6 Foundations of Public Administration

Public administration is founded on six assumptions. Bit by bit, they have come from the research and work of many social scientists and of course, public agencies. Despite this, some have questioned about their true existence. And those who see them work know that these assumptions are not set in stone. Majority of the public administration materials are actually focused on either renovating or eliminating them because of their weaknesses. No matter what the objection is, these assumptions do get the job done and thus, have turned into a worldwide craze. It would be pretty difficult to find any government completely free of them. Because of this and more, they must be understood thoroughly.

1. Purpose/Instrumental rationality: Max Weber was one of the theorists to first explain it. The work of instrumental rationality is to emphasize the result a specific available or a concept based effort can produce. It ignores the fundamental question of the real world aftermath forming from the use of that effort. Scientific method, experts and power flowing from top to bottom are all expressions of this rationality.
Weakness: It has a tendency to leave the lower level public servants in the dilemma of ethics, for not every instruction can be converted into words flowing from top to bottom.

2. Efficiency: This means that any program to be approved and started must show result and adhere to the common ideology of the country. Anything that does not work must be eliminated. In short, the depiction of performance measurement is very important.
Weakness: Performance measurement has always been an issue. There is no way to measure every work of the government. For instance, certain environment programs can take years to show signs of result. Hence, the idea of efficiency for them is blurry.

3. Professionalism: This refers to all the factors that the public employees must abide by while doing their work.Values are the examples of this. For instance, to prevent fraud and biases, the government has rules promoting transparency and fairness. Anyone failing to abide by them can be penalized. Professionalism also takes into account the knowledge of the employees connected to their work. What this means is that not just anyone is allowed to make laws or handle criminals. Such tasks are given to lawyers, judges, cops and the military. All of them must abide by procedural policies.
Weakness: Professionalism certainly is necessary in all organizations. However, its weakness is in how the professionals are perceived as all knowing which unfortunately is not always true.

Theories of Mary Parker Follett Made Simple

Born on September 3rd 1868, Mary Parker Follett was the eldest child in her family. They lived in Quincy of Massachusetts. Before giving into alcoholism, her father worked at a shoe factory. He eventually became sober, but his new permanent job was not enough to feed the entire family, forcing them to go live with his father. In 1885, both passed away, but it did not have financial effect on Mary and her family. There was a good amount of property which helped them lead a good life as well as pay for her education.

She got into Cambridge University, England, but before she could graduate, she was called back to United States because of her mother’s illness. She finally received Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe, a part of Harvard University made mainly for women. Later she went onto finishing her postgraduate study in France.

Her first profession was in social work which helped her gain management experience. As a social worker, she tried to solve the political and financial problems related to establishment of evening centers for public schools situated in Boston. This allowed her to gain popularity nationwide. She also brought about innovation in other community centers of the region, making them an example for the nearest and farthest cities.

In 1925, a new career came into her life. She chose to become an industrial management lecturer. Psychology and political science were always of great interest to her, but her management experience combined with them brought about organizational theories no one could think of at the time. They are found in her three books: Speaker of the House of Representatives, The New State and Creative Experience. Her papers and lectures were later published in two books titled as Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett and Freedom and Coordination: Lecture in Business Organization. Now let’s take a look at some of those theories.

Management and the Manager

Undoubtedly, the business management education today is pretty much influenced by what she wrote in her books. In her view, management is ‘the art of getting things done through people’. But with that, she emphasizes the need to introduce scientific standard to business management. According to her, business management has two parts. The first includes technical knowledge which can be learned. The second one has to do with knowledge of how to interact with employees and all others connected to the business. Follett then states that despite the differences between the two, there is no way to separate them. Consequently, there should be a way to apply science to human relations connected to management. Another important thing required is to evaluate the job of the manager in a way that he is no more seen as different from his employees.

The steps to arrange business management education is her another contribution. To carry it out, she prescribes scientific method. The first step here is to research managing process constantly. Experiments should never be dropped. The conclusions then must be turned into knowledge to shape up the business management education.

Community Governance and Obstacles to Achieving It

Governance within the framework of a society is the set of actions supported by common ideals and objectives from normal civilians and institutions. To give birth to their joint effort or dissolve conflicts, there is usually no need for official approval. The most common characteristics of governance are:

Reality is made by normal people: You have heard about bureaucracy within which only the influential elite people such as the president, other politicians, corporations and director of a public agency have more control over a policy. Governance is a complete transition from this. It is based on the view that reality is built by normal humans and mainly by those who are affected by a given problem. Similarly, the solution can be found by their collective effort.

