. Other values, such as duty to one’s country, social conformity, respectability, accepted norms of sexual morality and the work ethic have declined in importance for many people. Other values have increased in importance during this same period. These values include respect for diversity, pluralism, greater acceptance of individual differences, wider choices in personal lifestyles, concern for the environment, emphasis on quality of work life, belief in technology as a solution to many problems, putting family ahead of career and personal ambition, assuming individual responsibility for health care and retirement and protecting the rights of women and children.

The public has begun to have a watchful eye towards the government bureaucracy. The level of trust between the bureaucracy and the public has declined over the past forty years. Bureaucracy has become a focal point of discontent not only because of its obvious power but also because of its waste and mismanagement of scarce resources, its relatively obscure decision processes, and the degree to which it is insulated from direct (elective) political controls. Protests against the actions of local school boards and police departments, impatience with inefficiency and red tape, and public response to regulatory actions all testify to the intensity of feeling and, more generally, to growing frustration and a widening sense of distance between the people and their governing institutions. The corrupt and unethical dealings of elected officials over the last thirty years, has also brought discontent between the public and their elected officials.

The questioning of whether the public organizations are carrying out their mission and providing goods and services in an effective, efficient and uncorrupt manner has forced the public to monitor the dealings of these organizations. The average citizen believes that government is a bloated and tax-dollar consuming entity that provides services at a very inefficient cost. This belief that has been developing over the last thirty years has been the main reason for the increased efforts to hold government accountable. The veil of secrecy that bureaucracies used to operate behind have been torn down and opened to public scrutiny. Efforts such as the freedom-of-information-laws and the sunshine laws ensure that government bureaucracies and elected officials will be held accountable for decisions they make.

Over the last thirty years we have been experiencing a crisis of confidence or “crisis of legitimacy” regarding government and its actions. Recently, new assumptions or premises appear to be gaining momentum in shaping popular perceptions of government. There are five areas where these have been expressed:

Public programs are counterproductive to the social and economic well-being of the country (Page 479)

The public no longer expects public programs to work and is increasingly unwilling to spend additional funds on them (Page 479)

Public programs are better administered at the state and local level-further, many functions should be taken over by private organizations and voluntary community efforts (479)

National government program managers are becoming less important, with fewer needs (Page 479)

Public managers are already overpaid, and any system of reward or penalties in the public sector will be abused (Page 479)

This lost of confidence in government is can hurt the democratic process and make our government less effective. This lack of confidence has led to the open-records laws and other laws that have been enacted for people to be able to oversee government. The best way to resolve these crises of confidence in government is for government to be more forthcoming and honest with the public. The more the public knows and the less they believe is being hidden from them, the more confidence they will develop in government programs and decisions. Another way that the government must insure that the level of public confidence remains in government is by using criteria such as James Joseph laid out; the degree to which a project contributes to the sense of equity, community, utility, security and quality of life in America (Page 480.) Whatever decisions are made in the future, attention must continue to be paid toward increasing the public’s confidence in the government. If the confidence in government continues to decrease we run the risk of total apathy and miss-trust for the government. This type of attitudes and beliefs will run counterproductive to the participative democracy that our government is based on. We must ensure that citizens continue to participate in the election and governmental process, to ensure that the system performs in the manner it is intended to.