Herbert Simon's concept of 'bounded rationality' argues that administrators, given limited information and time, tend to:

Satisfice — accept a good-enough option rather than truly maximise

Always achieve perfectly rational optimisation

Adopt the 'one best way' through time-and-motion study

Act as budget-maximising bureaucrats

Fred Riggs's ecological approach and 'prismatic society' model chiefly argue that:

Administration cannot be studied apart from its social and cultural environment

All administrative systems converge on identical structures

Bureaucrats are budget-maximisers

Social equity must be a co-equal administrative value

The New Public Administration movement (Minnowbrook Conference, 1968) is defined chiefly by its insistence that administration pursue:

Social equity as a value co-equal with efficiency and economy

Privatisation of all government functions

Strict politics-administration separation

William Niskanen's rational-choice model of the 'budget-maximising bureaucrat' predicts bureaucratic behaviour from:

Self-interest, rather than assumed public-spirited neutrality

A civilisation's own integrating chiti

The prismatic society's formalism

Deep ecology's intrinsic value of nature

New Public Management (NPM), associated with 1980s UK/New Zealand/Australia reforms, imports which technique into government?

Performance targets, market-type mechanisms, and treating the citizen as a customer

Development Administration is distinguished from ordinary maintenance/regulatory administration chiefly by its focus on:

Planned socio-economic change in developing societies

System theory's own vocabulary (David Easton), reading government as converting societal demands into policy outputs, is best described as:

Inputs (demands and supports) converted into outputs, with feedback looping to new demands

A single best way discovered by time-and-motion study

Bounded rationality and satisficing

A prismatic society caught between fused and diffracted forms

Public Administration I: Meaning and Evolution, Approaches, and Theories from Scientific Management to New Public Management

Unit 9 shifts registers entirely, from political theory and Indian institutions to the discipline of Public Administration itself — how it defines its own subject matter, the approaches it studies government through, and the successive theoretical waves (scientific management to New Public Management) that have redefined what 'good administration' even means.

1. Public Administration: meaning and evolution; public versus private administration

Woodrow Wilson's 1887 essay 'The Study of Administration' is conventionally dated as the discipline's founding text, proposing the 'politics-administration dichotomy' — politics sets policy, administration merely and neutrally executes it, a separation meant to professionalise a US civil service then riddled with patronage. Public administration differs from private/business administration on several dimensions frequently tested together: public administration operates under public accountability and legal constraint (natural monopoly of legitimate force, statutory procedure) rather than market competition; its 'bottom line' is public service and welfare rather than profit; it must serve all citizens equally (universality) rather than choosing profitable customers; and its funding comes from taxation rather than a price mechanism, making 'value for money' harder to measure than a firm's balance sheet.

2. Approaches: system theory, decision-making, ecological approach

Three approaches to studying public administration
Approach	Claim
System theory (David Easton)	Reads government/administration as an open system converting societal 'inputs' (demands and supports) into 'outputs' (policies and actions), with 'feedback' looping outputs back into new demands — a systems-analysis vocabulary borrowed from broader social science.
Decision-making approach (Herbert Simon)	Treats administration as fundamentally a chain of decisions rather than mere execution; Simon's 'bounded rationality' argues real administrators cannot be perfectly rational optimisers (as classical theory assumed) given limited information, time and cognitive capacity, so they 'satisfice' — accept a good-enough option — rather than truly maximise.
Ecological approach (Fred W. Riggs)	Argues administration cannot be studied in isolation from its social, economic, cultural and political environment ('ecology'); Riggs's own 'prismatic society' model (met again in comparative public administration) explains why administrative structures transplanted from developed to developing societies function very differently once embedded in a different ecology.

3. Public administration theories and concepts I: scientific management to New Public Administration

Scientific Management Theory (Frederick Winslow Taylor) — the 'one best way' to perform any task can be discovered through time-and-motion study and applied uniformly, with workers selected, trained and monitored scientifically rather than left to informal custom; imported into public administration as an efficiency-and-economy movement in the early 20th century.
Rational Choice Theory — applies economics' own assumption of self-interested, utility-maximising individual behaviour to bureaucrats and politicians themselves (public choice theory's own root, William Niskanen's 'budget-maximising bureaucrat' being the classic model), predicting bureaucratic behaviour (empire-building, budget inflation) from self-interest rather than assuming public-spirited neutrality.
New Public Administration (Minnowbrook Conference, 1968; H. George Frederickson) — reacted against the older field's claimed value-neutrality, arguing administration must actively pursue 'social equity' alongside efficiency and economy as a third, co-equal value — an explicitly normative, activist turn shaped by the era's civil-rights and anti-war ferment.
Development Administration — administration explicitly oriented toward planned socio-economic change in developing societies (post-colonial nation-building, Five Year Plans' implementation machinery), distinct from the maintenance/regulatory administration of already-developed states.

🧠 Match the theory to its own value or assumption

Taylor's scientific management → efficiency via the 'one best way'. Simon's bounded rationality → satisficing, not maximising. Niskanen's rational choice → the self-interested, budget-maximising bureaucrat. New Public Administration (Minnowbrook, 1968) → social equity as a co-equal value with efficiency. Do not credit efficiency-only motives to New Public Administration, which is defined by its explicit rejection of value-neutrality.

