American Public Administration: Past, Present, Future

By Frederick C. Mosher

A seminal collection of essays, addressing such questions as the evolving roles of civil servants, the education and training of civil servants, and the ways to balance civil servants’ expertise with respect for democratic governance

This collection of essays highlights the “peculiarly American” issues of public administration ranging from 1870 to 1974, when they were first published. Every contributor was assigned a period of American history and given the opportunity to write on what he or she deemed the most important or relevant concern of that period. This method, employed for this book and the connected National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration conference, resulted in a wide-reaching, if eclectic, collection. Supplanted by Mosher’s impressive summarization of the field throughout the years, the book still holds prominence as a source for scholars, workers, and students alike in public administration.

The essays raise such issues as the education of civil servants, the changes necessitated by crises, the growth of social sciences in governmental concerns, and primarily, the role of public administrators in America. Each author is a distinguished expert in his own right, and each essay can stand alone as a remarkable insight into the changing world of public administration within American society. Frederick Mosher’s expertise and supervision shapes this work into a remarkable and holistic perspective on public administration over time.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780817390815

Book preview

Young.

Introduction: The American Setting

FREDERICK C. MOSHER

Doherty Professor, University of Virginia

The readers of this volume should not expect, and will not find, a series of smooth-flowing, contiguous essays on the history of thought in the field of public administration. This is partly because of the way in which the papers were written. Each author was given a block of time in the past, present, or future and some suggestions as to what kinds of material seemed important and relevant during the period he was treating. But each also had virtually complete sovereignty on the subject matter he would treat, the emphasis to be assigned different topics, and the manner in which the material should be organized. Thus, to a major extent, each essay is an independent contribution that could stand by itself, associated with the others only loosely by the threads of time. Some subsequent editorial suggestions were offered to minimize obvious overlapping and inconsistencies, but these essays remain essentially independent contributions, written by scholars of eminence, each of whom had particular experience in and acquaintance with the period of which he wrote.

A second reason for differences in the style and content of the essays that follow is that the periods of which the various authors wrote were, in most cases, so different from each other. For example, much of what seemed and was important before the Great Depression became quite suddenly almost irrelevant during the New Deal and World War II. And the intellectual ferment in the social (behavioral) sciences, treated with such insight by Professor Fesler, was probably the most distinguishing feature of the period following the war. Indeed, one of the conclusions almost inevitably drawn from this overview of the development and growth of public administration is the degree to which it has been dependent upon and responsive to its immediate social and intellectual environment. This is not to suggest that there were not connections between and among the periods, or that each period did not leave imprints that affected those that followed it. But the manner in which these essays were structured encouraged a focus on the period in time, leaving the major responsibility for interconnecting the themes to the reader.

A third source of disparity among the essays is of course the differing experience and perspectives of their authors. Although all of them have practiced, studied, taught, and written about public administration, they have done so at different places and different times. Their respective views are no doubt indicative of the wide differences of opinion in the field as a whole (although, as indicated later, public administration is in no way unique in this respect). Nonetheless, there are in these studies recurring themes, recurring problems, often differently viewed and defined. Some of the problems refuse to go away: the relations between management and public policy; the fact/value relationship; the linkage between public administration and the social sciences, particularly political science; and the linkage between public administration and other professional education, especially business administration and law. Like other fields of study and action, public administration has experienced a variety of new perspectives, slogans, and approaches, most of which have added new elements or emphases to the field, and have reinvigorated it. One thinks, for example, of economy and efficiency, administrative management, POSDCORB, performance budgeting, work measurement, human relations, cost-benefit analysis, PPBS; and today, of productivity, management by objectives, the new federalism, affirmative action, organization development, policy analysis, and the systems approach, to mention a few. However valid, important, or different these approaches may be, it seems desirable to examine them from time to time in relation to each other and in terms of the periods during which they emerged. Knowledge must be cumulative, if it is to contribute to understanding. New ideas and points of view are most valuable if they are seen, evaluated, and applied from the perspective of what has gone before as well as from the broader perspective of what was and is happening in related fields of study and action. It may therefore be useful to explore, very briefly, the differences, similarities, and interdependencies of public administration and other fields, particularly in the social sciences and professions.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND OTHER HIGHER EDUCATION

