"Management by Objectives" was introduced by:

Peter Drucker, in *The Practice of Management* (1954)

Douglas McGregor, in *The Human Side of Enterprise* (1960)

Peter Drucker, in *The Practice of Management* (1954)

Robert Golembiewski, in *Men, Management, and Morality* (1965)

Henri Fayol, in *General and Industrial Management*

The New Public Service proposed by Janet and Robert Denhardt holds that the role of the public administrator is to:

Serve citizens and help them articulate and meet shared interests

Maximise the budget of his own bureau

Serve citizens and help them articulate and meet shared interests

Steer society like an entrepreneur, leaving delivery to markets

Row — deliver every service directly through hierarchy

Assertion (A): Waldo rejected efficiency as the central value of public administration. Reason (R): Efficiency is always efficiency for some purpose, so it cannot by itself supply the ends of administration. 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

Which of the following is NOT one of Ferrel Heady's features of administration in developing countries?

Administrative patterns that are indigenous rather than imitative

A discrepancy between form and reality

Considerable operational autonomy of the bureaucracy

Administrative patterns that are indigenous rather than imitative

*Postmodern Public Administration: Toward Discourse* (1995), which proposes authentic discourse as the basis of administration, was written by:

Frank Marini and H. George Frederickson

Drucker's distinction between efficiency and effectiveness is best summarised as:

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things

Both mean minimising cost per unit of output

Efficiency applies to government, effectiveness only to business

Efficiency is doing the right things; effectiveness is doing things cheaply

Administrative Thought III: Waldo, Heady, Golembiewski and Drucker; the Minnowbrook Perspective, the New Public Service and Post-Modernism

Unit II closes: "Writers on Administration: Dwight Waldo, Ferrel Heady, Robert Golembiewski and Peter Drucker; Minnobrook Perspective, New Public Service and Post Modernism." The document prints "Minnobrook"; the conference centre, owned by Syracuse University in the Adirondacks, is Minnowbrook, and that spelling is used here. These are the writers and movements that took the discipline beyond the classical and behavioural schools — towards values and democracy (Waldo, Minnowbrook, the New Public Service), towards comparison (Heady), towards organisational humanism and development (Golembiewski), towards management as a discipline of knowledge work (Drucker), and towards the discursive critique of the whole enterprise (post-modernism).

1. Dwight Waldo and Ferrel Heady

Dwight Waldo's The Administrative State: A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration (1948) read the orthodox literature as political theory in disguise: behind the "gospel of efficiency" lay a vision of the good society, a preference for rule by experts, and a distrust of democratic politics. Efficiency, he argued, cannot be the central value of public administration because it is always efficiency for some purpose. His famous exchange with Herbert Simon in the American Political Science Review (1952) set Waldo's value-laden, historical, philosophical approach against Simon's positivist science. Waldo later described the field's identity crisis, advised that public administration be treated as a profession rather than a single discipline, convened the first Minnowbrook conference (1968), and edited Temporal Dimensions of Development Administration (1970).

Ferrel Heady's Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective (first edition 1966) is the standard text of comparative administration. Heady classified political systems — among them traditional-autocratic, bureaucratic-elite, polyarchal-competitive, dominant-party, and communist-totalitarian regimes — and identified recurring features of administration in developing countries: patterns that are imitative rather than indigenous (borrowed from colonial or Western models); a shortage of skilled manpower for development programmes; an emphasis on non-production-oriented goals such as status and security; a wide discrepancy between form and reality (Riggs's formalism); and operational autonomy of the bureaucracy, which often wields more power than weak political institutions. He also compared the "classic" administrative systems of Western Europe with the "civic culture" systems of Britain and the United States.

🎯 Why the Waldo–Simon debate still matters

It is the discipline's founding disagreement about itself. Simon wanted a value-free science of decisions, confined to factual premises; Waldo held that administration is shot through with values and that a democratic theory of administration must say what they are. Minnowbrook, the New Public Service and post-modernism all descend from Waldo's side of the argument; New Public Management and much of policy analysis from Simon's.

2. Robert Golembiewski and Peter Drucker

Robert T. Golembiewski brought organisational humanism and applied behavioural science into public administration. Men, Management, and Morality (1965) examined the moral assumptions built into the traditional theory of organisation — that specialisation and hierarchy treat people as means — and argued for structures that respect individual freedom and responsibility. He was a leading figure in organisation development (OD), the planned, behavioural-science-based effort to improve an organisation's health through laboratory training, team-building and action research, and he argued that OD could work in the public sector despite its political constraints. He also developed a phase model of burnout and wrote extensively on flexible working arrangements such as flexi-time.

