Lesson 1 Flashcards
The Study of Public Administration
Definitions of “public” in public administration
(1) We refer to physical places, like squares and parks, as public when they are open to all individual. Some authors also use the term “the commons”.
(2) The term public is used as a social category with variation on the boundaries of a specific public: all those active in a social construction or a specific public, public event, a collectivity of citizens.
Definitions of “public” in public administration #2
(3) We distinguish between public and private concerns. Here public means that something is the common interest to all those in polity, while private lacks this quality.
(4) The term “public” is also used as an indication of the aggregation of indivual views, as in public opinion, and public discourses.
Determine the “Publicness” of public administration
Publicness of public administration combines the two versions:
1. Public Goods
2. Public interest
Public goods that are produced in the public interest. Some goods are found to be benefical to the public, and therefore government looks after the production of these goods and services.
What is the definition of the extent of public-private distinction?
Publicness is understood in terms of the public’s distinguishing futures including its service norms such as impartiality and openness, its principles such as equality and representation, its service monopolistic and complex nature, and its longer and broader social impacts.
What are the concept of the “Publicness”
- The extent of public-private distinction.
- The composition of service recipients.
- The magnitude and intensity of its socioeconomic role (Nature of the role it places in society).
- The degree of publuc accountability
- The level of public trust.
What is the definition of the extent of its distinction from the private sector?
Publicness is understood in terms of the public’s distinguishing futures including its service norms such as impartiality and openness, its principles such as equality and representation, its service monopolistic and complex nature, and its longer and broader social impacts.
What is the definition of the composition of service recipients?
How many citizens does the public’s service serve. The public in this sense represents a shared and universally accessible domain involving the interest if all citizens.
What is the definition of the Nature of the role it places in society?
Its broader and more intensive role represents its wider societal impacts, and thus, greater publicness, whereas its narrower and weaker role implies its limited social impacts, and thus lesser publicness.
What is the definition of the amenable to public accountability?
The processes such as public hearings, grievance procedures, ombudsman, and sunshine laws— which actually represent the means of accountability— are all friendly to a general theory of the public for public administration.
What is the definition of the public trust?
This refers to the credibility, leadership, and responsive of public service to serve the people.
In it broadest sense what does administration refers to?
The activities of groups cooperating to accomplish common goals, that is, a cooperative group behaviour.
What are the two basic characteristics of what has come to be called administration?
- Purpose - Moving the stone
- Cooperative action- several persons using combined strength to accomplish something that could not have been done without such a combination.
In a narrow sense what does administrations refer to?
Those patterns of behavior that are common to many kinds of cooperating groups and that do not depend upon either the specific goals toward which they are cooperating, or the specific technological methods used to reach these goals.
How does Marx define administration
The determined action taken in pursuit of a conscious purpose. It is the systematic ordering of affairs and the calculated use of resources aimed at making those happen, which one wants to happen.
According to Lane, what is the definition of administration
Administration is organizing and maintaining human and fiscal resources to attain a group’s goal.
According to Frank Marini, what is public administration?
- A professional practice (vocation, occupation, field of activity)
- An academic field.
Here, public administration simply refers on one hand to the administration or management of matters which have principally to do with the society, polity (people/citizens), and its subparts which are not essentially private, familial, commercial, or individualistic, and on the other hand to the disciplined study of such matters.
According to Appleby what is public administration?
Appleby asserted that public administration is occupied with serving the public interest. According to him, administration is treated [as a] term involving policy-making as well as execution. It is so treated because it is felt that a great deal of policy-making is implicit in what the executive branch does, and that it is important to recognize this policy-making function.
What is the difference between public and private administrations?
Public administration is public-policy making. As such, it involves both politics and management. Virtually everyone now admits that public administration exists in a political environment and that the administrator must interact with the forces in that environment. The administrator is a participant in the political process, a politician in that he must engage in conflict resolution, exercise discretion, and make decisions affecting competing claims
How does Jay M. Shafritz and E. W. Russell clustered the differences between public administration and private administration?
- Political
- Legal
- Managerial
- Occupational
According to Jay M. Shafritz and E. W. Russell, what is the definition of political?
Public administration cannot exist outside of its political context. It is this context that makes it public, that makes it different from private or business administration
1. Public administration is what government does
2. Public administration is both direct and indirect
3. Public administration is a phase in the public policymaking cycle
4. Public administration is implementing the public interest
5. Public is doing collectively that which cannot be so well done individually
According to Jay M. Shafritz and E. W. Russell, what is the definition of legal?
- Public administration is law in action
- Public administration is regulation
- Public administration is the King’s Largesse (generosity)
- Public administration is theft
According to Jay M. Shafritz and E. W. Russell, what is the definition of managerial?
Public administration is so much a branch of management that many graduate schools of management or business or administration are divided into public and private and now increasingly non-profit-programmes.
Its legal basis allowed public administration to exist, but without its management aspect, not much of the public’ business would get done.
1. Public Administration is the executive function in government
2. Public administration is a Management speciality
According to Jay M. Shafritz and E. W. Russell, what is the definition of occupational?
It is whatever the public employees in the world do. It ranges from brain surgery to street sweeping. Most of the people in this broad occupation; category do not even think themselves as public administrators.
According to Gregory Inwood, what is public administration?
Gregory Inwood define public administration as a field of academic study derived from several disciplines, including political science, business administration, sociology, psychology, law, and economics. A sect of administrative practices and institutional arrangements geared toward the provision of public services and regulations as realised through the public bureaucracy
