Public Administration

Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector

David H. Rosenbloom, Robert S. Kravchuk, Richard M Clerkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000426267
• Edition: 9
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The ninth edition of Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector grounds students in the fundamentals of public administration while embracing its complexity. It describes, explains, and analyzes public administration through the lenses of three well-established perspectives: management, politics, and law. In addition to thoroughly refreshed examples and case studies, significant updates to this new edition include the following:

• The discussion of management has been collapsed into a single category, contemporary public management, to better reflect the blending of traditional/orthodox and new public management approaches in the field.
• Significant changes to federal administration initiated by the Trump administration, the emergence of "hyper-" partisanship, major court decisions affecting public administration, and newer scholarship and foci in public administration.
• A thoroughly rewritten chapter on budgeting and public finance.
• New public governance material is incorporated throughout the book, including collaborative models for coordinating administration with private organizations, particularly nonprofits.
• Additional attention is paid to public participation in public administration, including public administration's potential contribution to strengthening democratic citizenship.
• Thorough discussion of the latest managerial techniques and concepts as well as the contemporary performance orientation in the public sector.
• Downloadable instructor support materials including Key Points, Discussion and/or Test Questions, Multiple Choice Questions, True or False Questions, and an Answer Key to accompany each chapter in the book.

Together these revisions reinvigorate the book yet retain its core structure, ideas, and familiarity for students and instructors alike. While the new edition retains its focus on the U.S. context, the focus on managerial, legislative, and judicial functions lends itself well to public administration in many developed nations, making the book a popular choice with instructors around the globe. This time-tested and fully up-to-date textbook is required reading for all students of public administration, public management, and nonprofit management.

Part IIntroduction: Definitions, Concepts, and Settings

10.4324/9781003198116-1

1. Chapter 1 The Contemporary Practice and Discipline of Public Administration: Managerial, Political and Policy, and Legal Perspectives
2. Chapter 2 The American Administrative State: Development and Political Environment
3. Chapter 3 Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations: The Structure of the American Administrative State

Chapter 1The Contemporary Practice and Discipline of Public Administration: Managerial, Political and Policy, and Legal Perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198116-2

KEY LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Be able to define public administration, and to identify its principal concerns.
2. Understand the differences between public administration and private management.
3. Learn the managerial, political and policy, and legal approaches to public administration and the tensions among them.
4. Learn how new public governance (NPG) seeks to reform public administration.

This chapter considers what distinguishes public administration from the administration and management of private and nonprofit enterprises, focusing on the roles of the Constitution, the public interest, economic market forces, and government sovereignty. The chapter explores how public administration provides both service and regulation. It discusses a framework for understanding public administration that consists of three general and competing approaches to administrative theory and practice. One approach sees public administration as essentially management, another emphasizes its political and public policy-making features, and the third focuses on its legalistic aspect. Each perspective embraces a different set of values, offers distinctive organizational approaches for maximizing those values, and considers the individual citizen in different ways.

Public administration has historically been difficult to define. Nonetheless, we all have a general sense of what it is, though we may disagree about how it should be carried out. In part, this is because public administration involves a vast amount of activity. Public sector jobs range from providing homeland security, to the exploration of outer space, to sweeping the streets. Some public administrators are highly educated professionals who may be at the forefront of their fields of special expertise (like National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] engineers and rocket scientists); others possess few skills that differentiate them from ordinary workers. Some public administrators make policies that have a nationwide impact and may benefit millions of people; others have virtually no responsibility for policy making and simply carry out mundane, but necessary clerical tasks. Public administrators are doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, accountants, budgeters, policy analysts, personnel officers, managers, baggage screeners, clerks, keyboarders, manual laborers, and individuals engaged in a host of other occupations and functions. But knowing what public administrators do does not resolve the problem of defining what public administration is.

It was pointed out some time ago that any one-paragraph or even one-sentence definition of public administration may prove temporarily mind-paralyzing.¹ This is because “public administration” as a category is so abstract and varied that it can be described only in vague, general, and somewhat competing terms. Yet some attention to definition is important. First, it is necessary to establish the general boundaries, and to convey the major concerns of the discipline and practice of public administration. Second, defining public administration helps place the field in a broader political, economic, and social context. Third, and perhaps most importantly, consideration of the leading definitions of public administration reveals that there are at least three distinct underlying approaches to the field. For years the tendency among scholars and practitioners has been to stress one or another of these approaches. But this has promoted confusion, because each approach tends to emphasize different values, different organizational arrangements, different methods of developing knowledge, and radically distinct views of the individual citizen.

