On the Typology of Public Administration

Abstract

Administration in modern times Bureaucratic administration Classification into types is a widely used scientific method. This is also true for jurisprudence, economics and social sciences, examples being Rechtsstaat-type constitutionalism and the Rule of Law, the market economy and the planned economy, agrarian society and industrial society, etc. The scientific claims in connection with such typologies vary considerably. Basically, the intention is to arrange concrete forms in conceptional categories. In administrative science, Max Weber’s ideal-type method has great influence. Yet Weber has left so much latitude that attention could be focused both on the field of external experience that we acquire through observation, measurements and experiments and on the world of thought, ideas and ideality. 1 So to some the ideal type is an empirical term, 2 to others, a category of objective correctness. 3 Above all, in American-type public administration teaching, Weber’s bureaucracy concept has been understood as a prescriptive and rational model. 4 Then, reference is made to the pathology of bureaucracy — impersonal attitudes, formalism, mystery-mongering and so on — finally presenting models of better public administration, if not the One Best Way. As regards administrative science, however, the following has to be noted: Here, the concept of bureaucracy does not mean a prescriptive, rational model of ‘correct’ administration. Rather, the individual elements have been deduced from historical reality. However, the bureaucracy concept is not a descriptive empirical statement on organizational reality in public administration. The concept is not complete. Other organizational elements can be detected, especially informal ones. The salient point is to decipher the rationality of the system of public administration in modern times in the West on the basis of the historical illustrative material. We have to work out the set of structural and functional principles that make up the internal order of modern administration and substantiate links between the institutional steering patterns and the adminstrative environment — regulated markets, for example. True, this is not the consummation of reality nor a claim to correctness. But it reveals a potential that may serve as a point of refer