Temporary Relationship: This has to do with different actors coming from private, public and even nonprofit entities for a limited amount of time. Together they influence a policy or solve a public problem in such a way that it ends up being helpful to all in the society.

Discussion: Governance requires all actors to discuss how a problem is affecting them. The aim here is to establish a common psychological relationship in the form of subjectivity. Another word for this relationship is inter-subjectivity.

Small role for the government: Here government is no more the main guy. Thus, politics takes the backseat. It is truly all about the citizens.

Respect for diverse values: Values always differ. However, through discussions, governance, allows them to bring about the good in the society. In a way, the program or policy derived through this process is usually the reflection of what people feel.

Democratic: Any discussion opened up must be able to produce effort from all the affected parties. Of course, all others who have nothing to do with the problem can also join.

Obstacles to Governance
It can be quite difficult to achieve governance in a society. The reasons behind this are:

Silent community: Not all communities are vocal about their problems. While some have extremely busy people, others have the passive ones.

Value for taxes paid: Through taxes, the salary of public servants, programs and even policies are funded. Such a factor can make many feel that they are already helping. Also why should they be active in the policy making process when someone has been already paid to do so?

Majority is not always right: The American founding fathers had a reason to fear the idea of giving power to people. Something seen as a problem by the majority may not be a real problem. Similarly, ideals can be driven by hate and less education. Moreover, people do not always have common sense. Such factors can create solutions detrimental to minorities and even the entire nation.

Public servants themselves may not let go of their power: It is not easy to get rid of bureaucracy. It is likely for them to feel intervention of public as annoyance to their daily work. They may not just like being pushed and questioned.

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What is Rational Design in Public Administration?

What comes to mind when someone talks about rationality? Fairly justifying something, right? But then how to do it? The answer is through objective evaluation of certain causes. This is what rational design model is all about. At least once in our lives, we all have used it. Just think about what you did in the chemistry lab back in high school. You measured and mixed chemicals to get some kind of reaction out of them. Your every step was depended on a scientific method. That is how rational design works. It does not wait for the problem to occur. Instead, it demands analysis to search for it in the normal environment. The tradition of the rational design is coated with the notion that only by the use of science, the best solution of a problem can be derived. Now this best is rooted in objectivity. This should be taken as a sign that emotions of humans have no room in rational design. It demands data measurement followed by facts derived from it.

Typically, a public administrator who uses rational design is already a technical expert. In other words, he knows how to gather and read data. He is convinced that anything can be measured and that quantitative data can truly predict all kinds of outcomes. His analysis gives birth to facts. He does not care if there is anything beyond them. To stay fair, however, he may go with the idea that there were some limitations in his study. After that, he would let his conclusion or decision out. Even in this step, he does not let his mind succumb to emotions. For the sake of fairness, he allows his analysis to speak for itself.

Rational design model works best in learning about things that can be measured. In all other areas, it is a challenging tool. The problem is that the model assumes predictability and objectivity, which unfortunately is inconsistent with the realities of social environments. For instance, there is no way to measure behavior of humans. Secondly, in rational design, decisions are made according to the expert's perspective. The problem is that data can be misleading and thus, may not describe what actually takes place. Also because of the technical knowledge of the expert, his explanation is taken as far superior than what the citizens have to say.

Summary of Characteristics of Rational Design

• It is proactive 
• It approaches a problem scientifically with the aim to maintain impartiality
• Questions and categories are used to help observation
• Measurement maybe based on cause-benefit or analysis of the system
• The one doing it is a technical expert
• The problem is seen through his analytical eyes
• Decision is based on facts
• There is no involvement of citizens or other significant actors

Identifying Rational Design in the Real World

• Analyzing how much is needed to run a government program: Budget is the keyword. Before it can be designed for a specific program, the public administrator must know the cost associated with it. Sometimes this can help him extract any problem that in the future may form.
• Calculating how many would be affected by a given policy: Think about the time when government decided to give a decreased amount of money to defense department. Numerous studies coming from military and those sponsored by them suggested that it was going to leave many without jobs. Such conclusion was derived through the use of rational design model.

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What is Crisis Design in Public Administration?

Crisis design is a decision making model through which solutions are created to respond to a problem as soon as possible. It can be used to control damage as well as prevent one from happening. One of the interesting facts about crisis design model is that it does not give the administrator the time to evaluate majority of the advantages and disadvantages of the solution before it can be implemented. Much of it is connected to a need for immediate action, preventing the administrator from acquiring all the necessary data required to perform the evaluation. That is why, although the solution tends to have a shorter lifespan, there is always a possibility for it to cause a major problem in the long run.

