Top Management Story

Writen by Md. Shahriar Islam Sabuj

Public administration is a subject of human inquiry with ancient roots. Contrary to present practice, the ancients were preoccupied with governance of public affairs as opposed to business, and very often, as in Greece, had disdain for commerce and management of business enterprise. Ancient empires created elaborate state structures, and effectively operated an apparatus overseeing huge territories. China gave the world the first civil service system some two thousand years ago, while the Roman Empire set the structures of governance (e.g., the organization of the executive branch into five main agencies) that many modern European states borrowed in their development.(1)

Management Models of Public Organizations

In the first direction, management of public organizations, two basic models can be recognized: a) the classic administrative model (from Taylor, Wilson and Weber to Simon and March); and b) the human relations model (from Mayo and Follett to Golembiewski and Argyris).

The second direction, bureaucracy in the framework of constitutional democracy, ismore diverse because of its close bonds to the fields of political science, economics and sociology, as well as its larger scope (society at large). Larry Hill, (2) for instance, classifies theories of bureaucracy according to the end result-the impact they prescribe to bureaucracy in governance. This classification has three main categories or theories: (1) bureaucracies are (or should be) weak and instrumental; (2) they are significant actors in political process; and(3) they dominate the policy process.

Paradigms of Public Administration

David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's Reinventing Government (3) is the most popular paradigm of public administration in the 1990s. It produced a popular agenda for high performance government, an agenda which Vice-President Albert Gore and the National Performance Review (4) adopted in Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less. Their recommendations for process and service improvements may have greater impact than those contained in a dozen or so comparable efforts over the last century. Perhaps government has never been under such pressure from the public to be more productive and effective; nor has government appeared more willing to change. The ''reinventing government'' paradigm is a rather eclectic synthesis of different approaches. It has ten tenets:

1. Government should act as a catalyst—it should ''steer,'' rather than ''row.''
2. Government should empower rather than serve.
3. Government should be competitive.
4. Government should be mission-driven rather than rule-driven.
5. Government should be result-oriented, and should not base its actions on inputs.
6. Government should be customer driven.
7. Government should be enterprising.
8. Government should anticipate rather than cure social ills.
9. Government should be decentralized.
10. Government should be market-oriented.(5)

Goals of Public Administration

Of the two central goals of public administration,(6) first maintenance and then task. The first goal emphasizes the development of a sense of ''inside'' and ''outside.'' This requires identifying the analytical ''us'' as contrasted with ''them,'' as well as specifying the character and quality of the relationships between the ''us'' and the heterogeneous ''them.''

The second central goal emphasizes comprehending what's going on in management—the development of tools and skills for description, analysis, and action. The first goal may be labeled ''maintenance,'' and the second ''task.'' The key questions associated with the first goal are:

• Who am I professionally and, to at least some degree, who am I as a person?
• Whom do I associate with in seeking and applying knowledge?
• With what scholarly discipline(s) or field(s) do I identify?

The key questions associated with the second goal are:

• What is my legitimate domain for study?
• What concepts or tools should I use?
• What are my criteria of reality or truth?
• What are the broad goals or values that my contributions to knowledge or truth should serve?

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE SERVICE OF DEMOCRACY

From Reinhold Niebuhr's classic volume, Moral Man and Immoral Society, we are informed that ''Practically every moral theory, whether utilitarian or intuitional, insists on the goodness of benevolence, justice, kindness, and unselfishness.'' During the periods of no national ethical unity, it is generally inevitable that the career public service is the first to be affected adversely by the external and internal centrifugal forces of suspicion, distrust, and cynicism.

A heavy burden rests on the career public service to assume the initiative in creating among the body politic the new possibilities for igniting the centripetal forces of ethical values and moral virtues.

In a word, society is dependent on the career professionals in governments at all levels to lead it to a new value vision of the common good. As a first step in this direction, public administrators must be willing to confront the suppressive and debilitating constraints, which currently are being imposed on ''bureaucracy'' from all directions, and to reaffirm the values and virtues inherent in the notion of service, which have unified the ethical forces of democracy so well in the past.

References:

1. See, for example, Wren, Daniel A. The Evolution of Management Thought, 4 ed., Wiley, New York, 1994;Heady, Ferrel. Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective, 5th ed., Marcel Dekker, New York,1996.

2. Hill, Larry B. ''Who Governs the American Administrative State? A Bureaucratic-Centered Image of Government.''Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 1 (July 1991): 261-294.

3. Osborne, David, Gaebler, Ted . Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1992.

4. National Performance Review, Washington, September 1993.

5. Osborne, David and Gaebler, Ted. Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1992.

6. The immediate argument closely follows Robert T. Golembiewski. '''Maintenance' and 'Task' as Central Challenges in Public Administration.'' Public Administration Review 32 (March 1974): 168-169.

author is a student of department of public administration, university of dhaka.