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Advanced Public Administration Chapter Two Notes
During the three decades that span between the world wars and the full emergence of the cold war,
governments in the united states changed dramatically. At the federal level, the New Deal’s efforts to
cope with a worldwide depression significantly increased the roles of the government. Additionally,
reforms in the state government and city management were equally significant. Government
organization would be dominated by new themes: centralization, management planning, efficiency
measurement, and new forms of social programs.
“As a nation we are slowly accepting the fact that the loose jointed, easy going, somewhat irresponsible
system of administration which we carried over from our rural agriculture background is no longer
adequate for our present and future needs.” Leonard D. White 1939
Initial Efforts to Create a Science of Administration
By the 1930’s, public administration was mostly influenced through the teaching of Frederick Taylor and
his ideas of the scientific management.
Luther Gulick’s “Notes on the Theory of Organization” introduced the famous mnemonic, POSDCORB,
which stands for the seven major functions of management: planning, organizing, staffing, directing,
coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. He helped shape a critical distinction in orthodox public
administration: the study of management and administration was to be focused on the role of upper-
level management.
Understanding Organizations and Human Behavior
Chester Barnard followed Mary Parker Follett’s major themes within “The Functions of an Executive”. He
saw organizations as cooperative systems where the function of the executive was to maintain the
dynamic equilibrium between the needs of the organization and the needs of its employees.
Robert K. Merton believed that Max Weber’s theories of bureaucracy was inefficient. According to
Merton, bureaucracy exerts constant pressures on people to be methodical and disciplined, to conform
to patterns of obligations. These pressures eventually cause people to adhere to rules as an end rather
than as a means- as a matter of blind conformance.
The Hawthorne experiments of the 1930s had provided the first major empirical challenge to the
scientific management notion that the worker was primarily an economic animal who would work solely
for money.
The workers, as pointed out by Mary Follett a decade earlier, were more responsive to peer pressure
than to management controls.
Hawthorne Effect- the discovery that production increases were due to the known presence of benign
observers.
Abraham Maslow (1908- 1970) asserted that humans have 5 sets of goals and needs which were
arranged in a hierarchy which included phycological needs, safety needs, love or affiliation needs,
esteem needs, and the final need for self-actualization. Higher needs could not motivate until lower
needs are satisfied.
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Douglas M. Mcgregor (1906- 1964) pointed out the absurdity of maintaining universal principles of
organizational arrangements. He hypothesized that manager’s assumptions about human behavior
predetermined their administrative style.
McGregor labeled theory X as the following assumptions:
1. The average humans beings has an inherent dislike of work
2. Most people must be coerced or threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate
effort
3. People prefer to be directed and wish to avoid responsibility.
Theory Y:
1. The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest
2. A person will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which he has
committed
3. Avoidance of responsibility, lack of ambition, and emphasis on security are generally
consequences of experience, not inherent human characteristics.
4. The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, creativity in the solution of
organizational problems is widely distributed amongst the population.
The Growth of the Government and Reform Movement
Government had grown rapidly during the New Deal period under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt,
in response to the Great Depression.
Early Debates about Accountability, Ethics, and Administrative Responsibility
The issue involved how we could ensure that government administration, in pursuit of being responsive
to interest groups, executive and legislative forces would need to act legally and responsibly. A major
perspective on this problem of administrative responsibility and accountability came from E. Pendleton
Herrings’ 1935 book “Public Administration and Public Interest”. Herring recognized the problems posed
by the dramatic increase in the scope of government and the influence of administrative discretion.
Additionally, he was a significant voice in what is now known as group theory.
According to Herrings, the bureaucrat’s most basic task was to establish working relationships with the
various special interests so that their concerns could be more efficiently brokered. While he looked on
this process as highly desirable, a quarter of a century later Theodore J. Lowi would provide a critique of
why bureaucracy’s penchant for establishing such harmonious working relationships was paralyzing
modern government.
Carl Fredrich argued that administrative responsibility is best assured internally, through professionalism
or professional standards or codes. Internal checks and balances were necessary because the modern
bureaucrat’s policy expertise and specialized abilities were so extensive.
Herman Finer argued that administrative responsibility could only be maintained externally though
legislative or popular controls. External checks and balances were the only way to ensure subordination
of bureaucrats because internal power of control would lead to corruption. Some form of electoral or
legislative review was the only possible way to avoid abuses of bureaucratic power.
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Questions About Managing Resources in Government
The 1930s saw the advent of increasingly larger government domestic programs and concomitant
expenditures as a part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts to counter the national depression.
Consequently, budgeting became of increasing importance as well.
Performance budgeting, which was in its prime, after being officially sanction by the Hoover Commission
of 1949, stressed using the budget process as a tool for work measurement and efficiency analysis. Verne
B. Lewis advocated budget submissions be prepared in a manner that would facilitate comparison,
demonstrate a range of choices for service and funding levels, and at the same time have the final choice
provide realistic contracts and realistic expectations for the individual program managers.
Rejecting the Politics-Administration Dichotomy
The politics-administration dichotomy of the reform movement lost its viability amid the New Deal and
the war effort. It was simply not possible to take purportedly value-free processes of business and apply
them to government. Government, in spite of the best efforts of many reformers, was not a business and
was not value free.
According to Paul Appleby in, Big Democracy, Political involvement was good-not evil as many of the
progressive reformers had claimed because political involvement in administration acted as a check on
the arbitrary exercise of bureaucratic power.
