Evolution of Public Administration Theory

Traditional public
administration approach has been shaped by the
views of Woodrow Wilson and Frederick Taylor in
the United States, and Henri Fayol and Max Weber
in Continental Europe.

The distinction between
politics and administration was mainly expressed
under the concept of cameralism in the 16th
century. Cameralists living in Prussia and France
published studies on the separation of politics and
administration.

scientific management

To employ the scientific method,
managers must gather, categorize, arrange, and
transform knowledge into rules, laws, and formulas
that are useful to workers in their daily work.
Additionally, managers carry out the following
tasks (Taylor, 1998: 19):
1. Using scientific methods for employee
selection, development, and training
instead of letting workers choose their own
jobs
2. Developing sincere cooperation with
employees
3. Instead of leaving most of the responsibility
to the employees, take over the entire
business in matters that they can do it more
effectively than the employees

According to Taylor (1998: 63), the essential tools
of the scientific management mechanism are to apply
time and motion surveys with the most appropriate
methods, standardize the tools and equipment used
in the works, create a planning department, use
time-saving tools such as the spreadsheet and reward
workers who accomplish their assignment.

Henri Fayol is recognized as one of the pioneers
of the classical theory of administration, and his
14 principles serve as the foundation for functional
management.

1. Division of Labor

2. Authority

3. Discipline

4. Command Union

5. Executive Union

6. Preference of General Interests over Private Interests

7. Personnel Wages

8. Centrality

9. Hierarchy

10.Order

11. Fairness and Equality

12. Stability in Officials

13.Initiation

14. Unity Among Employees

Max Weber introduced his analysis of bureaucracy
by explaining the main sociological concepts,
including establishment, authority, sovereignty,
and legitimacy

The principle of equality is carried out both
inside and outside the organization. Personnel
management emphasizes that individuals with
similar qualifications receive equal pay and benefits.

‘Professionalization’ means a technical specialization
in a particular public service, such as law or social
work.

Unlike other theories in the discipline, the NPA
Movement gave importance to normative and
subjective assumptions and rejected the positivist
approach in social sciences. The advocates of
NPA were also opposed to the classical politics/
administration dichotomy

The new public administration movement that
emerged in the USA under the leadership of Dwight
Waldo at the end of the 1960s and the new public
management approach that was theorized following
the reform attempts in the 1980s are quite different
from each other in terms of underlying assumptions,
basic characteristics, and policy suggestions.

According to its founding father, Christopher Hood (1991: 4-5), the main features of NPM are:
1. Devoting the senior executives freedom to manage in the public sector,
2. Performance measurement,
3. Emphasis on outcomes rather than procedures,
4. The division of monolithic and large-scale institutions into small units,
5. Increasing competition in the public sector,
6. The use of private sector management techniques in public administration,
7. Ensuring financial discipline and economic use of the public budget

The NPA movement assigns bureaucrats five roles: (1) social justice defender, (2) change agent, (3)
representative bureaucrat, (4) enabler, and (5) moderator. 

NPM foresees the separation of service providers and service users in the public sector (Hughes, 2003: 55). It also suggests empowering public officials, who are considered service providers, and service users, who are labeled as customers.

As a result of the separation of the departments that design public policies and strategies from the
executive units under the tenets of NPM, coordination, and auditing problems have arisen among central government institutions.

Social problems such as climate
change, food crises, the fight against epidemics, and
irregular migration have gone beyond the borders
of countries and require the cooperation of various
governments, market actors, and non-governmental
players at the national and supranational
levels. Network relations, cooperation models,
partnerships, and multi-sectoral solutions among
public policy actors became extremely important
at the end of the 1990s.

In the governance
approach, horizontal relations among government,
civil society, and market actors and democratic
participation are preferred to bureaucratic processes
based on central control and hierarchical relations.

The state established autonomous
and semi-autonomous regulatory agencies to
coordinate the various sectors from which it withdrew.

There are two arguments explaining the
relationship between governance and NPM.
According to the first argument, governance
is an expansion of NPM. It was developed to
combat the side effects of the fragmentation the
central government experienced due to NPM
reforms. According to the second argument,
governance and NPM have different characteristics
and assumptions. Governance is derived from
political science theories, while NPM is based
on organization theories and microeconomic
assumptions. NPM advocates the concept of the
“customer” in a narrow sense; on the other hand,
governance follows a multi-actor and participatory
approach depending on the notion of the “citizen”.