1. Compare the following theories/approaches and discuss their application to public administration and organization theory. Flashcards
a. Theories of political control of bureaucracy
Woodrow Wilson set out the most formal and rigid version of the dichotomy by arguing in this essay on modern public administration that politics should not meddle in administration and administration should not meddle in politics. Dwight Waldo and Herbert Simon challenged the dichotomy. To Waldo, all administrative acts were political at a fundamental level. To Simon, it was different empirically to unbundle politics from administration and vice versa. STREET LEVEL BUREAUCRATS – WHAT ARE THEY??? Street level bureaucrats refers to the subset of a public agency or government institution where the civil servants work who have direct contact with members of the general public. Street level civil servants carry out and/or enforce the actions required by a government’s laws and public policies, in areas ranging from safety and security to education and social services. Examples: police officers, border guards, social workers, and teachers.
Theories of bureaucratic politics
or explanations of why particular public policy decisions got made the way they did stress the motivation by the relevant officials in the government bureaucracy to protect or promote their own agency’s special interests (in competition with other agencies) as a major motivating factor in shaping the timing and the content of government decisions. Each bureau (or other governmental sub-division) continually strives to maximize its budget and its authorized manpower, as well as to protect or extend its operating autonomy and discretion in decision making in the area of its assigned responsibilities. Often this can be most readily accomplished by lobbying for an expansion of the scope of the bureau’s responsibilities that are prescribed by Congress or the legislature. Because bureaucratic agencies are in competition with each other for budget shares and for personnel allocations as well as for gaining responsibility for juicy new programs justifying expansion, the policies and policy recommendations generated in the executive branch of the government and passed on to both the chief executive and the legislative authorities are often better understood as the by-product of bureaucratic turf battles and expedient compromises between bureaucratic chieftains than as the product of reasoned analysis of how most effectively and efficiently to carry out eh policy commitments of the elected chief executive or to serve the public interest.
Public institutional theory
A theory on the deeper and more resilient aspects of social structure. It considers the processes by which structures, including schemes; rules, norms, and routines, become established as authoritative guidelines for social behavior. Different components of institutional theory explain how these elements are created, diffused, adopted, and adapted over space and time; and how they fall into decline and disuse. REFERENCE KRAFT…
Theories of public management
Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific
Management (1911) was based on measurements of work processes and outcomes. The application of his principles would lead managers and workers to the best conditions under which to create and nurture business. The concepts were adapted to fit government and were used to test, promote, create position descriptions, record employee evaluations, etc. In 1937 Gulick proposed his own framework of applying scientific management to government and created the acronym POSDCORB (Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting, Budgeting) to reflect the seven major functions of management (Gulick, 1937 in Frederickson et al, 2012) which served as the standard through the late 1950’s. In 1938 Chester Barnard identified and set forth the acceptance theory of authority which discussed that authority is more about those that accept the authority of another over others than it is in naming an authoritative person and hence the attention given. He described the power present at the bottom of the hierarchical model, and promoted the functions of the executive having less to do with administration and more to do with securing cooperative efforts from employees through feedback, a traditional communications model (Frederickson et al, 2012). Another modification came via the Hawthorn studies where it is thought that worker productivity comes not from authority but rather from observer attention (Frederickson et al, 2012). While simplistic this has led to the examination of worker behavior affected by communication principles and thus represented an important shift from scientific management to human behavior related postulates and the challenge began again to record findings in a more scientific manner, data heavy, as opposed to anecdotal findings with assumptions made. The struggle to identify with “real” science begins here.
Decision Theory
The study of the reasoning underlying an agent’s choice. Decision theory can be broken into two branches: NORMATIVE decision theory, which gives advice on how to make the best decisions, given a set of uncertain beliefs and a set of values; and DESCRIPTIVE decision theory, which analyzes how existing, possibility irrational agents actually make decisions.
