History Lessons for Reinventors

Abstract

Toward end of Waldo Symposium at Syracuse University in 1996, Paul P. Van Riper averred that, as field, public administration was neglecting its history and allowing others, lacking deep knowledge of its literature and institutional development, to define its past for many faculty, students, politicians, pundits, and journalists. price could be high if replaced historical understanding and field was misconstrued in self-serving ways by those seeking to reinvent or otherwise change it. Laurence E. Lynn Jr.'s The Myth of Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood hammers Van Riper's point home. He brings great intellectual energy to showing why we must reclaim and re-examine American public administrative history. One does not have to agree with every aspect of Lynn's historical analysis to embrace his larger argument. Historical knowledge is prerequisite for grappling productively with larger purposes of public administration in U.S. constitutional system. Lynn's example of myth of bureaucratic paradigm is well chosen because it clearly highlights weaknesses of reinvention literature and weaknesses of an academic discipline and profession that quickly gave it wide currency. An Orthodoxy? metaphor of a bundle of sticks is sometimes used to characterize property rights in American law. For instance, right to exclude others from one's property is such stick. It is useful way of thinking about public administration's putative as well.(1) is an intellectual construct used to denote number of interconnected ideas that were advanced primarily from 1870s through 1930s. It had some institutional, organizational, and social manifestations, but one could espouse orthodox ideas without being self-conscious member of any movement or group.(2) On these terms, it is inherently contestable whether the orthodoxy is useful construct for understanding part of field's past. Lynn thinks it does too much damage to public administration's historical heterodoxy. Along with others, I have found it useful label for following group of ideas: 1. There should be separation between partisan politics on one hand, and organization and staffing of civil service, on other. civil service reformers of 1870s-1890s were primary source of this idea (Rosenbloom 1971, ch. 3). They promoted it both before and after Woodrow Wilson wrote what some consider field's foundational essay in 1887. elimination of partisanship from civil service was later conflated with broader politics-administration dichotomy in which policy making as well as partisanship was considered distinct from administration. broader dichotomy is often attributed to Frank Goodnow (1900), who provided bridge between reformers and Progressives by showing how political reforms for improving expression of people's will were connected to administrative reforms for executing it. Eventually, politics and administration were treated conceptually as largely separate endeavors with fundamentally different value scales (Gulick and Urwick 1937, 10, 192). 2. Much of what government does is business and should be insulated from control by elected officials. reformers made this claim with respect to civil service. Later, Progressives used it to promote city management and establishment of authorities for infrastructure (which, like patronage-based public employment, was major source of corruption and power for political machines). 3. Public administration could be design science. Wilson (1887) raised this idea in his essay, but it gained prominence with publication of Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911). By 1923, if not before, science was claimed as basis for fundamental administrative technology--that of position classification. …