Which of the following is the managerial view of the nature of public administration?

Only the work of planning, organising, directing and controlling done by those who manage counts as administration

Every manual, clerical and technical activity done for a public purpose counts as administration

Only the work of planning, organising, directing and controlling done by those who manage counts as administration

Administration is identical to the making of public policy

Administration is the whole of government including the legislature and courts

Which of the following were the "three problems" Robert Dahl (1947) said stood in the way of a science of public administration? Select all that apply.

The absence of a written constitution

In Nicholas Henry's scheme, which paradigm is characterised by a clear focus on universal principles but an unimportant locus?

Paradigm 2, the principles of administration (1927–1937)

Paradigm 5, public administration as public administration

Paradigm 1, the politics/administration dichotomy

Paradigm 3, public administration as political science

Assertion (A): Herbert Simon called the classical principles of administration "proverbs". Reason (R): For almost every principle an equally plausible contradictory principle can be found, and the theory gives no rule for choosing between them. Choose the correct option.

Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A

Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A

Paul Appleby's main objection to the politics–administration dichotomy was that:

Administrators make policy through discretion and advice, so policy and administration form a continuum

Only the legislature can be held accountable to citizens

Administration should be run on the lines of a private business

Administrative principles are universal and culture-free

Administrators make policy through discretion and advice, so policy and administration form a continuum

Which of the following describe the shift from government to governance? Select all that apply.

Networks of public, private and voluntary actors take part in steering

The state moves from provider towards enabler and regulator

Accountability becomes simpler because one ministry answers for everything

Hierarchy and command become the only modes of coordination

Networks of public, private and voluntary actors take part in steering

The state moves from provider towards enabler and regulator

"Steering rather than rowing" is the formulation of:

David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, *Reinventing Government* (1992)

Janet and Robert Denhardt, *The New Public Service*

R. A. W. Rhodes, "The New Governance" (1996)

David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, *Reinventing Government* (1992)

Christopher Hood, "A Public Management for All Seasons?"

Which work is associated with the argument that "efficiency" is itself a value choice and that public administration is a form of political theory?

Dwight Waldo, *The Administrative State* (1948)

W. F. Willoughby, *Principles of Public Administration* (1927)

Frank J. Goodnow, *Politics and Administration* (1900)

Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick, *Papers on the Science of Administration* (1937)

Introduction to Public Administration: Meaning, Nature, Scope and Significance; Evolution of the Discipline; the Politics–Administration Dichotomy; Globalization; and the Shift from Government to Governance

Unit I opens: "Introduction to Public Administration: Public Administration- Meaning, Nature, Scope & Significance; Evolution and Present Status of the Discipline; Politics-Administration Dichotomy; Globalization and Public Administration; Paradigm shift from Government to Governance." This chapter reads the discipline as its own scholars have argued about it — the integral and managerial views of what administration is, the POSDCORB and subject-matter views of its scope, Nicholas Henry's five paradigms, the dichotomy from Wilson and Goodnow to its critics, and the move from rowing to steering to networked governance. The question underneath all of it is the one Dwight Waldo kept asking: is public administration a science of management, a branch of political theory, or something with an identity of its own?

1. Meaning and nature: integral and managerial views

Public administration is at once an activity — the organised work of government in carrying out public policy — and a discipline that studies that activity. Definitions differ mainly on how much of government's work they include. Woodrow Wilson called it "detailed and systematic execution of public law"; Leonard D. White, author of the first textbook (Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926), defined it as "all those operations having for their purpose the fulfilment or enforcement of public policy"; Luther Gulick narrowed it to "that part of the science of administration which has to do with government", chiefly the executive branch; and Simon, Smithburg and Thompson (1950) described administration as "the activities of groups cooperating to accomplish common goals".

Two views of the nature of administration
View	What counts as administration	Associated with
Integral view	Every activity — manual, clerical, technical and managerial — undertaken to fulfil a public purpose, from the peon to the secretary	L. D. White, Marshall Dimock
Managerial view	Only the managerial work of planning, organising, directing and controlling done by those at the top	Luther Gulick, Herbert Simon, Smithburg and Thompson

A second argument concerns whether public administration is a science or an art. The early writers — Wilson, White, Willoughby, Gulick and Urwick — hoped for universal principles and a "science of administration". Robert Dahl's essay "The Science of Public Administration: Three Problems" (1947) answered that no such science was possible while three problems remained unsolved: the place of normative values, the variability of human behaviour, and the influence of social and cultural setting, which makes principles drawn from one nation unsafe to apply in another. Most scholars today treat the field as an applied social science with an art of practice — a view Dahl's third problem directly prepared the way for, because it is the starting point of comparative administration.