Peter F. Drucker, the most widely read management writer of the twentieth century, is credited with establishing management as a discipline. The Practice of Management (1954) introduced Management by Objectives (MBO) — superior and subordinate jointly set specific objectives, and performance is appraised against them, replacing control by command with self-control. Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959) introduced the term knowledge worker; The Age of Discontinuity forecast the knowledge society and argued for "reprivatization", with government concentrating on governing and deciding rather than doing; and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973) treated the public-service institution as a manager of results. His dictum that there is "nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all" captures the difference he drew between efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things).

⚠️ MBO is Drucker's, not McGregor's

McGregor admired MBO and saw it as a Theory Y practice, and George Odiorne systematised it later, but the concept was introduced by Drucker in The Practice of Management (1954). Likewise "knowledge worker" is Drucker's coinage (1959), and "reprivatization" his argument in The Age of Discontinuity — two decades before New Public Management made the idea fashionable.

3. The Minnowbrook perspective: New Public Administration

In September 1968, amid the Vietnam war, urban riots and the civil rights movement, Dwight Waldo brought young scholars together at Syracuse University's Minnowbrook conference centre. The papers were published as Frank Marini (ed.), Toward a New Public Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective (1971), and the movement was called New Public Administration (NPA). It rejected value-neutral, efficiency-centred administration as irrelevant to a society in turmoil, and put forward five themes: relevance (to contemporary social problems), values (openly normative, not value-neutral), social equity (H. George Frederickson's contribution: administration should actively redress the disadvantage of minorities and the poor), change (anti-status quo, anti-bureaucratic, open to experiment) and client focus (participation of citizens and clients in administration).

The three Minnowbrook conferences, twenty years apart
Conference	Year	Setting and emphasis
Minnowbrook I	1968	Social turmoil in the United States; relevance, values, social equity, change, client focus — the birth of New Public Administration
Minnowbrook II	1988	Mixed first- and second-generation scholars; a more pragmatic tone, with ethics, social equity, leadership, diversity and democratic values
Minnowbrook III	2008	Globalisation, networked and collaborative governance, performance and accountability, and the relation between public administration and democracy

NPA was criticised as a mood rather than a theory — anti-positivist, anti-technical and anti-hierarchical in rhetoric, but without a workable organisational alternative — and for asking unelected administrators to pursue social equity on their own judgement, which raises the question of democratic legitimacy. Its lasting legacy is that social equity joined efficiency and economy as a recognised "third pillar" of public administration.

4. The New Public Service

The New Public Service (NPS) was proposed by Janet V. Denhardt and Robert B. Denhardt in "The New Public Service: Serving Rather than Steering" (Public Administration Review, 2000) and the book The New Public Service: Serving, Not Steering (2003). It was a direct reply to New Public Management and to Osborne and Gaebler's call for government to steer: the Denhardts argued that citizens are not customers, that the public interest is not the sum of individual self-interests, and that the administrator's role is to serve citizens and help them articulate shared interests, not to steer society like an entrepreneur. It draws on democratic citizenship theory, models of community and civil society, organisational humanism, and post-modern discourse theory.

Serve citizens, not customers — build relationships of trust and collaboration with citizens.
Seek the public interest — a shared interest arrived at through dialogue, not an aggregate of individual choices.
Value citizenship over entrepreneurship — public servants and citizens committed to society, not managers acting as owners of public money.
Think strategically, act democratically.
Recognise that accountability is not simple — it runs to law, community values, professional norms and citizens' interests, not just to the market.
Serve rather than steer — help citizens meet shared interests rather than control society in new directions.
Value people, not just productivity — collaboration and shared leadership inside organisations.

Three models compared (after the Denhardts)
Aspect	Old Public Administration	New Public Management	New Public Service
Citizen seen as	Client / constituent	Customer	Citizen
Role of government	Rowing	Steering	Serving
Public interest	Defined politically, expressed in law	Aggregate of individual interests	Result of dialogue about shared values
Accountability	Hierarchical, to elected leaders	Market-driven	Multifaceted

5. Post-modernism in public administration

Post-modern public administration questions the modernist project on which the discipline was built — the belief in reason, science, universal principles, progress and a unified, objective truth. Drawing on Lyotard's "incredulity towards meta-narratives", Derrida's deconstruction and Foucault's analysis of power and knowledge, it treats administrative "facts" as constructed in language and discourse, and regards bureaucratic expertise as a form of power that can silence citizens. Two books of 1995 are its landmarks. Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. Miller's Postmodern Public Administration: Toward Discourse argued that the orthodox model of representative democracy with a neutral bureaucracy no longer works in a fragmented, image-saturated society, and proposed authentic discourse — public policy formed through open, sincere, participatory deliberation — as the basis of administration. David John Farmer's The Language of Public Administration: Bureaucracy, Modernity and Postmodernity proposed four post-modern moves: imagination (in place of rationality), deconstruction (of the field's texts and assumptions), deterritorialization (breaking down disciplinary boundaries and codes) and alterity (moral openness to "the other", anti-authoritarian service).