4. Public administration theories and concepts II: development administration to New Public Management

Comparative Public Administration (Fred Riggs again) systematically compares administrative systems across countries to identify what is genuinely universal in administration versus what is culturally/ecologically specific — Riggs's 'prismatic society' model describes developing-country administration as caught between traditional ('fused', undifferentiated) and modern ('diffracted', highly specialised) forms, producing characteristic pathologies (formalism — a wide gap between formally prescribed rules and actual behaviour, nepotism operating alongside modern bureaucratic norms) rather than a clean transition from one to the other. New Public Management (NPM, from the 1980s UK/New Zealand/Australia reforms, associated with Christopher Hood's list of doctrines) imports private-sector management techniques directly into government — performance targets and output measurement, market-type mechanisms (contracting out, internal markets), disaggregating large bureaucracies into smaller, semi-autonomous agencies, and treating the citizen explicitly as a 'customer' — a genuinely different value system from both classical bureaucratic and New Public Administration's social-equity turn, prizing efficiency and managerial flexibility above hierarchical rule-following. The changing nature of public administration under liberalisation and globalisation folds these threads together: privatisation and regulatory (rather than owner-operator) roles for the state, e-governance replacing paper-based process, and a genuinely more porous boundary between public and private administration than the classical dichotomy ever assumed.

Key takeaways

Wilson's 1887 politics-administration dichotomy founds the discipline; public administration differs from private administration in accountability, universality, profit-independence and tax-based funding.
System theory (Easton), the decision-making approach (Simon's bounded rationality/satisficing) and the ecological approach (Riggs's prismatic society) are three distinct lenses for studying administration.
Taylor's scientific management (the one best way), rational choice/public choice theory (the self-interested bureaucrat), and New Public Administration (Minnowbrook 1968, social equity as a co-equal value) mark successive theoretical turns.
Riggs's comparative public administration and prismatic-society model explain formalism and administrative pathologies in developing societies; NPM (1980s) imports private-sector techniques (performance targets, market mechanisms, agencification, citizen-as-customer).
Liberalisation and globalisation have shifted public administration toward regulatory rather than owner-operator roles, e-governance, and a more porous public-private boundary than the classical dichotomy assumed.

Practice questions (8)

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.

Woodrow Wilson's 1887 essay 'The Study of Administration' proposes:
1. The politics-administration dichotomy
2. New Public Management
3. Bounded rationality
4. The prismatic society model
Show answer
Answer: A — The politics-administration dichotomy
Wilson's founding essay proposes the politics-administration dichotomy; the other concepts are Hood's/NPM's, Simon's and Riggs's, from much later.
Herbert Simon's concept of 'bounded rationality' argues that administrators, given limited information and time, tend to:
1. Satisfice — accept a good-enough option rather than truly maximise
2. Always achieve perfectly rational optimisation
3. Adopt the 'one best way' through time-and-motion study
4. Act as budget-maximising bureaucrats
Show answer
Answer: A — Satisfice — accept a good-enough option rather than truly maximise
Satisficing is Simon's own specific term, distinct from Taylor's one-best-way and Niskanen's budget-maximising bureaucrat model.
Fred Riggs's ecological approach and 'prismatic society' model chiefly argue that:
1. Administration cannot be studied apart from its social and cultural environment
2. All administrative systems converge on identical structures
3. Bureaucrats are budget-maximisers
4. Social equity must be a co-equal administrative value
Show answer
Answer: A — Administration cannot be studied apart from its social and cultural environment
Riggs's ecological claim is precisely this environment-embeddedness; the other options belong to convergence theories, Niskanen, and Frederickson's New Public Administration respectively.
The New Public Administration movement (Minnowbrook Conference, 1968) is defined chiefly by its insistence that administration pursue:
1. Social equity as a value co-equal with efficiency and economy
2. Only efficiency and economy
3. Privatisation of all government functions
4. Strict politics-administration separation
Show answer
Answer: A — Social equity as a value co-equal with efficiency and economy
Social equity as a co-equal value is Minnowbrook's own defining, explicitly normative departure from claimed value-neutrality; the other options describe rival or earlier positions.
William Niskanen's rational-choice model of the 'budget-maximising bureaucrat' predicts bureaucratic behaviour from:
1. Self-interest, rather than assumed public-spirited neutrality
2. A civilisation's own integrating chiti
3. The prismatic society's formalism
4. Deep ecology's intrinsic value of nature
Show answer
Answer: A — Self-interest, rather than assumed public-spirited neutrality
Niskanen's model applies economics' self-interest assumption to bureaucrats themselves; the other options are unrelated concepts from earlier units.
New Public Management (NPM), associated with 1980s UK/New Zealand/Australia reforms, imports which technique into government?
1. Performance targets, market-type mechanisms, and treating the citizen as a customer
2. The politics-administration dichotomy
3. Bounded rationality
4. Social equity as a co-equal value
Show answer
Answer: A — Performance targets, market-type mechanisms, and treating the citizen as a customer
NPM's private-sector-inspired techniques are its own defining feature, a genuinely different value system from Wilson's dichotomy, Simon's bounded rationality, or New Public Administration's social-equity turn.
Development Administration is distinguished from ordinary maintenance/regulatory administration chiefly by its focus on:
1. Planned socio-economic change in developing societies
2. Market-type contracting out
3. Strict value-neutrality
4. Time-and-motion study
Show answer
Answer: A — Planned socio-economic change in developing societies
Development administration's own orientation is planned change in developing societies; the other options describe NPM, classical Wilsonian theory, and Taylor's scientific management respectively.
System theory's own vocabulary (David Easton), reading government as converting societal demands into policy outputs, is best described as:
1. Inputs (demands and supports) converted into outputs, with feedback looping to new demands
2. A single best way discovered by time-and-motion study
3. Bounded rationality and satisficing
4. A prismatic society caught between fused and diffracted forms
Show answer
Answer: A — Inputs (demands and supports) converted into outputs, with feedback looping to new demands
This input-output-feedback vocabulary is Easton's own system theory; the other options describe Taylor, Simon and Riggs respectively, each a distinct approach covered in this chapter.