Rational choice theory
a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior. The basic premise of rational choice theory is that aggregate social behavior results from the behavior of individual actors, each of whom is making their individual decisions. The theory therefore focuses on the determinants of the individual choices. Rational choice theory then assumes that an individual has preferences among the available choice alternatives that allow them to state which option they prefer. These preferences are assumed to be complete (the person can always say which of two alternatives they consider preferable or that neither is preferred to the other) and transitive (if option A is preferred over option B and option B is preferred over option C, then A is preferred over C) The rational agent is assumed to take account of available information, probabilities of events, and potential costs and benefits in determining preferences, and to act consistently in choosing the self-determined best choice of action. Rationality is widely used as an assumption of the behavior of individuals in microeconomic models and analyses and appears in almost all economics textbook treatments of human decision making.
Theories of governance
Most theories of governance as process arose out of neoclassical economics. These theories build deductive models, based on the assumptions of modern economics, to show how rational actors may come to establish and sustain formal organizations, including firms and states, and informal organizations, such as networks and practices for governing the commons. Many of these theories draw on transaction cost economics
Administrative School
Three important theorists are Fayol, Mooney, and Gulick. Core components of administrative management include utilization of a formalized administrative structure, a clear division of labor, and delegation of power and authority to administrators relevant to their areas of responsibilities.
Classical Perspectives
Classical Public Administration is often associated with Woodrow Wilson and Max Weber. In the United States, Woodrow Wilson is known as ‘The Father of Public Administration’ , having written the “The Study of Administration” in 1887, in which he argued that a bureaucracy should be run like a business. Wilson promoted ideas like merit-based promotions, professionalization, and a non-political system. Sympathy can lead to downfall in an administration , means there should be pragmatism in bureaucracy.
Human Resource or Behaviorists
The behavioral approach to public administration owes its genesis to the Human Relations Movement of the 1930s. The movement started off as a protest to the traditional approaches to public administration that focused on organizations, institutionalization, rules, and code of conducts etc with absolutely no mention of people who are the center of all these activities. The pioneering work done by Taylor and the emergence of Scientific Management created quite stir not just in the industrial sector but also in management and study of public administration
Human Resource or Behaviorists
Henry Fayol worked on his Fayolism at around the same time as Taylor and came up with different set of functions and principles for the management bringing in terms like discipline, unity of command, equity and team spirit. Herbert Simon was one of the torch bearers of this moment and stated that administrative behavior is part of behavioral sciences and the study of public administration cannot be complete without the study of individual and collective human behavior in administrative situations.
Human Resource or Behaviorists
The behavioral approach has certain salient features like:
The literature that has been written on the topic stays away from being prescriptive. It follows a descriptive course with an exception to the studies carried out in the areas of motivation
Individuals were paid attention to and aspects like motivation, decision making, authority and control were brought into focus
The informal aspects of an organization and communication patterns amongst the members were emphasized
The effort was to identify operational definition of terms and a lot of empirical study like field study, laboratory study and statistical methods were conducted
It borrows a lot from other social sciences, social psychology and cultural anthropology
Human Resource or Behaviorists
This approach made more sense and had greater relevance than earlier approaches as it took into consideration the fact that the political, social, economical and psychological environments have an effect on human motivation and which ultimately has an effect on the work output of an individual. It also helped to develop an understanding of what, how and why of the way the public administrators act. It showed that the way administration is conducted is influenced by human sentiments, presumptions biases and perception, which many of us may have experienced firsthand during our interaction with government organizations and public administrators. Behavioral approach has contributed to the study of public administration in many ways like the scholars started studying cross-structural and cross-cultural administrative behaviors and which further paved the way for the comparative study of public administration. Like all new things, this approach too has its fair share of criticism and the critics have ruthlessly questioned the utility of this approach in the analysis of administrative problems. They find it limited in scope and of little use. The study of public administration goes beyond small social groups and deals with large communities and therefore the behavioral approach falls short.
Systems Theory
General systems theory emphasizes the way in which organized systems (human and non-human) respond in an adaptive way to cope with significant changes in their external environments so as to maintain their basic structures intact. Systems theory models of decision-making in human groups and organizations emphasize their interaction with “outside” actors and organizations and concentrate on identifying the particular elements in the environment of the group or organization that significantly affect the outcomes of its decision-making. To understand what an organization did, try to find out what threat or opportunity it was responding to and how its pre-existing response mechanisms worked to do this.
Organizational Culture
l. – A system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which governs how people behave in organizations. These shared values have a strong influence on the people in the organization and dictate how they dress, act, and perform their jobs.