🎯 Why "public" is not a mere adjective

Paul Appleby's Big Democracy (1945) argued that "government is different": public administration works under political direction, public scrutiny and accountability to the legislature and courts, pursues goals that cannot be reduced to profit, and must treat citizens with legal equality where a firm may choose its customers. Simon, by contrast, saw the difference between public and private administration as one of degree rather than kind. A question that sets the two against each other is testing exactly this disagreement.

2. Scope and significance: POSDCORB, subject matter and the public-policy view

Luther Gulick, in "Notes on the Theory of Organization" in Papers on the Science of Administration (1937, edited with Lyndall Urwick), summed up the work of the chief executive in the acronym POSDCORB — Planning, Organising, Staffing, Directing, Co-ordinating, Reporting and Budgeting. The POSDCORB view of scope treats these seven techniques, common to every agency, as the subject. Its critics answered that it describes tools, not substance: an administrator of health or defence needs to know health or defence. The subject-matter view therefore adds the substantive services — police, education, public health, agriculture — and accepts Lewis Meriam's objection that the techniques are only the "tools" of the trade. A third, public-policy view, associated with the post-war discipline, treats the formulation and implementation of policy as the core of the field.

Significance as an instrument of the state: administration is the part of government the citizen actually meets — the ration card, the land record, the school, the police station.
Significance in the welfare and developmental state: as the state took on social security, planning and development, administration became the main agent of social change rather than only of order.
Significance for democracy: accountable, responsive administration is what turns laws passed by representatives into rights citizens can use — which is why Waldo called public administration a matter of political theory as much as of management.
Significance as a stabiliser: the permanent civil service carries government through changes of ministry, and Charles Beard's often-quoted remark was that no subject is more important to modern civilisation than administration.

🧠 Remembering POSDCORB in order

Read it as two halves: POSD — the executive's own work of planning, organising, staffing and directing — and CORB — the tying-together work of co-ordinating, reporting and budgeting. Urwick later added the Fayolian elements, but the seven letters are Gulick's, and they are a summary of what a chief executive does, not a list of academic sub-fields.

3. Evolution and present status: Henry's five paradigms

Woodrow Wilson's essay "The Study of Administration" (Political Science Quarterly, 1887) is conventionally the founding text: it asked for a science of administration that would make government "less unbusinesslike" and argued that administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Nicholas Henry, in "Paradigms of Public Administration" (1975), organised what followed by two questions — the locus (where the field is institutionally situated) and the focus (what it specialises in) — and found five overlapping paradigms.

Nicholas Henry's five paradigms
Paradigm	Period	Locus and focus	Landmarks
1. The politics/administration dichotomy	1900–1926	Locus: the bureaucracy; focus left vague	Goodnow, Politics and Administration (1900); White's textbook (1926)
2. The principles of administration	1927–1937	Focus: universal principles, valid anywhere; locus unimportant	Willoughby, Principles of Public Administration (1927); Gulick and Urwick, Papers (1937) — the "high noon of orthodoxy"
3. Public administration as political science	1950–1970	Locus: government bureaucracy again; focus lost	After the challenge of 1938–1947; an "identity crisis" as political science treated it as a lesser sub-field
4. Public administration as management	1956–1970	Focus: organisation theory and management science; locus lost	Administrative Science Quarterly (1956); generic "administrative science"
5. Public administration as public administration	1970–	Focus: organisation theory, policy and public-affairs techniques; locus: the public interest and public affairs	NASPAA founded 1970; separate schools and degrees

Between the second and third paradigms lies the challenge of 1938–1947. Chester Barnard's The Functions of the Executive (1938) moved attention to informal organisation and the acceptance of authority; Herbert Simon's "The Proverbs of Administration" (Public Administration Review, 1946) showed that the classical principles come in contradictory pairs — narrow the span of control, but keep the hierarchy short — and so are proverbs rather than laws; Dahl's "three problems" appeared in 1947, as did Simon's Administrative Behavior; and Waldo's The Administrative State (1948) exposed the political values hidden inside the gospel of efficiency. The present status is plural: New Public Administration (Minnowbrook, 1968) put social equity on the agenda, New Public Management in the 1980s and 1990s imported market techniques, and the governance literature since the 1990s studies networks of state and non-state actors.

⚠️ Two paradigms overlap in time

Paradigms 3 (1950–1970) and 4 (1956–1970) run side by side: in the same years some scholars sheltered the field inside political science and others inside the business schools' administrative science. An option that makes them strictly successive is wrong. Also note that Henry's dates are his own reconstruction, not events.