The first third of the present century was a period during which, among many other things, the professions and professional education were born, or in a very few cases, revivified. It was a period during which many of the occupations we now recognize as professions asserted that claim—accounting, business administration, city planning, forestry, engineering, foreign service, journalism, nursing, optometry, public health, social work, teaching, and many others. During that period, too, the older, recognized professions like medicine and law took major steps to strengthen preentry education for admission into their ranks. It is not accidental that this same period encompassed the professionalization of higher education in at least two senses: the professors organized themselves, developed standards of entry, and began their long battle for tenure; and, more important for our purposes, the object and the substance of a large part of higher education became preparation for career occupation—that is, in most cases, for professions. The nineteenth-century colleges, privately and community endowed, church supported and governed largely for the acculturation of upstanding Christian young men—though earlier challenged by the Morrill Acts and their gestures towards the applied arts and practices—began to give way to the socially and occupationally oriented institutions, both public and private. University interest in science in this country was scattered and sporadic until late in the nineteenth century and did not flower until World War II and, later, after Sputnik in 1958. The United States was certainly not a leading source of pure scientists until World War II. But it became a leader in technology and applied science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and subjects in these realms became dominant in our academic institutions.

The beginnings of a self-conscious public administration during this same period were therefore basically consistent with the directions of other occupational and educational developments. They were not scientific except in a very applied sense—roughly the sense of Frederick Taylor in his expression of scientific management. They were not grounded in a profound theory of society or even of organization and management—any more than most of the other fields developing at the time were theoretically based. Like them, public administration was pragmatic, problem-oriented, sustained by faith in progress, efficiency, democratic government, and what we now call meritocracy. The early public administration, like some other societal developments, grew out of concern about public corruption and scandal. It was a reform movement, directed against clear and present evils that rational and well-intentioned people could correct. Like other movements associated with the Progressive era, it reflected a fundamental optimism that mankind could direct and control its environment and destiny for the better.

During the three-quarters of a century since its birth as a field of study, public administration has experienced, been challenged by, and to some extent responded to, many of the same kinds of environmental and internal forces as have other fields of thought, study, and practice. The impact of many of these is the subject of the essays that follow: the explosion of the Great Depression and the New Deal that endeavored to cope with it; World War II, which set off a near revolution in thought and concept as to the content and conceptual base of public administration; the incursion of paradigms and theoretical approaches from many other fields of study and the accompanying pressure toward scientism; the legislative explosions of the sixties; followed by the disappointments and the disillusionment of Vietnam, civil rights, and Watergate. The accompanying essays on the periods since World War II (by Doctors Fesler, Schick, and Waldo) indicate the absence of an agreed theoretic base for public administration, of a core and of firm boundaries for the field, and even of a definition of what it is. Public administration is undergoing, according to some, an identity crisis or, according to others, an intellectual crisis.*

The extent to which these allegations are true is a matter for legitimate concern and discussion. And now is surely an appropriate time for those of us who are in this field to indulge in some thoughtful introspection about where we are, how we got here, and whither we are tending. Hopefully, this volume will contribute to such self-examination. But we should not assume that public administration is unique in its self-doubts and internal disagreements. All the social disciplines and professions (and many of the physical ones with which this writer has any familiarity) are undergoing the same kinds of trauma—as to purpose, content, paradigm, methodology, core, boundaries, and indeed the legitimacy of their existence. Economics, sociology, psychology, political science, law, city planning, education, business administration, and even medicine and engineering are entertaining the same kinds of doubts and internal ferment. We are not alone.

The disappointments, frustrations, failures, and disasters of the past decade have undoubtedly contributed to the current malaise in the educational and academic specialties. But probably a more enduring source of concern is the growing realization within each discipline and profession of its innate inability to handle real problems of the world within its own traditional confines. Those problems stubbornly refuse to respect academic, professional, and vocational boundaries. And as relevance to real social problems is increasingly demanded by society, the inadequacy of disciplinary and professional differentiations, at once traditional and artificial, will increasingly foment discontent.

