Premises of Public Administration: Past and Emerging

Abstract

W HEN the first textbooks in public administration appeared in the United States a little more than thirty years ago (Leonard D. White's Introduction to the Study of (Macmillan Co., 1926), and W. F. Willoughby's Principles of (Johns Hopkins Press, 1927)), they were based upon premises and concepts about the executive branch and its administrative agencies which had been at least a half century in the making. The civil service reform movement beginning in the late 186o's and culminating in the Pendleton Act of 1883, Woodrow Wilson's essay on Public Administration in 1887, Goodnow's Politics and in 1goo (MacMillan Co.), the work of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research and its counterparts throughout the country, the scientific management movement in industry, the reorganization movement (including the Taft Commission studies of 1910-12, the Illinois and New York reports of 1915), the city manager movement beginning in 191o, the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the Classification Act of 1923, the New York state governmental reorganizations un-