ℹ️ What the critics say

Critics answer that post-modernism is better at dismantling than at building: if every truth claim is only discourse, it is hard to justify any policy or to hold administrators accountable to evidence. Its defenders reply that it has made the field take citizen participation, deliberation and the voices of marginalised groups seriously — themes the New Public Service absorbed.

Key takeaways

Waldo's The Administrative State (1948) exposed the political theory behind the gospel of efficiency; he convened Minnowbrook I in 1968.
Heady's Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective (1966) found developing-country administration imitative, short of skills, formalistic and bureaucratically autonomous.
Golembiewski brought morality and organisation development into public administration; Drucker gave MBO (1954), "knowledge worker" (1959) and "reprivatization".
Minnowbrook (1968, 1988, 2008) produced New Public Administration: relevance, values, social equity, change and client focus.
The Denhardts' New Public Service (2000) answers NPM with "serving, not steering"; post-modern public administration (Fox and Miller, Farmer, 1995) turns to discourse, imagination and alterity.

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 convened the first Minnowbrook conference in 1968?
1. Herbert Simon
2. Peter Drucker
3. Dwight Waldo
4. Ferrel Heady
Show answer
Answer: C — Dwight Waldo
Waldo, then at Syracuse University, brought young scholars to the Minnowbrook conference centre; Frank Marini edited the resulting volume (1971).
Which of the following were themes of New Public Administration as it emerged from Minnowbrook I? Select all that apply.
1. Value neutrality
2. Relevance
3. Client focus
4. Social equity
Show answer
Answer: B — Relevance; C — Client focus; D — Social equity
NPA stressed relevance, values, social equity, change and client focus. It explicitly rejected value neutrality in favour of openly normative administration.
In which year was the third Minnowbrook conference held? Type a number.
Numerical answer — type the value.
Show answer
Answer: 2008
The conferences were held twenty years apart: 1968, 1988 and 2008. Minnowbrook III focused on globalisation, networked governance and democracy.
"Management by Objectives" was introduced by:
1. Douglas McGregor, in The Human Side of Enterprise (1960)
2. Peter Drucker, in The Practice of Management (1954)
3. Robert Golembiewski, in Men, Management, and Morality (1965)
4. Henri Fayol, in General and Industrial Management
Show answer
Answer: B — Peter Drucker, in *The Practice of Management* (1954)
Drucker introduced MBO in 1954. McGregor endorsed it as consistent with Theory Y, but did not originate it.
The New Public Service proposed by Janet and Robert Denhardt holds that the role of the public administrator is to:
1. Maximise the budget of his own bureau
2. Serve citizens and help them articulate and meet shared interests
3. Steer society like an entrepreneur, leaving delivery to markets
4. Row — deliver every service directly through hierarchy
Show answer
Answer: B — Serve citizens and help them articulate and meet shared interests
"Serving, not steering" is the Denhardts' reply to NPM's steering; rowing describes old public administration, and budget-maximising is Niskanen's public-choice model of the bureaucrat.
Which of the following are among David Farmer's four post-modern moves in The Language of Public Administration (1995)? Select all that apply.
1. Deconstruction
2. Standardisation
3. Deterritorialization
4. Imagination
Show answer
Answer: A — Deconstruction; C — Deterritorialization; D — Imagination
Farmer's four are imagination, deconstruction, deterritorialization and alterity. Standardisation is a modernist, Taylorist value — exactly what the post-modern critique questions.
Assertion (A): Waldo rejected efficiency as the central value of public administration. Reason (R): Efficiency is always efficiency for some purpose, so it cannot by itself supply the ends of administration. 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 Administrative State Waldo argued that efficiency is instrumental, so treating it as the supreme value hides the real political choices about purposes.
Which of the following is NOT one of Ferrel Heady's features of administration in developing countries?
1. A shortage of skilled manpower for development
2. A discrepancy between form and reality
3. Considerable operational autonomy of the bureaucracy
4. Administrative patterns that are indigenous rather than imitative
Show answer
Answer: D — Administrative patterns that are indigenous rather than imitative
Heady found the patterns imitative rather than indigenous — borrowed from colonial or Western models. The other three are among his features.
Postmodern Public Administration: Toward Discourse (1995), which proposes authentic discourse as the basis of administration, was written by:
1. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler
2. Janet and Robert Denhardt
3. Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. Miller
4. Frank Marini and H. George Frederickson
Show answer
Answer: C — Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. Miller
Fox and Miller wrote it; the Denhardts wrote on the New Public Service, Osborne and Gaebler on reinventing government, and Marini and Frederickson belong to the Minnowbrook movement.
Drucker's distinction between efficiency and effectiveness is best summarised as:
1. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things
2. Both mean minimising cost per unit of output
3. Efficiency applies to government, effectiveness only to business
4. Efficiency is doing the right things; effectiveness is doing things cheaply
Show answer
Answer: A — Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things
For Drucker, doing efficiently what should not be done at all is useless: effectiveness — choosing the right objectives — comes first, efficiency second.