Is crime a problem of ethics or poverty or housing or ballistics or education or drug control or immigration or police? Is it a problem for economics or political science or psychology or sociology or public administration or law or city planning or medicine or transportation engineering or criminology? Clearly, it is all of these and none could respond effectively by itself. There are few if any public problems about which the same generalization would not be equally applicable. Almost from its beginnings, public administration sought to transcend these difficulties by refusing to specialize, by insisting on cross-fertilization among specialties. This was, and perhaps is, at once its greatest strength and its most vulnerable feature.

In its origins and development public administration was part of a larger movement toward professionalization, and its experience in many ways resembled those of other fields. Yet it has always had certain distinctive features, many of which discouraged and still discourage its rapid and large-scale acceptance and growth. Among its handicaps, in comparison with most other professional fields, have been:

(1) the antagonism of much of society and of almost all of the emerging professions to politics and to government generally; (in a business oriented society, private endeavor has been more respectable and prestigious; most of the professions, in their drive for status, endeavored in every possible way to divorce themselves from politics, at least in the public eye);

(2) long-standing fear of concentrated governmental power in America, dating to colonial times; (from its beginnings, rightly or wrongly, public administration has embraced centralization of authority, responsibility, hierarchy—in short, bureaucracy);

(3) the widespread aversion among and within the professions to organized effort in contrast to their general preference for individual autonomy and responsibility, a feeling transferred from the image of the oldest and most respected professions, law and medicine; (public administration, like business administration, has of course from the outset had to do with behavior in large organizations); and

(4) the emphasis in public-administration literature and education on generalism in a society which was increasingly impressed with and dependent upon specialized expertise in function, in occupation, and in knowledge; (most of American public administrators are products of specialized education and experience in a specialty deemed appropriate to the functions of the agencies they are administering; thus, in terms both of temporal sequence and of perceived importance, public administration is, for most of them, a second profession, if a profession at all).

To these were added other difficulties, a good many of which were shared with other emerging professions: lack of—or slow development of—career opportunities for graduates in the field; shortage of financial and other resource support except for a few scattered philanthropists at a few scattered institutions; and the reluctance of governments to provide public support for the development of administrative talent for themselves.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND IN THE WORLD

Among the many occupational and professional fields with which it grew up in this country, public administration was thus unique in many respects, and handicapped in some. It also differed from many of them in that most of its character depended in only a minor way upon intellectual and vocational developments in other nations. Though it had distant roots in some of British constitutional history, in the largely abandoned German cameralism, in foreign military reforms (adapted to the American military establishment around the turn of the century), it was for the most part an American invention, indigenous, and sui generis. With only a few exceptions—some paragraphs by Hamilton in The Federalist papers, some interesting observations by de Toqueville, some rhetorical complaints by Lincoln and other political leaders —the subject as one for science, study, or generalization was largely ignored in the century following the drafting of the Constitution. As a profession, it did not exist. In intellectual terms, it was picked up by a scattering of scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Wilson, Goodnow, and others—and they drew on European literature and examples. But, as the article by the Stones in this volume makes clear, the real origins of public administration lay in the cities, especially the big ones, not in theories of sovereignty or the state or the separation of powers. The cities were where most government was, where most action was, where most problems were, where the services of public administrators could most demonstrably be made more effective, more honest, and less costly.

So in the United States, probably more than any other country in the world, public administration as practice, as field of study and as self-conscious profession, began in the cities. This was possibly the first time in modern history that concern about public administration focussed on the cities from the outset; virtually all European administrative thought, literature, and education began with the nation-state and worked downward. In the United States, the progression was reversed. We started with the cities; worked up to the states during the state-reorganization movement beginning around 1910 and subsiding in the thirties; focussed on national administration during the depression, New Deal, and World War II; went on after that war to international and comparative administration; and reverted partially to the states and cities during the trauma of the sixties—the decade of Vietnam, civil rights, ghettoes, and civic revolt. We are back to the cities now, though in a much different social, economic, and political context than in the early years of this century. In this history, PUBLIC administrationists have learned, among many other things, that the governmental layers (cities, counties, states, nations, multinations) are hardly separable, any more than problems and functions (such as crime, welfare, economy, transportation, drugs, population, food) are separable.