Some Definitions

One can find a wide variety of definitions of public administration, but the following are among the most serious and influential efforts to define the field.²

1. “Public administration … is the action part of government, the means by which the purposes and goals of government are realized.”
2. “Public administration as a field is mainly concerned with the means for implementing political values.”
3. “Public administration can be best identified with the executive branch of government.”
4. “The process of public administration consists of the actions involved in effecting the intent or desire of a government. It is thus the continuously active, ‘business’ part of government, concerned with carrying out the law, as made by legislative bodies (or other authoritative agents) and interpreted by the courts, through the processes of organization and management.”
5. Public administration (a) is a cooperative group effort in a public setting; (b) covers all three branches—executive, legislative, and judicial—and their interrelationships; (c) has an important role in the formulation of public policy, and is thus part of the political process; (d) is different in significant ways from private administration; and (e) is closely associated with numerous private groups and individuals.

What conclusions can be drawn from this variety of definitions of public administration and their myriad nuances? One is that public administration is indeed difficult to pin down. Another conclusion is that there is really no such subject as “public administration,” as such, but rather that public administration means different things to different observers and lacks a significant common theoretical or applied meaning. However, this perspective has limited appeal because the problem is certainly not that there is no public administration—we not only know it exists, but also are often acutely aware of its contributions and limitations.

Ironically, another conclusion that can be drawn from the multiplicity of definitions is that public administration is everywhere. Some have argued that there is no field or discipline of public administration per se because the study of public administration is inherently interdisciplinary³ and overlaps a number of other disciplines, including political science, sociology, economics, psychology, anthropology, geography, and business administration. Although this approach contains a great deal of truth, in practical terms it is unsatisfactory because it leaves us without the ability to analyze coherently a major aspect of contemporary public life—the emergence of large and powerful governmental agencies. In two words: public bureaucracy.

This book concludes that all the previous definitions are helpful, but limited to some extent. Public administration does involve activity, it is concerned with politics and policy making, it tends to be concentrated in the executive branch of government, it does differ from private administration, and it is concerned with implementing the law. But we can be much more specific by offering a definition of our own: Public administration is the use of managerial, political (including policy making), and legal theories, practices, and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial mandates for the conduct of governmental regulatory and service functions. There are several points here that require further elaboration.

Emphasizing the Public in Public Administration

First, public administration differs from private administration in significant ways. The lines between the public and private sectors are often blurred, insofar as several aspects of management and law are generic to both sectors. However, on balance, public administration remains a separate field. The reasons for this are outlined in the pages that follow.

Constitutions

In the United States, the federal and state constitutions define the environment of public administration and place constraints on it. First, constitutions fragment power and control over public administration (see Box 1.1). The separation of powers places public administration effectively under three “masters.” Americans have become accustomed to thinking of governors and presidents as being in control of public administration, but in practice legislatures possess as much or more constitutional power over administrative operations. This is clearly true at the federal level, where Congress has the constitutional authority to create agencies and departments by law; fix their size in terms of personnel and budget; determine their missions and legal authority, internal structures, and locations; and establish procedures for their human resources management (HRM). Congress has also enacted a large body of administrative law to regulate administrative procedures, including rule making, open meetings, public participation, and the gathering and release of information.

The courts also often exercise considerable power and control over public administration. They help define the legal rights and obligations of agencies and those of the individuals and groups on which public administrators act. They define the constitutional rights of public employees and the nature of their liabilities for breaches of law or the Constitution. The judiciary has also been active in the restructuring of public school systems, public mental health facilities, public housing, and prisons in an effort to make certain they comply with constitutional standards. Judicial review of agency activities is so common that it variously places judges and public administrators in positions of “partners,” “allies,” or adversaries with one another.⁴ The judiciary also plays an important role in maintaining balance among the presidency, Congress, and courts in the constitutional separation of powers so that each branch provides direction and control over some aspects of administrative practice.

The extent of legislative and judicial authority over public administration leaves chief executives with extensive, yet only partial control over the executive branch, and far less authority than is commonly found in the hands of chief executive officers of private organizations, whether profit-seeking or not. The text of the federal Constitution grants presidents only two specific powers that they can exe...