Creating Theories of Decision Making and Public Administration
Robert A. Dahl analyzed the state of the art of the discipline of public administration in his 1947 Public
Administration Review article “The Science of Public Administration”. Public administration should be
created where: states end honestly: and
1. Recognizes the complexities of human behavior
2. Deals with the problems of normative values in administrative situations
3. Takes into account the relationship between public administration and its social setting
Selznick argued that in bureaucratic organizations, cooptation would reflect a state of tension between
formal authority and social power.
The State of Public Administration at Mid-Century
The first Hoover Convention, 1947-1949 chaired by former President Herbert Hoover, specific task in
relation to the machinery of government was supposed to be to reduce the number of governmental
agencies created during world war 2, but instead, it focused on strengthening the executive branch of
government and providing for a reorganization of executive branch agencies to provide a coherent
purpose for each department. Instead of calling for a reduction of government agencies, the commission
made a vigorous call for increased managerial capacity in the Executive Office of the President through:
1. Unified discretion over presidential organization and staff
2. A strengthened bureau of the budget
3. An office of personnel located in the executive office of the president
4. The creation of a staff secretary to provide liaison between the president and his subordinates
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At Mid-Century, public administration faced an American society in which the role of government vastly
changed. The impacts of the three great events – World War 1, the Depression, and the New Deal, and
World War 2, had radically altered the size, scope, and reach of the government. The public sector was
bigger, public sector organizations were larger and more sophisticated, and the trust and expectations of
the American public in government to solve societal problems had been significantly raised.
Bureaucracy and the Public Interest- E. Pendleton Herring
In the United States, the bureaucracy suffers for want of a hierarchical organization and a personnel
united by a harmonious concept of state service. The purpose of the democratic state is the free
reconciliation of group interests and that the attainment of this end necessitates the development of a
great administrative machine.
Average people desire to use the facilities of the government, but he does not wish the government to
control his activities.
Herring recognized the problems posed by the dramatic increase in the scope of government and the
influence of administrative discretion. Additionally, he was a significant voice in what is now known as
group theory.
According to Herrings, the bureaucrat’s most basic task was to establish working relationships with the
various special interests so that their concerns could be more efficiently brokered
Notes on the Theory of Organization – Luther Gulick
Luther Gulick’s “Notes on the Theory of Organization” introduced the famous mnemonic, POSDCORB,
which stands for the seven major functions of management: planning, organizing, staffing, directing,
coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. He helped shape a critical distinction in orthodox public
administration: the study of management and administration was to be focused on the role of upper-
level management.
Report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management- Louis Brownlow, Charles E.
Merriam, ad Luther Gulick
The five point program:
1. Modernize the White House business and management organization by giving the president six
high grade executive assistants to aid him in dealing with the regular departments and agencies.
2. Strengthen the budget and efficiency research, the planning, and personnel services of the
government
3. Place the whole governmental administrative service on a career basis and under the merit
system
4. Overhaul the more than 100 separate departments, boards, commissions, administrations,
authorities, committees, and agencies which are now parts of the executive branch and
theoretically under the president and consolidate them within twelve regular departments,
which would include the existing ten departments and two new departs, a department of social
welfare, and a department of public works.
5. Make the executive branch accountable to congress by creating a true post audit of financial
transaction by an independent auditor general.
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Bureaucratic Structure and Personality – Robert K. Merton
He was a functionalist sociologist. Published in 1940, it analyzes the formal personal structures within
organizations. Bureaucratic grow a strict a devotion to the rules, paradoxically it is this devotion that
does not allow the bureaucracy to be efficient.
A Theory of Human Motivation- A. H. Maslow
Psychologist who believed that our behavior is driven by needs and these needs are pursued in a
hierarchical fashion. In order to pursue up the pyramid you must sustain the bottom need on the
pyramid first. Psychological needs (food, water, oxygen) Safety and security Needs, (financial/emotional
safety), Social Needs (sense of belonging to someone or a group), Esteem Needs (Desire to feel good
about yourself/desire for prestige), Self-Actualization Needs(Feeling like we reach our fullest potential,
they are different for every person).
The Proverbs of Administration- Herbert A. Simon
The mechanisms that make bureaucracies efficient. Government bureaucracies and corporate
bureaucracies can not be effectively managed under the same universal system.
It appears that the simplicity of the principle of specialization is a deceptive simplicity- a simplicity which
conceals fundamental ambiguities.
The Administrative State Revisited- Dwight Waldo
Theory Y: The /interation of
Bureaucracy Basics: Crash Course Government and Politics #15
Technically the federal bureaucracy is a part of the executive branch, but it has grown over time so
significantly and some people are worried that the large growth of the executive branch could result in
that branch holding too much power. Even more troubling, bureaucracies just do not just enforce the
rules, but they also make regulations which can be considered troubling as
According to the constitution, only congress has the capabilities of creating laws. Of course some people
also are not afraid of this as the rule making process within the electorate branch allows for a degree of
popular participation that goes way beyond what happens in congress. It is because of public opinions
that are taken into consideration, that makes federal rule making more democratic than congressional
legislation.
Furthermore, administration adjudication raises similar separation of powers issues but they are less
problematic because the constitution gives congress the right to establish courts other than the supreme
court and it does not say that these can’t be administrative tribunals that are part of bureaucratic
agencies.
External individuals utilizes their informal influence in collaboration with others. The internal stake
holder group- typically government entites wear the har of interest groups in most policy settings
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For example, cursing on a radio or television can result in fines from the FCC.