4. The politics–administration dichotomy and its critics

Wilson's case was practical: the American spoils system had filled offices by party loyalty, and a neutral, competent administration required that "administrative questions are not political questions". Frank J. Goodnow's Politics and Administration (1900) gave the idea its theoretical form: politics is "the expression of the will of the state" and administration "the execution of that will". The dichotomy did real work — it justified the merit system after the Pendleton Act (1883), gave the new discipline a subject of its own, and underpinned the ideal of a neutral civil service.

The critique came from several directions. Paul Appleby's Policy and Administration (1949) argued that administrators make policy every day through discretion, advice and rule-making, so the relation is a continuum, not a wall. Waldo showed that "efficiency" is itself a value choice. Simon replaced the dichotomy with a fact–value distinction inside every decision rather than a division between institutions. And empirical work on India, as elsewhere, found that ministers and senior civil servants share the policy process — the minister sets direction, the secretary shapes options and implements, and each shades into the other's role.

The dichotomy and its alternatives
Position	Claim	Key text
Dichotomy	Politics decides, administration executes; administration can be a neutral science	Wilson (1887); Goodnow (1900)
Continuum	Policy and administration are interwoven; administration is a political process	Appleby, Policy and Administration (1949)
Fact–value distinction	Every decision has factual and value premises; science can speak only to the factual	Simon, Administrative Behavior (1947)
Revival as complementarity	Distinct but interdependent roles, with the elected side holding final authority	James Svara, "complementarity" (2001)

5. Globalization and the paradigm shift from government to governance

Globalization — the intensified cross-border flow of capital, goods, information and ideas — changed public administration in four ways. It narrowed the state's autonomy, since mobile capital and credit ratings discipline fiscal choices; it spread a common reform vocabulary of privatisation, deregulation and performance management through the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD; it created transnational policy problems — climate, pandemics, cyber-security, migration — that no single administration can solve; and it drew in new actors, from multinational firms to global civil society. Critics argue that it weakened the welfare functions of states in the global South; defenders, that it forced efficiency and openness on closed bureaucracies.

Government means the formal institutions of the state acting through hierarchy and law; governance means the wider process of steering society through networks of public, private and voluntary actors. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's Reinventing Government (1992) urged that government should be "steering rather than rowing"; R. A. W. Rhodes's "The New Governance: Governing without Government" (1996) described self-organising inter-organisational networks; and the World Bank's use of "governance" from 1989 onward tied the term to aid conditionality. The shift is from command to coordination, from monopoly provider to enabler and regulator, and from citizen as subject to citizen as partner — though the state keeps what Bob Jessop called "meta-governance", the power to set the rules within which networks operate.

From government to governance
Dimension	Government	Governance
Actors	State institutions	State, market and civil society together
Mode	Hierarchy, command, law	Networks, negotiation, partnership
Role of the state	Provider ("rowing")	Enabler, regulator ("steering"), meta-governor
Accountability	Vertical — to minister and legislature	Diffused — multiple and horizontal, harder to trace

ℹ️ The accountability cost

The standard criticism of the governance shift is the "problem of many hands": when a service is delivered by a partnership of a department, a contractor and an NGO, it becomes hard to say who answers for failure. This is why the governance literature returns again and again to transparency, citizen charters and social audit — topics this syllabus takes up in Units V and IX.

Key takeaways

The integral view (White) counts every public activity as administration; the managerial view (Gulick, Simon) counts only the work of planning, organising, directing and controlling.
POSDCORB is Gulick's (1937) summary of the chief executive's work; the subject-matter view objects that it names tools rather than substance.
Henry's five paradigms run from the dichotomy (1900–26) and principles (1927–37) through political science (1950–70) and management (1956–70) to public administration as public administration (1970–).
Wilson (1887) and Goodnow (1900) framed the dichotomy; Appleby (1949) replaced it with a continuum and Simon (1947) with a fact–value distinction inside each decision.
Governance means steering through networks of state, market and civil society ("steering rather than rowing"), at the cost of diffused accountability that the state must manage through meta-governance.

