Unit 1 Philosophy Essay

PA2000 Unit 1 Lecture: The Ecology of the Administrative Craft

Unit 1 is an introduction into the course that provides a definition of the field of public administration.an easy definition of public administration if you are content with government in action – the management of public affairs or the implementation of public policies. There are several definitions that could be taken into consideration in different context:

Political – the political nature of public administration makes it different from private or business administration. Public administration is what government does ranging from scheduling state dinners for visiting officials, inspecting beef at a slaughterhouse and/or determining the number of rodent hair safe and legal in food we eat.

Public administration is both direct and indirect. It is direct when government employees provide services to the public as varied as mortgage insurance, and mail delivery. It is indirect when government pays private contractors to provide goods and services to citizens. An example, NASA operates the space shuttle, but the shuttle itself was built by private corporations.

Public administration is a phase in the public policymaking phase. Governments are always considering what to do or not to do. Whatever they do is public policy. All such decisions are made by those who control the political power and implemented by the administrative officers of the bureaucracy. Public administration is implementing the public interest. Public interest is the universal label in which political actors wrap the policies and programs that they advocate.

Public administration is doing collectively that which cannot be so well done individually. What started as voluntary services became institutionalized as people indicated a preference to pay taxes so that once voluntary activities could become government function.

Public administration is law in action. The law that creates an agency or program is known as enabling legislation – the law that legally enables a program to exist. No government administrator can do anything if it is not provided for in the legislation or in the rules and regulations that the legislation allows the agency to promulgate.

Public Administration is the executive function in government. A president, governor or mayor is constantly recommending new programs to the Congress, state legislature or city council. They actively compete to influence the enactment of programs they are anxious to implement.

Public administration is art, not science – or vice versa. Some people have a gift for administration. They have a knack for getting people to work together harmoniously. The administrative art comprises judgement and common sense. But the artist is useless without tools – without technical skills (the science) that allows for the digestion and transference of information. Nothing is more pointless than to argue whether the practice of public administration is more art or science. It is inherently both. Of course, the more science you have, the better artist you'll be. But book learning won't make you an artist if you don't possess an element of the gift in the first place.

Public administration is an occupational category. It is whatever the public employees of the world do. It ranges from brain surgery to street sweeping. Most of the people in the broad occupational category do not even think of themselves as public administrators. They identify with their specific professions (physicians, engineers, or teacher) and trades (carpenter, electrician, or plumber). While it is true that they may not be administrators in the sense of being managers, they are nevertheless, whether they realize it or not, ministering (in the sense of providing services) to the public.

Public administration is idealism in action. Many people enter public service careers because they are idealist; they believe in and seek to advance noble principles. "Noble" is the key word here because traditionally the nobility had public service obligations. They were the warrior class, so it was their obligation to heroically protect the weak and less fortunate, to accept the notion of nobles oblige. Idealism draws people into public

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administration because it provides them with worthwhile and exciting things to do with their lives.

Public administration is an academic field. It is the study of the art and science of management applied to the public sector. But it traditionally goes beyond the concerns of management and incorporates as its subject matter all of the political, social, cultural and legal environments that affect the running of public institutions.

The study of public administration must include it ecology. "Ecology" state the Webster Dictionary, "is the mutual relations, collectively, between organisms and their environment". An ecological approach to public administration builds from the ground up; from the elements of a place - soil, climate, location, for example – to the people who live there – their numbers, and ages and knowledge, and the ways of physical and social technology by which from the place and in relationship with one another, they get their living.

John Gaus has put together a list of factors that are useful in explaining the ebbs and flow of the function of government. They are: people, place, physical technology, social technology, wishes and ideas, catastrophe, and personality. By illustrating concretely the relations of these environmental factors, a cooperative testing of the theory will e facilitated. The change in the distribution of the people of a governmental unit by time, age and administration. At our first census, we were a people 80% of whom lived on farms; at our last census one hundred and fifty years later, 80% of us did not live on farms.

The movement of people (by characteristic age and income group) from the mother city to suburbs, produces its repercussions in the values of land and buildings, in the tax basis for public services already existent in older areas and demanded in the new.

Changes in physical technology – the adoption of the automobile – and the role it has come to play. Its wide spread use was made possible by the development of paved highways provided necessarily as a public service.

The originator of ideas and of social as well as physical inventions are persons. We students of public administration will do well to study the elements in the influences. Relevant preparation, longevity, personal or institutional resources for research, sympathetic disciples, frequently some catastrophic situation in which prevailing attitudes were sufficiently blasted to permit the new ideas to be applied, channels of publication and of communication generally, as well as inner qualities of industry and integrity all, or nearly all in some combination will be found.

Catastrophe, especially when leadership and knowledge are prepared with long-time programs into which the immediate hurried relief action can be fitted, has its place in the ecology of administration

The quality of government's work depends on the quality of the individual recruited and retained in the public service, on their respect for bureaucratic accountability and ethical behavior, and especially on their commitment to the constitutional, democratic system. In stilling such values is a societal task; it depends on communication by family, school, and peers. Public administration is no longer primarily, the direct execution of government programs. Much of it now is administration by proxy, the delegation to and supervision of activities by third parties – state and local governments, profit-oriented corporations, and nonprofit organization. This new mission calls for a degree of sophistication continuing awareness that government is different, with obligations that eclipse those of the nongovernmental agents whose energies it enlist.

(CSLO 1, CSLO 4)

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