Crisis design does not have a good reputation for a reason. The biggest problem is that it cancels out the need to allow subordinates to have a say about whether its solutions should be implemented. Same can be told about the public. The sound of their voice is ignored. In some cases, both the groups have to pay a big price. Moreover, the one who goes by the model can get in trouble later, for the affected people can always sue the government. This has given birth to the idea that crisis design is not a model that should be used frequently.

But it is not possible to completely do away with it and there is a very general reason behind it. The model does help at times and since the future can never be known with complete certainty, people cannot fully prepare for the worst. The last resort is to either just do or die. This is when the model comes in handy.

Yet it must be noted that crisis design cannot go in haywire mode. When applying it the administrators have to abide by policies and approval of the main government. A benefit is attached to it. In case of negative consequence, the administrator can use rationality to justice the application of the model.

Summary of Characteristics of Crisis Design

• It is reactive
• Used to implement quick action
• Decision is short lived
• Highly bureaucratic because only the top public administrators take the decision
• Short amount of time prevents complete analysis of the situation which weakens the task of finding other alternatives
• During implementation process, full information about the decision is not shared with all

Identifying Crisis Design in the Real World

• Use of atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japan was not giving up, turning into a matter of crisis. The last resort for US was to drop the bombs in those two places. Many Japanese are still affected by it. But according to US, it meant saving the lives of Americans.
• Firefighters and 9/11: The hit buildings and people trapped in them were a crisis for the government. Firefighters here were the ones responding to it. They were following order to rescue the people. However, the ones inside the southern tower did not have information about the norther one coming down. There was a lot of confusion. Eventually, the southern tower collapsed, killing many of them.
• Recession leading to budget cuts: During recession, tax revenue suffers. In this situation, government does have the ability to do something about the economy. But it does take time to put the plans in action. Shortage of fund needs immediate response. For government, the only option is to utilize budget cuts. This way many federal and state programs go through job loss. 

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Hidden Meanings of Liberal, Conservative and Radical

When we hear about liberal and conservative the first thing that comes in our head is the political system. We have two parties in United States known as Democrat and Republican. Their ideologies are marked as liberal and conservative respectively. When it comes to radical we think of extremists because the media has somewhat conditioned us to believe it in this way through constant blabbering. In cultures also, people utilize them. Those who like to think of themselves as open minded will often say they are liberal.

Meanwhile, those who are all about the culture will call themselves conservative. Since radicalism is shown as bad by the media, no average human wishes to be symbolized by it. Did you know that no matter how much you call yourself liberal you can be both conservative and radical? Actually, according to philosophy, humans are all of them. The reactions to situations make us liberal, conservative or radical. This is how it goes:

Liberal

Sure it means being open-minded, but this is not exactly the way philosophy defines it. Its true meaning is going with the flow. In other words, Liberals want what works. Compromise is their keyword.

You are liberal every time you have no complaint about your surroundings. In brutal way, this is linked to the idea of allowing atrocity to happen while the mind turns mutable to surrender to it. Think of it as eyes wide shut. That is why, the normal idea of being liberal is said to be free of thoughts on equality and justice.

Examples of liberal behavior

• Your professor is extremely harsh and unfair. You have been its victim, but you decide to just refrain from taking action against him. You still take his classes.
• You are satisfied with the way things are going.

Conservative

Generally, conservatives believe we should do what the culture says. But deep down inside they just want to conserve values. Psychologically, they prefer familiar places and people. Changes send them jolts. Conservative mind is usually very stubborn.

You are conservative whenever you feel something is worthy of your honor. You hold it close to your heart. However, certain changes make you feel you threatened and miserable. You do not wish them to occur at all. Bottom line is that conservatives have fear towards changes.

Examples of conservative behavior

• Tragedy has direct link to being conservative because it is something that changed your story in a bad way and you did not want this change to take place.
• You are madly in love with your romantic partner. You wish to marry her because marriage in your mind is something of great value.

Radical

Now this last one is most interesting. Radical, in general sense, has nothing to do with fundamentalism. Its true meaning is bringing changes suddenly and drastically to restore justice and equality. These changes are so unique that those who are used to what is ordinary find them shocking.To be clear, a mind becomes radical when it learns of something fair that it lacks, but wants. There is no time to wait for it. It must be achieved as soon as possible.

Example of radical behavior

• You come to know that your employer is not doing anything about safety concern at your workplace. You consider it injustice. Hence, you decide to bring an end to it by going on strike with your colleagues. 
• You introduce a new product which can completely take care of the problems of at home flee infestation.