Practice questions (10)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

Who defined politics as "the expression of the will of the state" and administration as "the execution of that will"?
1. W. F. Willoughby
2. Leonard D. White
3. Frank J. Goodnow
4. Paul Appleby
Show answer
Answer: C — Frank J. Goodnow
Goodnow's Politics and Administration (1900) gave Wilson's dichotomy its theoretical form. White wrote the first textbook (1926), Willoughby the Principles (1927), and Appleby was the dichotomy's leading critic.
In which year was Woodrow Wilson's essay "The Study of Administration" published? Type a number.
Numerical answer — type the value.
Show answer
Answer: 1887
It appeared in Political Science Quarterly in 1887 and is conventionally treated as the founding text of the discipline in the United States.
Which of the following is the managerial view of the nature of public administration?
1. Every manual, clerical and technical activity done for a public purpose counts as administration
2. Only the work of planning, organising, directing and controlling done by those who manage counts as administration
3. Administration is identical to the making of public policy
4. Administration is the whole of government including the legislature and courts
Show answer
Answer: B — Only the work of planning, organising, directing and controlling done by those who manage counts as administration
The managerial view (Gulick, Simon, Smithburg and Thompson) limits administration to managerial functions. The second option is the integral view associated with White and Dimock.
Which of the following were the "three problems" Robert Dahl (1947) said stood in the way of a science of public administration? Select all that apply.
1. The absence of a written constitution
2. The variability of human behaviour
3. The influence of social and cultural setting
4. The place of normative values
Show answer
Answer: B — The variability of human behaviour; C — The influence of social and cultural setting; D — The place of normative values
Dahl named values, human behaviour and the social setting. The third made principles drawn from one country unsafe to transplant and became a starting point for comparative administration; a written constitution was not among them.
In Nicholas Henry's scheme, which paradigm is characterised by a clear focus on universal principles but an unimportant locus?
1. Paradigm 2, the principles of administration (1927–1937)
2. Paradigm 5, public administration as public administration
3. Paradigm 1, the politics/administration dichotomy
4. Paradigm 3, public administration as political science
Show answer
Answer: A — Paradigm 2, the principles of administration (1927–1937)
Principles were held to apply anywhere, so where administration was located did not matter. Paradigm 1 had a locus (the bureaucracy) but a vague focus; paradigm 3 regained the locus and lost the focus.
Assertion (A): Herbert Simon called the classical principles of administration "proverbs". Reason (R): For almost every principle an equally plausible contradictory principle can be found, and the theory gives no rule for choosing between them. Choose the correct option.
1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
3. A is true, but R is false
4. A is false, but R is true
Show answer
Answer: A — Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
Both are true and R explains A: in "The Proverbs of Administration" (1946) Simon showed, for example, that narrowing the span of control lengthens the hierarchy, so the two principles cannot both be followed — like proverbs, they come in opposing pairs.
Paul Appleby's main objection to the politics–administration dichotomy was that:
1. Only the legislature can be held accountable to citizens
2. Administration should be run on the lines of a private business
3. Administrative principles are universal and culture-free
4. Administrators make policy through discretion and advice, so policy and administration form a continuum
Show answer
Answer: D — Administrators make policy through discretion and advice, so policy and administration form a continuum
Policy and Administration (1949) argued that administration is a political process in which officials shape policy daily. The other options restate positions Appleby rejected — he also held that "government is different" from business.
Which of the following describe the shift from government to governance? Select all that apply.
1. Accountability becomes simpler because one ministry answers for everything
2. Hierarchy and command become the only modes of coordination
3. Networks of public, private and voluntary actors take part in steering
4. The state moves from provider towards enabler and regulator
Show answer
Answer: C — Networks of public, private and voluntary actors take part in steering; D — The state moves from provider towards enabler and regulator
Governance means steering through networks with the state as enabler. It makes accountability more diffused, not simpler, and it adds negotiation and partnership to hierarchy rather than relying on hierarchy alone.
"Steering rather than rowing" is the formulation of:
1. Janet and Robert Denhardt, The New Public Service
2. R. A. W. Rhodes, "The New Governance" (1996)
3. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government (1992)
4. Christopher Hood, "A Public Management for All Seasons?"
Show answer
Answer: C — David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, *Reinventing Government* (1992)
Osborne and Gaebler's entrepreneurial government asked the state to steer. The Denhardts replied with "serving rather than steering"; Rhodes wrote of governing without government; Hood set out NPM's doctrines.
Which work is associated with the argument that "efficiency" is itself a value choice and that public administration is a form of political theory?
1. Dwight Waldo, The Administrative State (1948)
2. W. F. Willoughby, Principles of Public Administration (1927)
3. Frank J. Goodnow, Politics and Administration (1900)
4. Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick, Papers on the Science of Administration (1937)
Show answer
Answer: A — Dwight Waldo, *The Administrative State* (1948)
Waldo's study of the political theory of American public administration exposed the values in the gospel of efficiency. The other three are texts of the orthodoxy he was criticising.