This symposium article examines articles published in Public Administration Review (PAR) between 1980 and 1995 in order to determine the prevalence of work on the field's historical roots. The ...results provide evidence of a paucity of historical concerns during that period. This is unfortunate because the field's identity is inextricably bound up with the way practitioners view its history. In many cases, those views are seldom examined in depth. Thorough and influential historical analyses can change those preconceptions and the field's identity in significant and beneficial ways. For example, it is common to attribute a simplistic politics/administration dichotomy to Woodrow Wilson, when careful study reveals that he held a much more complex and ambiguous view which supported broad grants of discretionary powers for public administrators. However, a PAR article by Doig (1983) on this point received little attention in the field. A robust discussion of Wilson's work in the field's major journals and textbooks could help public managers confront the reality of discretionary powers in more sensible ways.
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In this article the authors treat Woodrow Wilson's views on public ethics as an important link between the Founders, expecially the Federalists, and our current thinking about the ethical content of ...American public administration. Wilson's writings reveal an apparent effort to revisit and re-energize those central concerns of the Founders: citizen character, public virtue, and their relationship to the constitutional design of a democratic republic. The bedrock principle, common to the Federalist and Wilsonian views, is the channeling of self-interest into public-interested service. The Founders sought to achieve this through constitutional correctives such as checks and balances, a strong regard for reputation or honor, and education. Wilson addressed these same ends and means, but dressed in the context of increasing democratization and emerging professionalism and technicism. Despite his tentative claims for a politics/administration dichotomy in the 1887 essay, his broader writings betray a thorough understanding of administrative responsibility as an inherently political component of the regime. This understanding is reflected today in the advocacy of professional codes, and in attempts to educate public administrators in the salient values of the regime.
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This article analyzes Woodrow Wilson's political rhetoric during the years 1909 to early 1912. It illustrates how Wilson integrated his thought on public administration with his views on democratic ...politics. These years reflect the transition in Wilson's life from his academic career to his political career. His public speeches and addresses during this period indicate that he held a much more sophisticated view of the role of public administration in mass democracy than is typically attributed to him in the current literature of the field. Wilson offers important insight on the proper criteria for administrative reform in the American system. His central concern was how to orient the behavior of public officials toward the public interest rather than private interests. Organizational and administrative arrangements should be used to clearly fix responsibility, and make the corresponding duties personally attractive to each officeholder. Though Wilson at times seemed to offer flawed and sometimes inconsistent solutions, he nevertheless asked the right questions—questions we can and should be asking today about our attempts to reform public administration yet again.
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16.
Assaying the Record Gulick, Luther
Administrative theory & praxis,
03/1998, Volume:
20, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
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This article explores the influence of municipal reform on the Office of the President. In doing so, this article presents the idea that members of the Brownlow Committee may have used the municipal ...reform model as a broader tool for Executive reform. This reform model serves well a system of governance designed to act as a unitary system of power. When transposed, however, onto a system designed for shared or polycentric power, the reasoning behind this reorganization analogy becomes obscured. In many ways, the use of potentially flawed logic may contribute to misplaced hopes and ambitions in the Office of the President.
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This paper examines the practice of eighteenth-century Prussian public administration under the rule of Frederick the Great. Frederick's autocratic and centralized style of administration and the ...activities and accomplishments of Prussian bureaucracy are discussed. It is argued that the Prussian administrative experience lent support to the idea that a system of bureaucratic administration was essential to the modern state. Furthermore, it encouraged a vision of public administration as an instrument in pursuing substantive and important state purposes, a vision still very prevalent in contemporary public administration thought.
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This essay is an exploration of the ideas of Woodrow Wilson, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Gifford Pinchot. My argument is that their views on public opinion and principles provide a different way to ...think about the dreaded politics/administration dichotomy. As the essay title suggests, the key strategy was to develop a "general mind" by articulating principles that would connect the internal management mechanisms developed by the science of administration with the common interest of the public.
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Autorica preispituje promjene u metodologiji obrazovanja javnih službenika u 18. stoljeću potaknute afirmacijom vladareva suvereniteta tijekom ranoga novog vijeka te profesionalizacijom i ...specijalizacijom državne uprave. Na temelju relevantne literature i arhivske građe analizira nove mogućnosti obrazovanja javnih službenika u Habsburškoj
Monarhiji, osobito u Banskoj Hrvatskoj, ostvarene reformom pravnih studija i osnutkom zasebnih visokoškolskih institucija, kao i razvoj novih kriterija kvalifikacija za javnu službu. Ujedno tadašnji sustav obrazovanja javnih službenika komparira sa suvremenim tendencijama u Europi.