One other significant difference of the United States from most of the rest of the world was that we have had no administrative class; and, at least after the Jacksonian era, we had no social class from which our public administrators could habitually be drawn and educated for public service. As de Toqueville remarked long ago, in the absence of a recognized aristocracy or, later, any consciously planned linkage between higher education and public administration, the principal posts in government fell to lawyers—totally in the judiciary and largely among legislators and administrators. But lawyers were typically neither trained nor experienced in public administration—as they were, for example, in continental Europe—and few of them planned careers in public service. As specialism in education and in governmental functions proliferated during the present century, top administrative posts were increasingly preempted by professionals in appropriate fields. In this respect, the problem of American public administration has been essentially opposite to that in countries whose administrations were based upon either the British or the continental administrative class traditions. Theirs, to this day, has been to develop and encourage specialists within, or in competition with, the administrative classes—whether predominantly Oxbridge scholar-amateurs or administrative lawyers. Ours has been, basically, to develop more generalized perspectives among administrators, whether or not their initial orientation was in a particular specialism.

The essays that follow, like this introduction, are based in American culture and, in anthropological terminology, are no doubt culture-bound. There is justification for this: American public administration is largely indigenous and peculiarly American. Of the many students and writers identified in the succeeding pages, only a very few were not Americans, and indeed these are principally footnote references: Weber, Fayol, Keynes, Urwick, Crozier and a few others. During and since World War II, the United States has been heavily involved in technical assistance in the public administration of a great many of the nations of the world, new and old. Many of our transient experts—and no doubt more of their foreign listeners—were dismayed and chagrined that many tried-and-true American ideas, techniques, and formulae were not particularly useful, or were completely irrelevant, away from home. (One may even speculate that the American experts learned more from the experience than did the governments they were endeavoring to assist.) This volume may be of some interest both to those interested in cross-cultural communication about public administration of whatever nationality, and to those students and practitioners of the field in the United States. For better or worse, it should help us—and them—understand how we got this way—or these many different ways.

*       *       *

As editor of this volume, I would like to express my appreciation to all the authors for their contributions and for their cooperative spirit in working with NASPAA, the Maxwell School, and me over many months. I am also gratified by the efforts of those who, upon request, prepared and delivered critiques of the various papers at the Syracuse meetings. They included:

Brewster C. Denny, University of Washington

Nathan D. Grundstein, Case Western Reserve University

John Holmes, University of Virginia

Albert C. Hyde, State University of New York at Albany

Robert J. Mowitz, Pennsylvania State University

Laurence O’Toole, Syracuse University

Clara Penniman, University of Wisconsin

Dallas L. Salisbury, Syracuse University

Orion White, University of North Carolina

Finally, I wish to thank, for their ideas, effort, and time, those who helped me in planning and organizing the series. They included:

Stephen K. Bailey, American Council on Education

Don M. Blandin, National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration

Alan K. Campbell, Maxwell School, Syracuse University

James Carroll, Maxwell School, Syracuse University

Morris W. H. Collins, Jr., College of Public Affairs, American University

George A. Graham, National Academy of Public Administration

Laurin L. Henry, Department of Government and Foreign Afairs, University of Virginia

Mordecai Lee, Brookings Institution

Frank Marini, San Diego State University

Thomas P. Murphy, Institute of Urban Studies, University of Maryland

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*See particularly Vincent Ostrom, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (University, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 1973; rev. ed., 1974).

1. Early Development of Education in Public Administration

ALICE B. STONE AND DONALD C. STONE

In this study we describe the development of education in public administration in response to national and local dissatisfaction with the performance of government. Research and training programs of private agencies and universities stimulated administrative reform. At the same time, the need for administrative knowledge and competence to plan and implement such reform encouraged the establishment of research and training